Yeah, timestamps should always be stored in UTC, but actual planning of anything needs to be conscious of local time zones, including daylight savings. Coming up with a description of when a place is open in local time might be simple when described in local time but clunkier in UTC when accounting for daylight savings, local holidays, etc.

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.

They did, eventually. The first PlayStation was relatively easy to pirate for (with a mod chip), but it took a while for that stuff to become available. Someone had to go and manufacture the chips, or reverse engineer the check.

By the time that scene matured, Sega released the Dreamcast right into a more sophisticated piracy scene that could apply lessons learned to the Dreamcast right away.

On paper, Sega had more sophisticated copy protection than the first PlayStation did. But it also released 4 years later.

you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.

I don’t remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.

USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.

Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren’t necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.

For what it’s worth, that particular format war, the format backed by more porn studios (HD-DVD) actually lost to the one with less porn backing (Blu-ray). Personally I think that the PS3 tipped things over the edge.

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.

Oh don’t worry, malicious .exe files were all over the forums back then.

Y’all motherfuckers need the compose key.

Are committee meetings immune to runaway political madness? Who’s on the committee? How does the committee make decisions? Can those decisions be revisited?

I’m not convinced that today’s state of science is any different than in eras past, tracing all the way back to kings and wealthy patrons throwing their political and economic might behind their preferred scientific endeavors.

Science was political in non-capitalistic societies, as well. That’s the point of my second paragraph: science requires resources and however a society steers resources to productive uses, a scientist will need to advocate for their research in order for it to get done.

IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions

That would shift towards another metric of whose resumes look the best. That might be an improvement, but we’d still be talking about how much bullshit there is in making your resume perfectly tailored to a particular opportunity. And at that point we’re still talking about the skills that go into a grant application or a submission of a paper to a conference. That’s the soft skills that make science possible, even if submissions are anonymized.

Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.

I don’t understand how you’d prioritize things using only facts, and not some kind of extrinsic value system that assigns weights to those facts.

Let’s say you have a huge infrared telescope sitting at a Lagrange point, between the earth and the sun. How would you determine what it should be observing at any given time? There’s only 8760 hours in a year, and the telescope was designed to last for 5 years, with the hope of 10 years. How do you divide up that finite resource?

Now do the same for every particle collider, double blind medical study, paleontological excavation, test nuclear reactor, etc., fighting for a finite amount of science money, and you’ll have no choice but to define priorities according to projections and uncertainties and value judgments.

To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.

Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.

I’d say the real world doesn’t reward being actually gifted.

More accurately, the real world punishes being below average at any one of like a dozen skillets. You can’t min/max your stats because being 99th percentile at something won’t make up for being 30th percentile at something else. Better to be 75th percentile at both.

The real world requires cross-disciplinary coordination, which means thriving requires both soft skills and multiple hard skills.

They pronounce it “heera”

If you’re going to reach back into the time period before they hired the writers/showrunners to actually develop a script in early 2022, or selling the rights to Amazon in 2020, then you’re talking about a project that was far from certain it would actually get made. Hard to say that they “knew” a tv show was coming before 2022.

Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5

I’m pretty sure the TV show began development in 2022, four years after Starfield was announced in 2018.

I gotta imagine making the Sahara Desert habitable is a lot easier than making Mars habitable. The Sahara at least has breathable atmosphere, a 24 hour day, solar intensity that our plants are well adapted to using, and is relatively close to resupply from population centers on Earth.