What in the name of waluigi is this

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

Everything I know about dinosaur fur I learned from the Tim Meadows sketch on I Think You Should Leave:

Fuck! I should’ve been Barney!

How?

Could’ve been like Barney’s hair. Hey look at me, I’m Barney. Like Barney’s hair.

Barney doesn’t have hair.

Will you shut the fuck up, he’s like a cloth! Cloth is hairs, just little tiny hairs. Even his mouth has little hairs. I mean it’s cloth, cloth is little hairs!

What’s the science these days about how furry dinosaurs actually were?

No such thing as an NDA that allows a spouse to work in the same room, and allows the spouse to actually be on video while blurred, but draws the line at not being able to unblur the video.

I get how it works with wifi connections, and Bluetooth scanning (since that’s a peer to peer protocol that needs to broadcast its availability), and obviously the OS-level location services, but I’m still not seeing how seeing wifi beacons would reveal anything. For one, pretty much every mobile device OS now uses MAC randomization so that your wifi activity on one network can’t be correlated with another. And for another, I think the BSSID scanning protocol is listen only for client devices.

Happy to be proven wrong, and to learn more, but the article linked doesn’t seem to explain anything on this particular supposed threat.

I set a simple task to turn off WiFi when my home network is not detected so my phone doesn’t scan and report my location to businesses.

I was under the impression that BSSID scanning was entirely passive, and that a phone that scans for beacons doesn’t actually reveal itself to anyone.

It’s much harder for spoken language to be misunderstood among the population that a native grew up in,

Well, there’s still register switching, which is an important part of the study of linguistics. A native English speaker might freely switch between the different ways to say the same meaning, depending on context and audience (“sorry” versus “my bad” versus “apologies,” or “you’re welcome” versus “don’t mention it” versus “my pleasure”).

There are perceived formalities, common membership in different groups, unspoken social relationships and positions that are reflected in speech.

These systems can be described with rules, and we can recognize that sometimes one register is inappropriate or poorly fit for a particular situation, and that some registers have different rules of grammar.

“Culler” is a word, but it certainly will not be received by a reader as the same word as “color.”

I’m a descriptivist but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t rules and that we can’t point out things still being wrong.

Descriptivism still describes rules as they’re used in the real world. Breaking those rules still subjects the speaker/writer to the consequences: being misunderstood, having the spoken or written sentence to simply be rejected or disregarded, etc.

“Colour” and “color” are both correct spellings of the word, because we are able to describe entire communities who spell things that way. “Culler” is not, because anyone who does spell it that way is immediately corrected, and their written spelling is rejected by the person who receives it. We can describe these rules of that interaction as descriptivists, and still conclude that something is wrong or incorrect.

Shouldn’t the DE/Window Manager be handling that? Seems like doing it on a window by window basis would be inefficient (and look inconsistent).

The TZ database doesn’t tell us what the offsets will be in the future. Only the past.

I think the comment is specifically talking about storing future times, and contemplating future changes to the local time zone offsets.

If I say that something is going to happen at noon local time on July 1, 2030 in New York, we know that is, under current rules, going to happen at 16:00 UTC. But what if the US changes its daylight savings rules between now and 2030? The canonical time for that event is noon local time, and the offset between local time and UTC can only certainly be determined with past events, so future events defined by local will necessarily have some uncertainty when it comes to UTC.

Sharks are older than Saturn’s rings.

Is that just for vertebrates? Seems that exoskeletons should still be fair game, right?

The hills have bones

This meme format works best to absurdly overstate the uselessness of something you find mildly annoying. That’s when it’s funniest, because the criticisms are grounded in something real, and the low-stakes controversy makes the aggressive tone funny in context.

We have tons of evidence that it happened but our models for explaining and predicting it are bad at consistently and reliably explaining everything we’ve already seen, and each new discovery seems to break those models even more.

The theory is the model trying to explain how it works. The fact, though, is that we have evidence showing that it did happen, even if we don’t have a unified theory of how it happened.

Imagine a car crash site, where the cars have definitely crashed, but everyone has different debates about what caused the crash. Imagine further that the specifics of any person’s explanation has a few inconsistencies with what we see. So we’d have the fact that a car crash happened, but lousy theories explaining how it happened.

So anybody who says dark matter doesn’t exist is plain wrong, the discrepancies are there plain as day.

There’s dark matter, the real thing that exists and we can “see”.

No, we have observations that are consistent with the existence of matter that does interact gravitationally with regular matter, but does not appear to interact with light or electromagnetic forces. It’s not like any matter we know about, other than the fact that it seems to have gravity.

General relativity works really well to explain matter in the solar system. Bigger than that, you have to use something else. The general consensus is that dark matter exists, but it’s not strictly proven, as there are alternative theories.

Then, even bigger than that, dark matter alone isn’t enough, you need dark energy to explain some observations, if you assume that cosmological constants are constant. If it turns out that they’re not truly universally constant, we might need to modify some theories (including the proposed existence of dark matter and dark energy).

Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does.

Not just the why, but also the what. We didn’t observe gravitational waves until 2015. People have proposed the existence of dark matter and dark energy because observed gravity doesn’t behave as our models would predict at certain cosmological scales.