MadDemon

Did they really die out, or did the population just merge with modern humans? Most people on the planet have some Neanderthal DNA, so clearly there was some intermixing. If modern humans were a much larger population, it makes sense that the Neanderthals only contributed a small amount of DNA to the gene pool. I could imagine that they were just slowly absorbed into the much larger Sapiens population.

That does not explain how mathematically your statement of 40%-60% heritability represents anything other than a coin flip.

Doesn't 50% heritability mean that it's a coin flip in a 2 party country? So basically no heritability?

If a debtor can't pay their debt, you don't just get to wipe out the bond holders. There is some kind of negotiation to try to restructure the debt and see how much the bond holders can still get. Simply wiping out the debt would create a terrible precedent with terrible consequences for the credibility of the whole eurozone. Who would want to lend money to an EU country if they just get wiped out when things get bad? It would've also had bad consequences for the financial system and potentially caused some institutions to go belly up. The way that countries typically get rid of their debt is by printing money to serve it and thereby inflating it away. But that is obviously not popular among the remaining EU countries. It was always clear that the Euro comes with this constraint that you can't just inflate away your debt.

Greece took on more debt than they could serve. Do you expect the tax payers from other countries to just pay for that without significant changes to how Greece operates? If you can't pay your debts and you can't print your own currency, you lose some sovereignty. But I feel like Greece would have been worse off if they still had the drachma and tried to print their way out of the crisis.

The high voltage DC transmission lines from north to south are being built right now and for example SuedLink is expected to be operational in 2028. Their transmission capacity will be more than enough. Why would you split Germany into electricity zones now, if in a few years the transmission problem will largely be fixed?

It's great for you that you were able to create this app that wouldn't otherwise exist, but does that app dramatically increase your overall productivity? And can you imagine that a significant chunk of the population would experience a similar productivity boost? I'm not saying that there is no productivity gain, but big tech has promised MASSIVE productivity gains. I just feel like the productivity gains are more modest for now, similar to other technologies. Maybe one day AGI comes along and changes everything, but I feel like we'll need a few more break throughs before that.

LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the information quickly and even a 10x speed up does not really have too much of an impact on your overall productivity, because the time it took was already negligible.

Liechtenstein is as much a monarchy as Britain is. It probably falls more in the direct democracy bucket. Also, the GDP per capita figures for these tiny countries are very missleading because you can have a situation where more than half the work force is commuting into the country every day for work. They increase the GDP but don't count in the capita part.

The food system in Europe works pretty well.

That's definitely questionable, but a drop in the bucket. Irrigation for all the farms in the desert is using vastly more water.

They seem to be able to survive with the small amount of water that is allocated to them from the Colorado river.

Nevada only uses a small percentage of the Colorado river water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact). Most of the water is used for farming in the desert.

Las Vegas is actually very efficient with their water use.

The Brenner base tunnel is still under construction.

Switzerland has such close ties to the EU that I would consider them half in.

Do you have something to back up this claim?

There is already a Wikipedia article about Grokipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia

I'm not a fan of Elon or whatever, but I agree with the parent. "Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles" does not seem like a title that should be flagged.

The tariff is applied to the import value. For many products you'll get a significant markup on top within the US for distribution, which is not affected by the tariffs.

During the dot-com era, a much larger share of the money could be spent on engineers. Today, a lot of the money goes into data centers and not salaries.

Places further north are great contenders because of the free cooling. Also, many of them have cheap electricity from hydro or even geothermal, like Iceland.

Intrest rates for morgages in Switzerland are around 1% and for tax reasons most people only pay off a third of their property. The payments are very managable, as long as you have the downpayment. You can't fully compare this with a similar price in the US where interest rates are much higher and people pay off the full morgage.

Europe might not have much oil and gas, but the future is in renewables anyways. Western Europe has a lot of wind potential at the coastlines. Northern Europe and the alpine region already mostly run on hydro. Southern Europe has good solar potential. And the continent is very compact, so distributing the electricity can be done quite cheaply, since the distances are small. That seems like a pretty good setup for a clean energy future to me.

In the article it says that they are shrinking the workforce by not replacing the naturally churning people (20% per year), rather than firing people.

This can go both ways. Have you heard of Venezuela?

It does not, but they are storing the energy for winter. Solar produces a lot more energy in summer, which is especially true in Switzerland or Europe in general.

It renders a waveform that looks very similar to what it would look like if you drew a line between all points. If you have 100 samples per pixel and you draw lines between all of them, you'll essentially end up with a filled area that goes from the lowest sample to the highest. So practically the same thing as just taking the min and max and then filling everything in between. The advantage is that you're avoiding all those lines in between. If you zoom it, the signal changes very smoothly without those aliasing effects where peaks appear and disappear. The web demo currently doesn't allow zooming in, so you can't test it there, but if you download the whole Samplab app (https://samplab.com/download), you can try out what it looks like when zooming in.

> Drawing one line per sample leaves very little aliasing.

It's definitely gonna look better than just skipping samples, but you're also gonna draw a lot of unnecessary lines.

You have to down sample by a lot (easily 10-100x). That would essentially remove a lot of the information in the signal. If you low pass filter you essentially remove all the peaks and the signal looks much "quieter" than it actually is.