I had to look up the article to figure out if this was the intolerable downside of having kids (all this work raising them, and then they just fly out of the nest) or _not_ having them (with your scientific work the only great project of your life). I believe he meant the latter :)

Yeah it's in the marriage pros section, so I assume it's the latter. And worker bees can't reproduce.

Worker bees will reproduce when the hive queen's suppression pheremone disappears. Of course, they're not fertilized so they only produce haploid offspring, who in the bee world are all male and hence useless for anything but mating with a queen. Worker bees can't mate.

But I understand the sentiment.

Haha, thank you for the correction but also thank you for appending that last sentence, because otherwise I was going to say "Yes, okay, but Darwin probably didn't mean..."

I don't think people choose Python because it's virtues as a language for tooling (it's not great from that perspective, statically linked binaries would be better). They choose it because of the ecosystem of libraries. For data analysis, visualization, and scientific computing, there are no comparable offerings in any other language. And a lot of this is stuff you _really_ don't want to be reimplementing from scratch, because it's very easy to introduce bugs (around numerical stability, say) that cause your software to produce correct results 99% of the time, and plausibly-looking but totally incorrect ones 1% of the time.

Getting images of simple molecules or lattices seems tricky.

Did you mean to say it's _related_? The original "spiral" image by Ugleh is explicitly credited in the "Related Links" section.

It’s a similar topic which is why they credit it but the mechanism is much different.

Thank you for the prompt, that's very useful! I'm surprised GPT "knows" what Monster of the Week is. RPGs in general are somewhat obscure, and to ask for a specific one at that?

In fact, it's SO knowledgeable, that if you tell it to talk in the accent and slang of people from Sigil, the feature city in the Planescape D&D Setting from the 90s, it will perfectly adopt the character.

I agree with all these criticism. But I also know many human DMs who make the same stylistic decisions as GPT did here. It's definitely not good Burning Wheel, but it might be ok D&D?

On the other hand, I appreciate the GPT's willingness to follow the players' revealed interests where they lead, instead of sticking to a predetermined railroad. The comment here about engaging zombies in a multilevel marketing scheme illustrates this nicely. That's very deft DMing in my opinion. (Whether _asking_ for such a tonal shift is deft playing on part of the non-DM player is a different question.)

Yeah, maybe there's a confusion between percentage and fraction, and this was meant to be 0.001 (not 0.001%). But if so, the error is not the journalist's: I clicked through and the original paper also contains this improbable figure.

Re 2: this is not true if you're doing margin or futures trading, which was FTX's main business (and may be Binance's). This type of business is what characterizes an "exchange" (as opposed to a non-margin brokerage or a custodial bank).

Hence the "without your permission" caveat. Point being, when you lend your assets to brokerage, it's explicit, unlike a fractional reserve bank, where deposits are inherently lent out (and no need to comment that fractional reserve banking doesn't "really" work this way, I get it, but deposits are still part of the capitalization of the bank).

To be fair, it would be better if you explicitly lent money via certificate of deposits to the banks because it means their job is much less risky. The fractional reserve banking model isn't really something to imitate, it is a rather ugly hack that we cannot do without when people don't get enough CDs.

Perpetual futures don't require any margin. All it requires is matching buy side and sell side market participants and transferring money between their accounts as the underlying changes in value. The exchanges don't actually hold any underlying with perps, so there's no need to borrow money.

How does a perpetual future actually work?? What happens if 5 people buy the "sell" side and 1 person buys the "buy"? There's no way to redeem to the underlying, and I don't think the 1 person pays out 5x the price movement to the other side.

An exchange can hedge vs excess buy orders by buying the underlying, but how do they hedge vs excess sells?

I've been trying to figure out how to short BNB, and perps feel pretty much as risky as trying to do it on binance itself.

Each trade is bilateral. Futures, both regular and these "perpetual swaps" are zero-sum. A person buying is another person selling and vice versa. The exchange does not need to hedge the underlying because the exchange/clearing house is a neutral party in the transaction as long as the individual traders are solvent. What it is exposed to is traders blowing up and not being to cover their debts.

In case of regular futures, price discovery is aided by the fact that the futures eventually settle to either the underlying or its cash value at a specific point. In perpetual futures, price discovery is aided by "funding fees," which are periodic cash transfers from the side that is contributing to the price discrepancy between the future and the spot to the opposite side. E.g., if perp is below the spot, the short holders will periodically be charged the funding fee, which will go to the long holders, to encourage the shorts to buy/get the price closer to spot, etc.

If five person buys and one person sells, only one person actually has the buy order executed. The other four are just waiting in line.

Counterparty risk of exchanges blowing up is exactly why tether doesn’t have a gigantic short volume outstanding. Shorting stablecoins or coins that represent profit share of exchanges like bnb is incredibly risky and that’s largely on purpose, the ecosystem doesn’t want people shorting it.

In theory, the exchanges should lend their own money to margin traders.

Yeah! Its deepest point is only 10 m shallower than the deepest point of the Baltic Sea!

Relatively little energy is actually used for heating and cooling. In the UK, a country pretty far north, it's about a fifth of energy use (https://www.withouthotair.com/c7/page_53.shtml), and could be substantially reduced if heating was actually done using electricity (i.e., with heat pumps, rather than direct heating; heat pumps are available with "efficiency" exceeding 400%, e http://www.withouthotair.com/c21/page_140.shtml, but of course require electricity to run, while most heating today is done by directly burning fuel).

Seasons are definitely not "the biggest obstacle to solar". That would be the night and especially the weather.