[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 month ago

Federal election times are set by 2 U.S. Code § 7 as 1 day after the 1st Monday in November (of even numbered years). The law is from 1875 and from what I can tell is indeed nominally motivated by the voters' need to first observe rest day on Sunday and then travel to their polling place. Keeping it and not having a federal holiday coinciding with it is largely aimed at keeping voter turnout low.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 months ago

This is definitely important in making the very most engaging base-builders - a pleasing mixture of longer term goals (manufacture this piece that I can eventually put in a future science pack or whatnot) and under-performing pieces of your older infrastructure that you have to scale up or re-plan is just so helpful for getting you into that flow state.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 25 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This is pretty much the underpinning question of the entire field of evolutionary developmental biology, so naturally any answer is going to be a bit surface level, and I get out of my depth fairly rapidly to be honest. Still, it is quite interesting.

One of the central ideas is that as an embryo grows, its cells go from being all equivalent multipotent stem cells into being different from each other - at first more specialized types of stem cell that can only turn into certain tissues and gradually specializing more and more. Since these cells are differentiated and expressing different genes from one another, they can then start to co-ordinate with each other using chemical markers and gradients of concentration of those markers across space to regulate what types of cells should be growing/dividing, where in the embryo they should be doing it and at what time they should be doing it.

That signaling is in turn controlled by some often complicated networks of regulatory genes - ones which when they are expressed make proteins that selectively attach to other bits of the DNA in that cell and make the genes there more or less likely to be expressed themselves. A lot of evolutionary variation is actually focused on these regulatory systems rather than on the genes which they are switching on and off.

So to my knowledge, something like nose shape likely comes down to some of those regulatory genes controlling where the cells that will eventually be forming the cartilage get placed relative to the skull etc.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 13 points 6 months ago

Or sometimes fold them over trees of objects!

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 15 points 8 months ago

It's the typical phrasing of social pressures to not stand out in Scandinavia, drawing from a book where the author phrases the "rules" somewhat as a legal code. Tall poppy syndrome is an overlapping idea that might be more familiar to English speakers.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 6 points 8 months ago

Shout out to Retro Video Game Mechanics Explained for his explanation of the entire construction of the cries.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 37 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

  • Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government's authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
  • People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under "natural law".
  • People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
Primarily it's a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it's a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

You might enjoy münecat's longer form explanation.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It becomes inherently difficult to make datasets actually anonymous the more data points they have about a given individual - it doesn't much matter whether names and such are listed data points if they can be inferred from the rest. This investigation by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes, for instance, managed to identify a named German member of parliament (Valerie Wilms) and other public functionaries within a data set on web browsing habits they received from data brokers.

Most countries do have data privacy legislation and relevant regulatory/enforcement agencies, but the data brokerage business is big and intensely international so the picture on audits is kind of unavoidably complicated.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 year ago

Miles Morales is Puerto Rican and the flag has previously featured in the Morales home/Miles' living areas in the game series. This time they used a Cuban one by mistake.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'd say the key insight with quantum computing is that its algorithms are about choreographing interference patterns among qubits such that wrong answers cancel each other out but right answers reinforce one another. It's not just a matter of trying possibilities in parallel or "running different probabilities simultaneously" - the qubits' states are complex combinations of 0 and 1 states, and they interact with and change one another. Simulating those interactions on a classical computer requires exponentially growing amounts of memory space and time as the quantum computation gets bigger. Trying to divide-and-conquer this simulation over multiple classical computers runs into the need for different parts of the circuit to know about each others' state, limiting how much work can be sectioned off to be done by each computer in the group.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The extreme version of this is called the Alchemy/Enchantment loop where you feed two skill-improving skills into one another. But be aware, this is the kind of thing that can end up taking the fun out of a game for some people.

Also, it's worth being aware that because of the way later Elder Scrolls games scale enemies, any time you're working on a noncombat skill the draugr are training.

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MagosInformaticus

joined 1 year ago