Degrees aren’t a metric unit, actually. Gradians were an attempt to make a metric unit for angles, but nobody uses those so it didn’t really work.

The people who designed and will use this telescope will be using “steredians”, which is square radians. That’s the unit which astrophysicists use for describing an area of the sky

It sounds like the only person we know was using LLMs was the plaintiff. He believes the court was as well, but I’m not aware of any reason to believe his accusation

No, the wires do not become less dense.

There is a virtual force acting to separate each part of the chain from each other part, but locally that force is orders of magnitude less than the bonding forces holding it together. The structure and density of the chain is therefore dominated by electromagnetic forces, rather than the expansion of space.

At large enough scale the expansion force will grow to become comparable to, or exceed, exceed the binding forces. That will cause the chain to stretch, but the electromagnetic forces will still exist and still be applying a restorative force trying to contract the chain again.

I’m pretty sure this requires many light-years of chain though, unless the acceleration of the universe is accelerating (in which case this same principle will eventually tear apart all matter, of any size), and I very much doubt that physics allows a material with the necessary properties

I can’t see how they’d do it, proton gets installed by the steam client. That client doesn’t run with root privilege, so at the very least they’d have to trigger a password dialog which would be highly obvious.

I feel like you’re getting a lot of partial answers, so I’ll try and fill in the gaps.

Palestine action are a protest group who believe that Palestinians are being mistreated by Israel, and that the UK shouldn’t support Israel in doing that. They e been around for a while, but obviously they’ve gotten a lot more active recently.

The key thing is that when they say “action”, that’s exactly what they mean. They aren’t about the usual things like protest marches, although I imagine they take part in those as well. Their approach is to do things like shut down roads leading to companies supplying the Israeli military or police by physically blocking the road.

The significant thing they did which brought them to the center of attention was to break into a military airfield, and throw paint into the engines of aircraft which they believed (and were likely correct to believe) were about to go to Israel to provide reconnaissance over Palestine to support military operations there. A lot of the news called that “vandalism”, but in reality a bucket of paint in the intake for a modern jet engine means the engine needs to be partially dismantled and thoroughly cleaned before it can run again. That costs a lot of time, and a huge amount of money, so really it amounts to sabotage.

That seriously angered the government, who used certain powers they were given by parliament years ago to declare that Palestine Action weren’t just criminal, they were terrorists. Those powers allow them to deny all sorts of fundamental legal rights, so much so that they can’t really be said to have been given fair trials. These are powers which were intended for people planting bombs in public places, and they’re alarmingly authoritarian even for that.

Among other things, declaring them terrorists has made it illegal for anyone to support them in any way. As a result, the overwhelming majority of people who have ever been arrested under the terrorism laws are now people who’s only crime was to say that Palestine Action did nothing wrong. Police were rounding up whole crowds of protestors, including harmless elderly people, and arresting them all for “supporting terrorists”

The party has the ability to kick them out, which they’d rather do as far as possible from a general election so that the new leader can be in a position to carry out a successful campaign.

When they resign between elections, it’s usually a matter of leaving before they’re kicked out, to minimise the damage of a public power struggle

Yes, and they have a plan for what happens if the rocket explodes. It wouldn’t be completely safe against an explosion this intense, but the dragon capsule (like all manned vehicles, aside from the very notable exception of the space shuttle) can eject itself from the rocket to protect the crew from explosions

Nobody was hurt. As a general rule nobody fuels a rocket without planning as if it’s going to explode in exactly this fashion. The pad didn’t survive, but nobody was anywhere near this thing when it blew up

The fact that it’s a bad idea doesn’t mean that isn’t the reason

“consider” as in “you won’t understand why Israel does what it does unless you think about”, it doesn’t mean “give them what they want”

I imagine he means things like Chromebook, rather than Chromebook itself. Mass-market consumer hardware which comes with Linux by default

The safety designed into Rust is suddenly foreign to the C family that I’m honestly not sure you can do that. Even “unsafe” Rust doesn’t completely switch off the enforced safety

Those two things aren’t being claimed by the same people.

There are people with functioning brains, who are aware that AI is shit at programming, and there are managers who have been sold a sales pitch and believe that they can replace half of their software engineers.

AI doesn’t actually need to be effective to cost a bunch of jobs, it just needs to have good salespeople. Those jobs will come back when the businesses which decided to rely on AI discover the hole they’ve dug for themselves. That might not be quick though, because there’s no rule saying that major businesses will have competent leaders with good foresight.

There are a million ways to back data up, many of them are as simple as “copy it to removable media”, and don’t require any clever operating system features at all.

What removable media you can use depends on the quantity of data, and how long you need the backup to last. Maybe DVDs, or USB drives. If the data is valuable enough, you can also pay for cloud storage and upload it

snag bites of the apex predators

I don’t think the author knows what “apex predator” means

Be cautious about trusting the AI-detection tools, they’re not much better than the AI they’re trying to detect, because they’re just as prone to false positives and false negatives as the agents they claim to detect.

It’s also inherently an arms race, because if a tool exists which can easily and reliably detect AI generated content then they’d just be using that tool for their training instead of what they already use, and the AI would quickly learn to defeat it. They also wouldn’t be worrying about their training data being contaminated by the output of existing AI, Which is becoming a genuine problem right now

Oh, absolutely. It’s not something which should be encouraged, and against a well designed modern system it probably isn’t possible (there must be some challenge-response type NFC systems on the market).

I’m just saying it isn’t unambiguously “illegitimate”

That’s probably debatable, if they have permission. They probably shouldn’t have been given permission, but that’s a separate issue

It’s only true of badly designed bridges, these days. Modern engineering tools can calculate the resonant frequencies, and they make certain that those are far away from the frequencies which humans or wind can create

An experimental capability being kicked out of the kernel, so that it has to settle for being a kernel module or custom forks of the kernel, is absolutely a minor matter