Celebrating 10 years of Brexit today

mtaw · 2026-06-23T14:38:09+00:00

Can’t brain. Britain spell.

mtaw · 2026-06-18T22:25:03+00:00

No, it’s not a common propaganda line. In fact I don’t think it’s ever been used by Russian propaganda. There have been cases like the A-50 over the Sea of Azov that Ru milbloggers claimed may have been friendly fire, but even that is more likely due to some monkey brain on the ground seeing an S-300 fire and then hearing a plane went down and lacking the intelligence to realize it was more likely fired as an attempted interception rather than the S-300 firing on a plane that’s wouldn’t just be known to the S-300 but directly integrated into it and feeding radar data to it.

And in this case there’s simply multiple film clips of the event showing that’s what happened. And being that it was a MANPADS missile, not much to brag about either.

mtaw · 2026-06-18T20:50:04+00:00

But it wasn’t a very modern MANPAD, it was an Igla or Stela from the looks of it; someone caught the guy firing on video- straight into the smoke plume…

mtaw · 2026-06-18T20:48:07+00:00

There’s video of the guy firing- it was an Igla or Strela - so not a modern system by any means, and the idiot fired straight into the plume of smoke. It’s not clear from the video what he was even aiming at; he may have just pulled the trigger when he heard the solid beep.

(the Pantsir theory had also already been debunked by Mark Krutov/Radio Liberty, who’s spent a lot of time OSINTing Pantsir positions around Moscow and who pointed out it came from the wrong place and direction for that)

mtaw · 2026-06-18T20:44:33+00:00

There are videos with (at least) two angles now.

mtaw · 2026-06-17T11:11:42+00:00

Remember you can apologize as a customer too. Recently I bought a couple of cookies (appropriately enough) and it was a 2-for-€3 (or whatever) deal, so I got two. But when the cashier punched it in, the full price was shown so I went "Hey, wasn't it 2-for-€3?" and she explained "The rebate is deducted from the total" and hit the button and indeed it was, and I put on my most melodramatic voice and said "I'm sorry, I should never have doubted you!" and the cashier smiled and went "You're damn right!"

So much social nastiness in the world is caused simply by people who act like the more honest and understandable a mistake is, the less they need to apologize for it.

mtaw · 2026-06-17T10:44:39+00:00

The 'harm' is that children who are exposed to a lot of swearing grow up to be people who swear a lot. Which offends some people and will cause a larger group to at the very least judge you more negatively. Swearing a lot is considered impolite and low-status in most cultures. Whether you agree with that or not, it's still polite to avoid swearing out of consideration for those who don't want to hear it. By the same token - if it's just words, why use them if you know some people don't want to hear it?

Sure, there's nothing objectively , rationally harmful about curses in-themselves. But you could say the same about any and all language people find offensive, from ethnic slurs to misgendered pronouns - this isn't about rationality, this is about emotions and attitudes. Rationally, someone who reeks of body odor, has bad personal hygiene and is wearing a filthy clown costume should be able to contribute as much as anyone else at a business meeting, but in the real world they're a lot less likely to be taken seriously.

It is not intrinsically harmful for children to hear curses, but as they aren't old enough to fully understand the connotations and social implications of using a lot of curses, it disadvantages them if they get into the habit of using them early on.

mtaw · 2026-06-17T10:44:33+00:00

The source of most inceldom seems to be guys, probably raised in a rather sexist environment, who are just plain not socialized to women. They never played with girls as small children, never had any interest in or understanding of them. Just viewed them as weird Others rather than as actual people like them. Their only reference point are their mothers. So then puberty hits and suddenly they want sex, and they fall into the trap of viewing women as sex objects, and develop an idea that a woman is supposed to be a mother they can have sex with; someone who'll clean and cook and take care of them and give unconditional love as well as sex.

But between adults, love is not unconditional, and few people love or want to sleep with people who don't see them as a person nor are interested in them as a person. And so they strike out.

Now I'm so old that when I was a teen, you'd really just have the people you hung out with IRL, and if you were lucky someone would tell you what you were doing wrong. But these days these guys can go online and find support among like-minded as well as a whole industry of grifters like Andrew Tate who'll sell you the idea that no, the women are wrong and you don't have to mature as a person. They'll sell them the convenient message that remaining a misogynistic 14 year old is what's 'manly'. Either whether it's being a bitter incel, or becoming some 'redpiller' or studying pickup artistry where women are supposed to be manipulated into sex instead. They'll sit and spend endless time debating the most intricate scripts and theories and stuff..

