It depends how deep they are. I run into a depressing number that have just been caught up in the misinformation storm. Getting them to stop and think often helps recalibrate their thinking.

It doesn’t help much on those that are deep enough their ego is heavily involved.

As a late diagnosed aspie, I fully get that. I also know that vaccines save a lot of lives, including fellow autistics.

The phrasing is also fun to derail the brains of people complaining about vaccines. It can bypass their mental defences and makes them think for a moment. It doesn’t work on the hard core, but the casual idiots are easier to deprogram.

Vaccines do increase autism numbers.

Most childhood vaccines are administered before symptoms of autism generally appear. A lot of children owed their lives to vaccines, and so got to develop autism, rather than dying.

For nieve signal distances, that can sometimes be true. That’s not how starlink works however. It bounces the signal between satellites, each adding latency. Overall, fibre wins in almost every situation.

The bigger problem is saturation. Most things you can apply to radio waves can be applied to light in a fibre. The difference is you can have multiple fibres on the same run. This massively increases bandwidth, and so prevents congestion.

Just checked the numbers. Starlink is up at 550km. That means a minimum round trip of 1100km. In order to beat a fibre run, you are looking at over 2000km distance. Even halving that to (optimistically) account for angles, that’s still a LONG run to an initial data center.

Off the joke topic, but something that made it make a lot more sense.

Scientists have studied this. Women do what are known as IOIs (Indicators of Interest). Most men can pick up on these. When they flirt, the rate doubles, or even more.

The problem lies in the base rate. It can vary a lot, from 5/hour to 120/hour. At this point men are left with a conundrum. Is a 60/minute lady a 10, desperately flirting, or a 100, who’s slightly off put by you. The lady’s friends have an instinctive read on this rate, so it’s quite obvious. Most men have been burnt however, so tend to be over cautious. This can lead to a lot of flirting at oblivious men, who think you’re just being polite.

I’ve got one of the bands (10, I think). That seems to be a solved problem. I can’t interact with it in the shower, but it doesn’t go haywire.

As for the heart rate, it’s at least consistent. It matches what my blood pressure measurements report, and follows exercise, rather than steps.

I’m bad at breaking or losing watches. I don’t buy expensive smart watches, I aim for a cheap, functional one.

I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.

The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.

Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).

In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.

It has several modes. The most basic is speech to text, pattern match, then implement. It also has text to speak for feedback. No actual AI in the loop.

It’s also capable of tying to AI models in various ways. It’s mainly intended for question answering. Either general, or about your data.

I personally don’t trust a non-deterministic AI having direct control of my house, so the split is useful.

It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not “no switch”.

Home assistant is capable of it. Unfortunately it’s not yet overly user friendly about it, but it’s getting better rapidly.

I’ve been impressed by my Ulefone 27T. It’s an armoured brick with a 10,000mAh battery. Waterproof, with IR and headphone jack. It also has a thermal camera.

The goal is to stop them building up any momentum. If the credit companies get used to flexing their power like this, and steam gets used to folding to it, then things will escalate.

Right now it’s porn games. Who the hell would defend them. But it won’t end there. You honestly don’t think they would go after games that mock religion, or are trans positive?

These can get an impressive range to a water balloon. Reduce the mass with an egg and 1/2 mile is likely (just) within range.

I would say stink bombs are even lighter, but I doubt Trump can even smell them, over his own stink.

There are already plans for metadata signing. I think some high end Canon cameras might do it already. It basically allows proof (via public private key of the hash) that a particular camera took that photo.

The idea is that you can create a chain of custody with an image. Each edit requires a new signature, with each party responsible for verifying the previous chain, to protect their own reputation.

It’s far from perfect, but will help a lot with things like legal cases.

For many places, your signal isn’t the bottleneck. It’s the back haul from the tower to the main internet. 5G won’t help if there’s a straw connected to the fire hose of 5G.

Its part of iterative improvement. The resonance causes the beam to spread out, which both makes getting results harder and losing more particles in route. The resonance is caused by the magnets used being imperfect.

The point of the article is they have created a model that predicts these resonances accurately. This will be of limited benefit to them, though it will help clean up some data. The big advantage for future constructions is by knowing how the field becomes imperfect, measures can be taken to correct for it. This will make future particle accelerators better. The same problem will occur in larger fusion reactors. By studying this now, they can be improved before they are even built.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is a huge difference!”

The seller thinks the value is net negative to them. The buyer thinks it still has a potential positive value. Both would agree to just hand it over.

Unfortunately, UK law does not allow that. Consideration must go both ways. The simplest way is to sell for the minimum reasonable amount. $1 is traditional in the US. In the UK it is £1. The other commenters link has a good writeup on the practice.

They broke from “everything is a pound” years ago. They also still do a really bad job making it clear what is no longer a pound.

You’re likely picking up on her autism. Most aspies put on a (mental) mask to interact with others. For most it’s intended to be inoffensive and keep you in the background. Greta’s is focused on her goal. She would likely prefer you hated her, but knew about her causes, than be likeable, but forgettable.

As for harmless, that’s part of the image. She’s as harmless as a friendly bull. It will happily get scratches behind the ears, but still walk straight through the wooden fence to let the cows roam free.