Technically any Catholic male is eligible to become pope, it doesn’t even have to be a cardinal. But yeah cardinals are the only ones voting so they always elect one of their own (with a few historical exceptions)

As a European, the idea of a bank having a drive-through is just absolutely wild.

What you’re talking about is essentially an EMP. They don’t generally emit continuously. Instead you just set off a single strong pulse which induces such high currents in receiving antennas that they melt or otherwise damage connected circuitry.

At these levels of power, any amount of conductive material tends to start acting as an antenna. If you set up a continuous transmitter you’re going to have trouble not damaging your own delivery and power mechanisms.

The most common way to generate one is to set off a nuclear bomb that has been finetuned to release most of its energy as electromagnetic radiation.

I did not come away from this article with a very positive opinion on Clarkson. He strikes me as the type of guy who is incapable of recognising a problem that he himself is not personally facing. Climate change wasn’t real until he tried his hand at farming. Driving electric vehicles won’t solve the climate problem, science will (did science not develop the battery technology needed to move away from gasoline cars?). Farmers are struggling and will be forced to sell to millionaires and capitalists (is he himself not the capitalist that bought a hobby farm from a struggling farmer?).

I don’t think he’s seeing his own hypocrisy here. Farmers have been facing these problems for years and no one paid attention. He calls up his buddy in Westminster, immediately gets a full cabinet meeting, and as if by magic the government starts moving in his favour (taking away power from local government, I might add).

This isn’t a black and white issue and there is merit to Clarkson’s point that local government can get captured and corrupted by personal conflicts and interests. But I don’t agree with the image he appears to project as a defender of the common man and poor farmer. He’s a millionaire who has never given a single shit about farmers until he personally owned a farm.

A price is usually set to cover the initial costs and to make a reasonable profit not to squeeze how much money you can from people.

There are exceptions, but usually that is absolutely not true. Making as much money as you can is 100% the goal for the vast majority of goods produced, physical or digital.

You can also view it as a strategy to extract more money from richer people, without sacrificing all the poorer customers.

Can you elaborate where your confusion lies? It’s a digital good, there is no marginal cost. So they can pretty much price a game however they want. So pricing is mostly about maximising revenue, i.e. get as many sales as you can at the highest possible price.

A sale is a relatively straightforward strategy where you first sell the game at a high price to all the people who are fine with paying a lot, then you lower the price to sell more copies to the people who weren’t willing to pay the higher price. The result is more total profit. There is a time limit too to create a sense of urgency (“I better buy now so I don’t miss the opportunity”).

This is “the gadget,” an implosion type nuclear bomb detonated in the trinity test, the first nuclear bomb test on earth (that we know of, heh).

It’s shown partially assembled inside the 100-foot test tower where it would eventually be detonated.

The translation of the Dutch one is awkward. It’s more like “it can rust on my ass”

It’s not very accurate IMO. I would translate it more like “it can rust on my ass” which has a bit different tone.

I advise everyone to ignore this article and read the actual paper instead.

The gist of it is, they gave the LLM instructions to achieve a certain goal, then let it do tasks that incidentally involved “company communications” that revealed the fake company’s goals were no longer the same as the LLM’s original goal. LLMs then tried various things to still accomplish the original goal.

Basically the thing will try very hard to do what you told it to in the system prompt. Especially when that prompt includes nudges like “nothing else matters.” This kinda makes sense because following the system prompt is what they were trained to do.

Can someone explain where the Y comes from? Is this something like, there exists a mother relation between this X and some Y?

with the rise in popularity of electric vehicles now they are in shorter supply.

This doesn’t make much sense at first glance, because the battery in an electric vehicle uses completely different technology and chemistry compared to a classic car battery (lithium-ion Vs lead-acid).

The system you are describing is what most countries use. This is basically just an extension of that intended for people who make so little they need extra assistance.

Actually, the US Earned Income Tax Credit is basically a version of negative income tax.

You are right, originally they did. The answer is catholicism happened:

A religious purist, Jón made it his mission to uproot all remnants of paganism. This included changing the names of the days of the week. Thus Óðinsdagr, “day of Odin”, became miðvikudagr, “mid-week day” and the days of Týr and Thor became the prosaic “third day” and “fifth day”.

Why is it weird? It’s just your butt. Are you scared of your butt?

It really depends on the sensor tech. The fingerprint reader in my pixel 7 pro is absolute dogshit. I’ve heard the pixel 9 line improves things though.

Pi Hole couldn’t block YouTube ads last time I tried it, which is one of the main things I want to have adblock for. So I went back to ublock origin.

The reason for this is that git rebase is kind of like executing a separate merge for every commit that is being reapplied. A proper merge on the other hand looks at the tips of the two branches and thus considers all the commits/changes “at once.”

You can improve the situation with git rerere

Reddit would become just another instance with no API control

Being that large of an instance gives a lot of api control all by itself. Theoretically Chrome is just another browser and member of WHATWG. in practice, if they implement something it immediately becomes a de facto standard. Reddit would be the same.

I wouldn’t bet on Huffman’s exit doing anything of consequence either. Reddit is now under the control of investors who want a return. One way or another, monetisation of users will increase.