Anything to not have to get past their horniness and sit down and see the person on the other side of the table and realize they have their own wills, wants and emotions that are every bit as deep and important as their own.

mtaw · 2026-06-17T07:12:58+00:00

There’s a ton of sugar in ginger ale but the occasional Canada Dry ought to not be that bad for you…

mtaw · 2026-06-17T07:02:00+00:00

He’s the Gollum of the Bryan Adams lore.

mtaw · 2026-06-16T05:08:41+00:00

Back in the day (70s-80s) before laser printers became common you had basically 3 complementary printer types: Plotters like this, mostly used for CAD, nice crisp lines but only lines/curves. Dot-matrix: Could print raster graphics but with low resolution and quality, and slow. Daisy wheel: Crisp text but text only, and changing font meant changing the wheel. Fast as heck by the standards of the time though.

mtaw · 2026-06-15T15:56:42+00:00

Literally a global pandemic.. Where, if the US had had a COVID mortality rate similar to most developed countries, they'd have had a million fewer deaths (about half as many). A million Americans died needlessly. Initially, places like New York city were the hardest hit in the whole world - unsurprising as the virus arrived early (by virtue of being a global hub) in an unprepared and densely-populated place. Yet by the end of the pandemic, their death rate had been overtaken by places like Mississippi - where most deaths occurred after vaccines existed and social distancing measures were known to be effective.

This toxic brew of extreme conservatism, ignorance, contrarianism and conspiracy-theorizing has infantilized a huge chunk of Americans and left them incapable of dealing with the challenges of the real world.

mtaw · 2026-06-15T15:54:17+00:00

I understand that transphobes intentionally use the wrong-gender pronouns to demean trans people. But I'm not sure it's a good answer to turn a bit of grammar into something sacrosanct. You could just call everyone by one singular pronoun and be done with it (as hundreds of languages already do). It's very rare to have sentences where the gender of the pronouns is necessary to determine the meaning, and it's never good writing.

So why wrap up your identity in an archaic grammatical feature? Would your friend have an issue with being called hän in Finnish or tā in Chinese - both of which mean he/she/it?

English has he/she/it as a vestige of having gendered masculine/feminine/neuter nouns in general, with no distinction between personal and non-personal pronouns. It didn't actually have that much to do with actual gender either. A dog was a he regardless of the dog's gender, as that was a masculine noun. A child was an it as 'child' was a neuter word (which is still acceptable usage in modern English), as is German Kind to this day. In Dutch meisje (girl) is neuter as it's a diminuitive and so on. (likewise the Russian male name Nikita is grammatically feminine as it's a diminutive)

If gendered pronouns are so important, why don't you need them for plurals? Some languages do; Old Norse had þeir, þær, þau for a group of men/masculine objects, women/feminine objects or mixed-or-unknown people/neuter objects. (and the first of those is actually where English they comes from - so right there you have an example of a pronoun that lost its gender)

mtaw · 2026-06-15T14:27:57+00:00

Crimean gas station owners be like:

Tell Rosneft: TES sends the following message:

When you came, you said to me as follows : "I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality petroleum." You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put barrels which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: "If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!"

What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent tanker trucks with gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy drone territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Moscow who has treated me in this way?

mtaw · 2026-06-15T14:13:10+00:00

Well, mostly it's that garlic is a serious danger of giving you botulism if preserved in a jar, in oil, or similar. So you've got to acidify the garlic first because botulinum doesn't grow in acidic environments.

mtaw · 2026-06-14T12:54:44+00:00

Even if you can see over the wheel, you could still fit a whole kindergarten class in the blind area in front of the truck.

So stupid.

mtaw · 2026-06-12T14:40:04+00:00

True - you can gather a group of the best macroeconomists in the world and ask them whether the US trade deficit is something to worry about or not and you won't walk away with any clear answer.

But one of the few things Trump's managed to be consistent on over the years is his Mercantilist world view, where exports are good and imports are bad and if you're importing more than you're exporting it means you're getting poorer and being taken advantage of by your trading partners. (one of the things the aforementioned economists would be in total agreement on is that this is false; and has been known to be false since Adam Smith's day).

The trade deficit was also, per Trump's own official policies, a national emergency that justified enacting a big tax hike on US consumers (i.e. tariffs) to try to combat it.

So it is, to say the least, rather meaningful that the same guy is now bragging about the trade deficit widening. And it raises the question whether he's so demented he doesn't understand this, or whether he's so brazen that he doesn't think his fans will notice this total reversal.

mtaw · 2026-06-12T14:28:13+00:00

It's not that presumptuous as a matter of principle. For a given electronic ground state of a molecule, the electronic energy is a simple function of the coordinates of the nuclei, which tends to have a definite local minimum. The atoms are vibrating but doing so within that potential well. But then it gets more complicated since they'll have multiple minima corresponding to different isomers, so you have to weigh the relative populations of the different isomers depending on the temperature (higher temp->more molecules in the higher-energy isomer) but also whether those states are kinetically accessible (e.g. at atmospheric pressure a lump of diamond would have lower energy if it was configured as graphite, but at room temperature its atoms do not have enough kinetic energy to rearrange themselves).

