I have a hunch that space race is not for "peaceful technological progress of human race at large", or "let's see how this behaves in 0G, it might be useful for some global problems" anymore.
Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich better, if any better at all, than current ballistic missiles armies around the world already have. Those space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe that huge space rockets would defeat the purpose, as they would consume a lot of fuel for nothing, while also being much easier to spot and stopped by shooting something at them.
So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of space exploration being directly useful for weapons.
The point now isn’t having better rockets for (ballistic) missiles, since satellites became a thing the game has been infrastructure. Future (hypothetical) missions to the moon and mars might not be for military research purposes directly, but the infrastructure that both needs to be and now can be set up to support those missions will absolutely be co-opted for military purposes.
The race is now to bootstrap your nation’s permanent presence in space, because at the moment there is a first mover opportunity for what is slowly but surely becoming just another frontier for economics, geopolitics, etc. to play out over (granted this is already happening, I suppose I’m talking about a step change in scale).
While that is just a natural reaction to "unfair" world where not everyone gets the same level of access to the best level of care, I'd also say that it's a reminder that money can't and won't solve all problems people are hit with in their lifetimes (or he'd not be facing cancer diagnosis in the first place).
This story is of someone with resources putting them to good use to save themselves, but also have that benefit others: medical research is expensive and for good reason restricted, and just like lots of open source was driven by individual's need, so lots of good stuff can come out of this. I suggest to see it that way.
On both cases it is based on some evidence even if they are completely different (one is a question of definition, another of measurement and observation): for Pluto, it is a round lump of rock going around the Sun on it's own separate orbit; for serif vs non-serif, argument is that serifs help with line tracking for eyes depending on the line spacing and line length.
For a meta-study finding a different result, it'd be great to qualify how was the previous research wrong so we learn something from it.
I've marked as something to pick up as I am very curious.
The previous theory was wrong because someone made it up on the basis of nothing. This is a very common event.
It is precisely analogous to the "dispute" over Pluto,¹ where the only argument was "I was taught in school that Pluto is a planet, which means it is true that Pluto is a planet". That is also the only argument for differential readability of serif vs non-serif fonts. It shouldn't surprise you that it turned out to be wrong.
¹ (The conclusions are not analogous - "Pluto is a planet" is not capable of being true or false when the definition of "planet" is up for debate. "Serifed fonts are more readable [under condition X]" is capable of being true or false. But the arguments are identical.)
There are more, but OP claims to dispute this study among others, and while I am very curios and have added it to my reading list, if somebody has already read and can highlight what was wrong with all the previous studies, that'd be great (that was the ask all along).
For instance, in this very study, Verdana (a sans serif font) is ranked best due to low mental effort, but an average reading speed is much better for serif fonts: I would like to see even larger x-height fonts than Georgia — eg. Baskerville — tested as well. Perhaps sans serif fonts are taken down by the worst ones.
I guess I'll need to read the OP's full 160 pages to get my answer.
> For Pluto, it is a round lump of rock going around the Sun on it's own separate orbit
That was never the reason anyone got upset at it being "demoted", or else they'd be equally upset about all of the other ones that were never planets in the first place (which in fact are in fact the main argument for why it got reclassified). People just don't like change, especially for things that seem like "facts".
That's exactly my point: the previous response assumed the argument was made in "I don't like change matter", when a better interpretation is "I am OK with Pluto being a planet if all the other similar objects matching the same definition are planets or them all not being planets", or, in this context, "I'd really like to know why was previous opinion also based on research wrong".
I'd also note Pluto was discovered only in 1930, and people already accepted a change of "one extra planet" not 100 years ago, and I do not think people have changed that much since.
> I'd also note Pluto was discovered only in 1930, and people already accepted a change of "one extra planet" not 100 years ago, and I do not think people have changed that much since.
Fair enough. I think people are more tolerant of new discoveries than being told than something being "taken away" though.
