I actually disagree having listened to it as someone who gets sensory overload and panic attacks. (Disclaimer: I’ve just listened with headphones; the real-world implementation might change this.)

I thought the music was pleasant. I can see it helping to organically drown out the loud, chaotic, stressful noises naturally present in the airport.

I’m interested to hear what other people who get sensory overload think, though, since I’ll bet it manifests in very different ways.

I’m just saying, renaming your store to “53 Shoes” after this would be really funny.

Except it categorically isn’t. If you sit two people in a laboratory – an adherent to an Abrahamic religion and a “practitioner” of “magic” – neither will be able to perform a supernatural feat. We agree that far. But unless the “witch” wants to resort to special pleading that they can’t perform it under laboratory conditions for no good reason (the woo magic system presumably isn’t sentient and has no reason to care? or maybe they have really bad performance anxiety?), then it’s provably false. Even if they say something vague like “better luck” or “better health”, well we have statistics for a reason. Are you not powerful enough? Okay, well like, we’re measuring down to the attometer at this point. If you want to drink masala chai under an amber calcite chandelier of 100 candles, listening to pagan-coded fantasy music, and you can consistently, measurably move a human hair 20 meters away, congratulations: you’ve still proven witchcraft is real.

The Abrahamic God, meanwhile, is constructed to be unfalsifiable. It’d be subject to everything I just mentioned except that there are a million bullshit but unfalsifiable rationalizations why a sentient God wouldn’t respond to these prayers to let them be observed. Literally no matter how hard you try, a sentient third-party gets the final say.

The difference between believing in a monotheistic God and believing in witchcraft is the difference between believing in Santa Claus and believing you made and placed those presents yourself. Of course neither is true and both are ridiculous: there is another entity putting those presents there, but it’s not magic, and by taking action in the real world, you can influence what those presents will be without magic. But for one of them, if you told your other little kid friends, they’d ask you to put up or shut up.

Sure. Doesn’t make them not stupid as hell; it just makes their beliefs less corrosive to society. I can imagine they’d be extremely toxic if they had widespread public support, but probably still not nearly as much as “I commune with an all-powerful sky daddy whose word is ultimate law that divides people between everlasting bliss and everlasting suffering and I can choose to believe whatever that word is” like Abrahamic religions.

That actually isn’t weird at all. People treat “politics” as an epithet for “controversial politics”, but in reality, almost everything in society is political – relating to power structures, the distribution of status and resources, and how those factors are determined. What you’re getting at, of course, is that Republicans have shifted the Overton window so disgustingly far to the right that “everyone is welcome” in a classroom is treated as a controversial ideology.

We’re constantly conditioned to think of the status quo as apolitical in nature (it’s just “normal” and the people who want to change it for better or worse are “the politicals”), but it is and always has been, and it’s why we’ve needed so desperately these past several decades to remain politically engaged to protect what we want and to change what we don’t. Now? Who knows, but we still need to try.

What I think you missed is that I’m saying there are far fewer excuses for spells than there are for prayers. If we think of a prayer or spell like a transmission, one that starts and ends in our reality but can’t be measured by science is (even) dumber than one that starts above our reality by an omnipotent, hyperdimensional trickster set on not revealing itself.

A prayer means that someone else – infinitely wiser and outside time and space – will do this for you if they so choose. From this, you have near-infinite freedom to weasel around why your prayer was or wasn’t answered. You’ve made it unfalsifiable, which is intellectual sludge, but it means you’ve insulated yourself from being provably wrong.

But for “witchcraft”? Yes, this particular brand of delusion often turns to weasel spells (whereas I used to see a lot more of “I can do concrete, measurable things that couldn’t happen otherwise”), but given they’re making the action happen or creating a conduit for that action, there ought to be some physically observable explanation behind it. But apparently magic can interface with patterns of candles and lavender and minerals and clockwise tea set up by some early 20s stoner in their parents’ basement but can’t be measured by science.

They’re not “exactly the same behavior” because 1) the locus of control is different and 2) that locus of control effectively being yourself should make this scientifically falsifiable.

Is it though…? As stupid as the Abrahamic God is, at least you have a “God of the Gaps” thing going on where all God really has to be is someone with their own agency to grant you what you ask for and to determine where to place you in an untestable “afterlife”. Of course there’s an obvious cocktail of inherent contradictions when you choose “omniscient”, “omnipotent”, and “omnibenevolent” at the same time, but then you can appeal to the idea we wouldn’t possibly understand the whims of such a god outside of time and space. Again, stupid as fuck, but you can weasel your way out of anything.

But witchcraft? Okay, you’re transferring the agency to yourself, a human that exists here, and you’re saying you can perform magic, but now you have no evidence you’re capable of jack shit and you have no excuse to pawn it off onto. You’ll never be able to do magic your entire life because it categorically isn’t real, so is the excuse that witches are real but you personally really suck as one? Is the idea that you do what “God” does and take credit for anything that vaguely “works” by sheer coincidence and ignore everything else? Do you only cast “spells” that function as placebos like easing someone’s pain or making them feel happy – similar to many prayers?