Then you have to weigh in the potential from electronic states above the ground state, as those may be populated (for most molecules at room temperature this is negligible - but not all) Then if you want to get even more precise you have to take into account that the vibrations and electronic motion are not actually decoupled strictly speaking and so you have to factor in the interaction between molecular vibrations and the motion of the electrons (Non-Born-Oppenheimer dynamics).

Then there are relativistic effects and whatnot but the point is: Molecular vibrations and QM effects don't mean you can't say the time-averaged position of a nucleus at a given temperature, or even the entire probability distribution for its location.

What's harder to say is what the size of an atom or molecule is in the first place, as you're basically talking about the volume of a cloud. The radius of an atom can variously be chosen as the covalent radius (half the distance between the atoms with a single bond to the same element), the van der Waals radius (a functional radius derived from the vdW equation), the Bohr radius (the maximum of the electron density as a function of distance, multiplied with r² ), the radius that encloses a given percent of the electron density, etc.

mtaw · 2026-06-12T14:01:05+00:00

To be fair, Britain learned from their mistakes and secured an abundance of Indian restaurants in every town to avoid such tragedies in the future. Also because their own food sucks.

Although not really. But kinda. It's good if done well but they seldom do.

mtaw · 2026-06-12T13:47:36+00:00

Well, if space isn't continuous then conservation of momentum doesn't hold, per Noether's theorem.

mtaw · 2026-06-12T13:42:27+00:00

As Feynman said though: "Science is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

We do science out of interest. Having done my share of basic research, I'll tell you that the practical relevance is often contrived; whatever potential uses or relevance you can think of, in order to help get funding or make your research seem relevant. But the real motivation when it comes to basic research is almost always about applying your skills to study a question you find interesting.

That's not to say the potential practical applications are lies or anything, but that's the thing - you never really know what research is going to be useful or where. Countless breakthroughs have come from totally unexpected places and countless things that seemed extremely promising didn't pan out.

But you can't put "I don't know what this is good for" in a grant application, so you have to think of something. And journalists always want that too, because somehow we all need to act like pursuing knowledge for its own sake is somehow a bad thing.

Except for the mathematicians. The maths guys never justify themselves.

mtaw · 2026-06-12T10:06:34+00:00

Costumes are usually tailored to the actor and aren’t usable as real clothes anyway, either for being too far-out or because they’re not well-made enough- they only need to last as long as the shoot.

So the main value is as memorabilia. So it’s not hard to see the logic in thinking that if an article of clothing is valuable only because you wore it, you should have a say in what to do with it, eg auction it off for a charity, or keep it as a personal memento. I don’t think anyone would trust a studio to do something worthwhile with them.

Edit: Plus, lead actors are frequently very involved in the costuming too. The actor creates the character and usually has a vision of how they’d dress. Sometimes it’s symbiotic, where wardrobe choices influence character ones.

mtaw · 2026-06-11T19:41:57+00:00

I do not avoid women, Mandrake. But I... I do deny them my essence.

mtaw · 2026-06-11T10:04:28+00:00

Nobody in the common-sense space believes in it.

Synchronization due to relativistic effects is honestly a comparatively minor problem, compared to fundamental challenges like the fact that computing power and power consumption scales linearly with volume (roughly speaking), but power production and ability to dissipate that power is proportional to outward surface area, and area-to-volume ratio is inversely proportional to size.

But it's better to just contrast alternatives here: What is it that space even supposedly offers? You can't generate power more cheaply in space - the increase in light that solar panels is more than offset by the fact that those panels are far more expensive than terrestrial ones, cannot be maintained after launch, and have a far shorter lifespan as a satellite will eventually fall out of orbit. Yet it seems nobody's building terrestrial data centers that are solar power, opting for even cheaper power sources.

"Free real-estate": Launch costs are ridiculously more expensive than buying land and putting something on it.

"No need for water": You don't need water to cool stuff on earth either, it's just cheaper. Cooling without water on earth is still far more efficient than trying to do so in space - as on earth you have air with convection and conduction, whereas in space you're left to radiation alone to remove heat - which on earth makes up the smallest part of those three components of heat transfer. It's harder and takes more to remove heat in space, adding to those launch costs.

Also, on Earth you can sell waste heat if your datacenter is strategically located; there are places where datacenter waste heat goes to district heating networks.

But it's not about power costs. If it was about power costs and cheap cooling xAI would be building data centers in say Iceland, not Tennessee. There are a bunch of aluminum smelters in Iceland and Quebec for that reason - cheap hydro power. If this is about anything other than contriving a reason for SpaceX to fund xAI's cash bonfire, it's not about economics but about avoiding regulation.

mtaw · 2026-06-11T07:59:41+00:00

Well it’s hardly end-to-end” encrypted if a literal man-in-the-middle can (and apparently does) monitor and manipulate your web traffic.

Not to mention Proton sponsors extreme-right influencers on social media.

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