> That's exactly my point: the previous response assumed the argument was made in "I don't like change matter", when a better interpretation is "I am OK with Pluto being a planet if all the other similar objects matching the same definition are planets or them all not being planets", or, in this context, "I'd really like to know why was previous opinion also based on research wrong".
At least in my experience, nobody I've ever heard genuinely complain about Pluto not being considered a planet anymore has expressed the sentiment you're saying though. There have been multiple adults in my life over the years who have what I can only describe as an emotional attachment to the idea of Pluto as a planet based seemingly on nothing other than nostalgia and the fact that it's what they were taught when they were in school. I'm not saying that the view you're citing here doesn't exist, but from what I can tell almost everyone who approached the change from that mindset either ended up convinced that the change was reasonable or stopped caring years ago.
I can see what you are describing with Pluto. But I am reasonably confident that we'd not be seeing that reaction if the discovery of new planet-like lumps of rock similar in size to Pluto was described as "new planets discovered" (you seem to hint at that too): it's more of a reaction to change for the sake of change in their opinion ("let's redefine what a planet is, making Pluto not one anymore").
I think it would be comparable to us saying that something which is now ingrained is redefined (eg. think about saying "Zero/0 is not a number" anymore).
Research pointing in the other direction in regards to serif vs non-serif type is not the same: it is measurable objective fact (even if riddled with methodological constraints and issues).
With a popular open source project, you'll quickly get to a number of bug reports that you have no chance of ever solving. You will have to focus on the worst ones and ones affecting most users.
At the same time, you want to communicate to users that this is the case so they don't have wrong expectation. But also, psychologically it is demotivating to have a 1000+ open bugs queue with no capacity to re-triage and only two maintainers able to out a few fours in every month or every week.
In open source, "won't fix" means either "not in scope — feel free to fork" or "no capacity ever expected — feel free to provide a fix".
The optimization problem is how do you get the most out of very limited time from very few people, and having 1000+ open bugs that nobody can keep in their head or look for duplicates in is mentally draining and stops the devs from fixing even the top 3 bugs users do face.
The problem is that your users also have limited time and if it's clear you're not even looking at issues where someone has put in lots of effort to help you then you're only going to get lazy issues and it will actually take more effort from you to do all that work yourself if you want to reach the same software quality.
I think you are missing the point: a user putting in a lot of effort into a bug report is usually trying to help themselves get the bug fixed.
As a maintainer, you will obviously look at that bug with more appreciation: but if you estimate it will take you 3 months of active development to fix it that you will have to spread over a full year of your weekends (which you can't afford), what would you do?
And what would a reasonable user rather see? Yes, this is an issue, but very hard to fix, and I don't have the time, or just letting the bug linger?
ASCII-only turned me away instantly: a message board limited to a very small number of languages and typewriter typography is not for me.
If you want to limit Unicode-attacks from lookalike characters — what's the attack vector? — I'd also worry about l, 1 and I or 0/O misrepresentation, so I'd drop those too.
I concur — having added it as a third level symbol (AltGr + dash for em-dash, AltGr + Shift + dash for en-dash) to a default layout for Linux in early 2000s, it has become my signature of sorts.
If I am to be called out as an LLM, at least I can lay a claim I've been one for 20 years!
I do eschew one tradition surrounding it — the one of using no spaces around it — despite recommendations of different Manuals of Style and typographic norms. It simply looks better with more breathing room.
The most dominant style guide is The Chicago Manual of Style, which recommends against spaces around em dashes, but there is an AP style guide which actually does recommend spaces!
Em-dashes are not the same thing as parenthesis even if they are used in similar circumstances, and as a sibling comment recognized well, you'd still put spaces outside the parenthesis —but this would be terrible with em-dashes— wouldn't you agree?
This is really a style issue, and it mostly depends on what "school" you subscribe to.
An LLM could do this by looking over the full codebase and release notes and do a shorter summary, bit probably at the cost of many tokens today.
reply