"A senior colleague of mine found one of his favourite problems among those solved and attempted to read the accompanying paper. He told me it was so unintelligible that, had he received it as an editor at a mathematics journal, “it would have gone straight into the bin”. —Melissa Lee, Monash […]

[Syria] A while ago, Ahmed al-Sharaa's government tried to restrict the sale of alcohol in Muslim-majority Syria to sealed bottles and cans in Christian-majority areas. This was quickly reversed when most of the country game out against it. Hopefully the same thing will happen here. It's not […]

Working on my first webdev assignment, I spent over an hour pulling what remains of my hair out because no matter what I did to the HTML or the CSS, it kept rendering the same. Turns out I was using classes in the HTML but ids in the CSS, so the styling information didn't actually apply to […]

I'm doing a basic computer science course (I know, I know). For my first assignments, the programming lecturer said "There's no problem with ye using AI. Of course ye're going to use AI, I use it every day. Here's what ye can and can't use it for..." The webdev lecturer said "You may not use AI […]

Everybody has to coordinate with Starlink because SPACEX CONTROLS ORBIT. That's against the Outer Space Treaty. Your engineering challenge, SpaceX, is to provide your services with fewer satellites. Not yell at everyone else for having satellites too […]

[IEpol] The government made sure to reduce the tax people pay on stock market profits. This us a terrible idea, and I say this as somebody who has paid Capital Gains Tax. CGT is a tax on income that doesn't come from making goods or providing services; people use their EXTRA money to buy a […]

[FRpol] So was anybody under the impression that Le Front, perdonne, Rasselement National WEREN'T a crowd of antisemites?

A carpenter friend in California told me today that the price of copper has gone through the roof -- e.g. $100 for a short section of pipe. He said the data centers are hoovering up raw materials in such a frenzy that the cost of essentially all construction materials is insane. I haven't seen […]