And of course with God you don’t have any way to test where this magic is coming from; it was there before time and is all-powerful, and there’s any number of ways with that setup to weasel your way out. But what’s the scientifically measurable phenomenon behind witchcraft? There is none, and unlike God where there also is none, this should be easily testable if it exists since it allegedly interacts with the physical world on your command.

So now you’ve gone from untestable woo like the afterlife and testable but weaselable woo like prayers to woo that you should absolutely be able to test empirically because you’re in control of it.

OP, the site you’re linking to is LLM slop. Like seriously just look at this site for a second.

• There’s zero consistent theme.
• The images are generated.
• They’re all “BY JOHN” (no pfp, no last name, no bio, let alone no indication why they’re qualified to write about this cornucopia of shit).
• It only ever hyperlinks to itself – i.e. the sources may as well be “I made it the fuck up”.
• The way the articles are structured are LLM slop to a tee – randomly bolding words, meandering prose, overuse of bullet points, jarring logical flow, etc.
• At least five articles per day from the same “person” despite extensive length, perfect grammar, and alleged research being done.

Can’t you please link to an actual source to make this claim?

I definitely think Juneteenth fits best as the final application of that proclamation. Although it’s slightly incongruous with July 4th celebrating the Declaration of Independence (rather than the end of the war), I think what distinguishes them is who declared the independence: the oppressed or the oppressor.

Independence Day celebrates the oppressed declaring their freedom and then later fighting to win it. An EP day would celebrate the oppressor declaring the freedom of the oppressed, so it seems less like it’d be celebrating black freedom and more like “wow guys look at what a good thing we did”. I’d imagine the EP falling on January 1st does its viability as a holiday no favors either.

Celebrated as the end of slavery in the US. Obviously excludes the clause of the 13th Amendment that served as a loophole, but emancipation holidays aren’t always so cut-and-dry.

OP, you linked to the comments instead of the top of the article. 💀

Aren’t you that smarmy, confidently incorrect asshat that recently got clowned on by like seven Germans?

I’m not agreeing with their dumb point, but just pointing out: this satellite works on radar. I’m genuinely concerned how many people seem to be commenting without reading the article.

I don’t know why you’re assuming their ‘/s’ is alluding to sarcasm around this being surveillance versus sarcasm around needing more surveillance. “We need more surveillance (we actually don’t)” seems to be indicated here, not “This is surveillance (it actually isn’t)”.

Especially when Reddit types are notoriously, chronically unable to read articles before they go spouting uninformed bullshit in the comments.

Did you read the part where this is a radar satellite designed for monitoring the climate? That is, did you read anything besides the headline before you decided: “Yeah, I think I’m able to make informed commentary about this”?

Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that’s called the lead, and that’s exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:

• Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning – at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target for a well-fleshed-out article.
• Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
• And even then, the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
• And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country’s flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
• And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there’s a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the “linear” reading experience) to make it so that you can intuitively jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
• Even then, if you don’t want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s is “American baseball player (1887–1951)”).

What’s outrageous here isn’t wanting summaries; it’s that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.

This not only bypasses the hard work real, human editors put in for free in favor of some generic slop that’s impossible to QA, but it also bypasses the spirit of Wikipedia that if you see something wrong, you should be able to fix it.

it shouldn't be that hard?

OP, what’s your background to make you think that way, and if you’re qualified enough to make that assessment, why aren’t you getting to work building the ground floor of something potentially highly lucrative?

The response to “It shouldn’t be that hard” for FOSS is invariably “PRs welcome”.

I don’t at all understand why the second law of thermodynamics is being invoked. Nonetheless, capillary condensation is already a well-studied phenomenon. As the scientific article itself notes, the innovation here over traditional capillary condensation would be the ability to easily remove the water once it’s condensed.

Re: Entropy:

• Entropy is a statistical phenomenon that tends to increase over time averaged across the entire body, i.e. the Universe. Not literally every part of the Universe needs to increase its entropy as long as on average it is increasing. You’re evidence of that: your body is a machine that takes entropy and pushes it somewhere else.
• Water vapor is a high-energy state compared to liquid water. What you’re saying therefore is the opposite of how the second law works: water vapor’s energy tends to spread out over time until it eventually cools back to a liquid. Liquid water is a higher entropy state than water vapor.

What’s the ratio of sweat to passion?

Notepad and WFE get thrown off hell in a cell into an announcer’s table by Kate and Dolphin, respectively, but to say they “don’t work” is intellectually lazy and dishonest.

Who are you trying to convince right now? Linux and macOS users are probably never going back to Windows if they can help it, and Windows users will correctly say “but it’s right there; I’m using it right now”.