While most of it is pretty relaxing it opens with the author getting stabbed on the subway so watch out for that maybe.

From the article there's also supposed to be additional review of further grants to deny anything that might look like gain of function research.

My laymen's take is that monitoring viruses for spillover is still important, maybe more important than ever, and gain of function research has negligible benefits and probably shouldn't happen? On that basis, what's presented in this article seems to be on the right track.

Just say the more general thing in the first place so people don't have to bother trying to argue the finer points of the specific case.

Imagine all junk food and sugary soda was produced with sustainable farming and renewable energy. It could still be the case that it leads to worse health outcomes for the population, which seems like grounds for regulation to me.

I don't really have a position on this, but it seems easy to imagine how someone could.

But that also doesn't imply we should suspect any particular AI of being conscious just because AI in general could be conscious in principle. We don't expect worms to be conscious just because animals can be.

There is no way for an asteroid and the earth to interact gravitationally to change the asteroid's orbit from what it was coming in. Non-gravitational interactions (like hitting the earth/atmosphere) can do it.

Also, over many interactions and a long time you can have orbital capture in many-body situations, but there is no general equation for this (look up 3 body problem). This is how you get objects accumulating at Lagrange points for example.

TLDR: The equation you're asking for does not exist. Sorry, wrong question!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit

For an incoming object to start orbiting earth, it has to decelerate through active propulsion or aerobraking or something like that.

So your asteroid would have to be at least several kilometers across. That approaching dino-killer size. You're definitely misremembering some part of this.

It worked out well for me, and I'd probably do it again without much hesitation if it felt necessary.

That's probably not enough to decide if it's worth it for you, but I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.

I don't understand this. Running the whole simulation locally on both ends means that a modified client would have access to the whole game state, and I don't really see how you could patch that out.

Anyone have any idea what they actually did? Try to detect modified clients? Obfuscate the game state to make it harder to interpret?

I generally agree that modern attempts to "unify" the design of icons usually go to far, but if you think Windows 98 icons are strictly better than say Windows 11 icons, that seems like rose coloured glasses to me.

The good ones are good, but the bad ones are worse. Although I do understand the appeal, and subjectively I do like them better.

He also says that having any degree is "worth it" to an individual, monetarily. It's just not worth it to society to require everyone to have education they don't use.

It seems to me like your postive example is a non-sequiter. I don't think Scott is arguing that it's impossible to make architecture that "moves the spirit" using modern design/construction. He's arguing that, for the vast majority of modern buildings, nobody is even trying to move the spirit. Even in cases where historically we would expect them to (major institutions, public art installations, large companies, rich people with large houses).

The question is, why do people with almost unlimited resources choose to build rectangular prisms of largely unadorned glass or concrete?

And your answer is (please correct me if I'm wrong), because modernists think it's better, and people generally agree even though they can't express this agreement in surveys?

What is your basis for believing this? And even if you engage with the literature on aesthetics in architecture, how do you find yourself siding with the modernists instead of the critics of modernism like Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros? This is a serious question, I've been trying for a while to find a defense of modernist architecture that I can actually understand.