While Putin was likely acting on their interests, the current situation has gone completely pear shaped on that front. Putin is stuck. If he backs down, he’s dead, if he doesn’t win, he’s dead. He’s currently riding the limbo between those situations, hoping for a 3rd option.

If he died, the powers behind him would likely take the chance to disengage. The current situation is bad for business, and plans need to be re-thought. It wouldn’t fix things long term, but short term, they would likely back down.

There’s a lot more to teaching than just good explanations. I do enjoy trying to explain complex science in more understandable ways however.

As for struggling, we all do at times, pushing through is how we get better. Also science is a little like a spider web. If you look closely, at just a few strands, they don’t make obvious sense. It’s only when you build up a broader picture that it becomes obvious and easy. Building that picture, unfortunately, requires pushing through the “what the hell, I can’t make sense of this!” stage.

It would be a mix of relative rates and the exact energy.

If you pick an area of “empty” space where you expect very little dark matter, you will get a baseline reading. When you aim at an area expected to be dense in dark matter, you will expect to get a higher reading. E.g. 10 counts a day, Vs 100 per day. This is basically how radiation detection works on earth, so the maths is well studied.

The other thing is energy levels. 2 electrons hitting have a distinct energy. It will vary upwards slightly, due to kinetic energy, but not that much. We also know the annihilation energy of other forms of matter, from earth experiments. A reading distinct from anything normal would be a good signature of an unknown type of matter annihilating.

There are also extra complications from things like red shift, but those can be measured in other ways, and corrected for.

The order of theory and discovery also helps. “Finding X that happens to support Y” is a lot weaker than “Predicting X from theory Y, then going and finding it”. If you run 1 million experiments, a 1 in a million result is quite likely by pure fluke. A 1 in a million result from a single, focused experiment is a lot more powerful.

In a short summary. Something is wrong with the spin of galaxies. There is more mass than we can account for, and it’s distributed wrong.

Either the laws of gravity are slightly wrong, or there is something out there with mass, but no interaction with other matters (light particularly).

More recent, more detailed studies have shown that the error is not consistent. Therefore either the laws of physics vary from galaxy to galaxy (very unlikely) or it’s something physical, rather than a law error.

That leaves dark matter, sometimes called W.I.M.Ps (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). They don’t seem to interact with electromagnetism at all, and even any strong or weak force interaction is minimal. It only interacts gravitationally.

We know the interactions at minimal due to gravity mapping. It seems to form a cloud around galaxies, rather than collapsing in. To collapse in, they must interact to exchange momentum. If they only interact by gravity, that collapse will be extremely slow.

That is most of what we can be fairly sure of. There’s a lot of speculation around this, and we might be barking up the wrong tree completely. However dark matter via WIMPs seems to be the most consistent with the evidence right now.

Edit to add.

This experiment seems quite ingenious. It assumes that WIMPs have a mix of both matter and antimatter. Ever so often a matter/antimatter pair get close enough to annihilate. This creates a pair of gamma photons. The existence of these would help back the existence of physical WIMPs. The energy would also tell us something of their mass (photon energy = mass energy + momentum energy). That will help narrow down where to look in our particle accelerator data.

The aiming is still a problem. The Hubble is relatively small. Even then, it can’t track fast enough to image the moon, let alone the earth’s surface.

Any useful reflector would be measured in Km^2 . Aiming that, with the same precision as Hubble would be a tall order. Added to that, the mirror would have to be light enough to launch. You’re basically trying to aim a sheet of tinfoil, as large as a stadium (minimum), with active tracking.

The same reason a dam owner panics over a finger sized leak. A hole becomes a crack, a crack a breach, and a breach can collapse the whole dam.

It might also be a single dev who pushed for it. With only a 1-3% market share, the company is unlikely to push resources at it. That 1 dev getting any working version out is a win in many ways.

Also, most Linux users are a lot better trained at reporting bugs. Most of the time, this is a good thing, letting them get fixed in FOSS development setups. Unfortunately, in gaming, it ends up making Linux look a buggy mess. When 60% of your big reports come from 0.5% of your users, companies can panic. Even if the same bugs exist in windows, just no one bothers to report them.

I’ll take compatible.

Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.

Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.

End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.

Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.

Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

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.