Yeah, there’s a pretty big difference between a lawn in Vermont or Ohio, and one in Nevada or southern California.

Grass really, really depends on location and climate. I literally never water or fertilize my lawn; it looks fine.

The worse thing here is ecological. I keep my mower set to 4", and keep my lawn a bit longer than my neighbors. I see a ton of fire flies in my yard in the summer, and see a fraction as many in my neighbors yard.

Short lawns are terrible habitat, which makes them good for sports or a children’s play area. But 80% of my neighbor’s lawn is just aesthetic, which is something I really don’t get. Lawns are about as visually exciting as a beige wall. They’re a waste of space.

Fair. I should have said that many legless lizards aren’t snakes.

Not in the right clade, basically.

They look similar, but aren’t directly related. It’s similar to why legless lizards aren’t snakes, and bats aren’t birds.

Dinosaurs are currently defined as anything that descends from the most recent common ancestor of triceratops and the pigeon.

Which, as others pointed out is mostly due to dinosaurs being originally defined before we found the first pterodactyl.

If you want to refer to dinosaurs and pterodactyls, you could use avemetatarsalians (anything more closely related to birds than crocs) or ornithodirans (dinosaurs + pterosauromorphs).

Also fun is that there’s a number of crocodillians that look suspiciously dinosaur- like, like Shuvosaurus. Convergent evolution is wild.

They particularly look like diffraction spikes/starbursts.

Astigmatism, cataracts, glaucoma or smudged glasses can cause you to see starbursts when you look at bright lights at night.

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

Apparently that might or might not be a mistranslation?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/checkmate

mid-14c., in chess, said of a king when it is in check and cannot escape it, from Old French eschec mat (Modern French échec et mat), which (with Spanish jaque y mate, Italian scacco-matto) is from Arabic shah mat “the king died” (see check (n.1)), which according to Barnhart is a misinterpretation of Persian mat “be astonished” as mata “to die,” mat “he is dead.” Hence Persian shah mat, if it is the ultimate source of the word, would be literally “the king is left helpless, the king is stumped.”

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

Inflation is calculated off of the cost of some particular basket of goods, and tends not to be even across those goods.

Yeah, if you eat a lot of corporate fast food, prices have skyrocketed recently. At a rate that far outpaces the local pizzeria and Chinese restaurant down the street, or the cost of chicken and eggs from the grocery store.

Suppose one year you spend $60k, but only earned $50k. You lost $10k.

The next year, you spend $57k, and earned $53k. You lost $4k, and your losses narrowed by $6k.

Disney+ lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2023 amid a hefty price hike that went into effect last fall, but managed to narrow its streaming business’ losses by $300 million during the October-December period.

That doesn’t really sound like it backfired to me. They lost subscribers but made more money.

The idea of a Pokémon clone isn’t protectable, but existing Pokémon are.

You can make a Pokémon clone with entirely novel monsters, but if a judge thinks they look too much like an existing Pokémon they’re gonna have a problem.

Yeah, projects also exist in the real world and practical considerations matter.

The legacy C/C++ code base might slowly and strategically have components refactored into rust, or you might leave it.

The C/C++ team might be interested in trying Rust, but have to code urgent projects in C/C++.

In the same way that if you have a perfectly good felling axe and someone just invented the chain saw, you’re better off felling that tree with your axe than going into town, buying a chainsaw and figuring out how to use it. The axe isn’t really the right tool for the job anymore, but it still works.

C is not how a computer truly works.

If you want to know how computers work, learn assembly and circuit design. You can learn C without ever thinking about registers, register allocation, the program counter, etc.

Although you can learn assembly without ever learning about e.g. branch prediction. There’s tons of levels of abstraction in computers, and many of the lower level ones try to pretend you’ve still got a computer from the 80s even though CPUs are a lot more complex than they used to be.

As an aside, I’ve anecdotally heard of some schools teaching Rust instead of C as a systems language in courses. Rust has a different model than C, but will still teach you about static memory vs the stack vs the heap, pointers, etc.

Honestly, if I had to write some systems software, I’d be way more confident in any Rust code I wrote than C/C++ code. Nasal demons scare me.

Oh, yeah.

If your point is that ICE car batteries have problems in the cold, so cold batteries is a problem for everyone and worse for ICE cars, that’s fair.

If your point is that ICE car batteries suck therefore EVs suck, that’s not really valid logic.

Lead-acid batteries aren’t lithium ion? And the car starter battery isn’t equivalent to that of an EV?

You might as well say that I have trouble starting my gas weed wacker, therefore cars are hard to start.

Right tool for the job, sure, but that evolves over time.

Like, years back carpenters didn’t have access to table saws that didn’t have safety features that prevent you from cutting off your fingers by stopping the blade as soon as it touches them. Now we do. Are old table saws still the “right tool for the job”, or are they just a dangerous version of a modern tool that results in needless accidents?

Is C still the right tool for the job in places where Rust is a good option?

The main problem is just that getting a product from a one-off in a lab to a cost-competitive mass-market product is hard and can take a lot of time, to say the least.

For example, Don Sadoway initially published about a molten metal battery in 2009. He gave a Ted talk in 2012. They’ve run into assorted setbacks along the way and are apparently just starting to deploy the first commercial test systems this year.

It’s less that these breakthroughs are bullshit, and more that commercializing these things is hard. The articles about the breakthroughs are often bullshit, though, or at least way too rosy.

Nope. The idea in no till is just adding stuff to the top and letting worms and roots handle the tilling.

I’ve had good luck just dumping a foot or two of finished compost on the ground and growing in it.

Another solid no-till approach is sheet mulching. You put down a layer of cardboard (to kill weeds), then layers of carbon and nitrogen like straw and kitchen scraps. Wait a few months, then plant. So you could do that in the late summer or fall to prepare a site for spring planting.

A lot of these things depend on location, though. Something that works great in Pennsylvania might not work as well in Utah.