solanaceous

It really mostly doesn't, and Quanta Magazine is (as is typical for them) full of sh*t.

Ternary is most efficient if the space (power, etc) needed to implement an operation on a base-b digit is proportional to b. (Then the cost is b * log(n) / log(b), and b/log b is minimized at e, but is lower with b=3 than with b=2.) However, in practice most operations take space that increases more than proportionally to b. For example, saturated transistors are either on or off, which is enough to implement binary logic, but ternary logic needs typically several more transistors. Transistors, and especially CMOS style implementations, are generally well-suited to binary. If future computers use a different implementation style (neurons! who knows) then something other than binary logic might be best.

Storing and transmitting data is different: this is often most efficient in bases other than 2. For example, if a flash cell of a certain size can reliably store 4 different amounts of charge, and the difference between these can reliably be read out, then flash manufacturers will store two bits per cell. This is already done and has been done for years. It's most often done in bases that are powers of 2, but not always.

Ternary calculations are occasionally used in cryptography, but as far as I can tell, at least the first ternary crypto paper the article cites is garbage.

There are also other architectures like clockless logic, which uses a third value for "not done calculating yet", but that's different from ordinary ternary logic (and is generally implemented using binary anyway). It also showed a lot of promise for saving power, and also some in reducing interference, but in most settings the increased complexity and circuit size required have been too much to deliver that savings.

We still believe in an open internet, but we do not believe that third parties have a right to misuse public content just because it’s public.

You need to pay us for the right to misuse our site's data!

I'm not sure I'd call Rimworld "small", though I guess it is a relatively indie studio. It's a popular game with a lot of content.

For "small" games, I'd recommend also Nova Drift. It's sort of asteroids + path of exile + a slight roguelite element.

In this essay I will

I don’t entirely understand the question. Do I have to carry the food on my back the whole week, or do I just have to carry it to the fully functioning kitchen, and then stash it in the fridge/cabinets? If the latter, is this the same thing as weekly grocery shopping?

This is awesome, and also bordering on dwarven !!SCIENCE!!

This reminds me of an old joke:

An SEO copywriter walks into a bar, pub, Irish bar, drinks, beer, wine, whiskey, cocktails, liquor.

But since then the situation has gotten a lot shittier.

In my experience, a lot of e-bike users have them to facilitate long commutes by bike. If they’re on pedelecs, they probably bring up the average, especially since someone who chooses a long e-bike commute over a train or car is likely to be pretty active in other ways.

Also they’re used a fair bit by old people. I’m not sure how that group would compare for bike exercise vs e-bike exercise though.

Sure, it’s hard to say whether a computer program can “know” anything or what that even means. But the paper isn’t arguing that. It assumes very little about how how LLMs actually work, and it defines “hallucination” as “not giving the right answer” with no option for the machine to answer “I don’t know”. Then the proof follows basically from the fact that the LLM-or-whatever can’t know everything.

The result is not very surprising, and saying that it means hallucination is inevitable is an oversell. It’s possible that hallucinations, or at least wrong answers, are inevitable for different reasons though.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a flask of acid, is a good guy with a flask of acid?

Or maybe the good guy's flask should have a buffering agent?

Yes, but it doesn’t matter, these people don’t read the Bible.

They do read the Bible though, at least in my experience. I've gone to a number of different churches, Evangelical and otherwise, and the Evangelical or otherwise Calvinist folks were the ones that read the Bible the most and in the most detail — but perhaps also the ones who came to horrible conclusions the most often. Like that you should shine the light of Christ into the world by blocking women for promotion at your job, because 1 Tim 2:12 says that Paul does not permit them to have authority over men. (Real example, if possibly the worst one I've seen.) Maybe my experience is not representative, but I don't think the problem is primarily that Evangelicals don't read the Bible.

I have a long theory about some of the ways that Evangelicalism distorts Scripture, but one root of the issue is that (IMHO) Scripture was written by humans, reflects the biases of the authors and their societies, and has a lot of horrible things in it. If you take a sola scriptura view and then read it through a lens that's been cultivated over years to reinforce patriarchy and supremacy (see e.g. Manifest Destiny, the curse of Ham, etc) then you will end up absorbing the genocidal and supremacist bits and not the hospitable and altruistic bits.

For them, it’s just an excuse to do whatever it is they’re doing.

For sure. People don't want to repent. They want to find justifications for what they were already doing, or planning to do.

I think the point might be reasonably condensed to:

• Africa is big and diverse, and its internal geographic barriers (particularly the Sahara) are more significant than the ones dividing it from Europe and from southwest Asia.
• Some parts of Africa have thousands of years of written or otherwise well-documented history, and each part has seen several waves of significant change, including colonization from other areas of Africa (e.g. by Egypt or Mali), from Europe (e.g. by Rome), and from southwest Asia (e.g. by the Umayyads); and colonization of other areas (e.g. of the Iberian peninsula by Morocco).
• For some parts of Africa, the latest round of European colonization is arguably less significant than previous changes.
• Thus, for serious discussions of history, "pre-colonial Africa" is not a useful division to make: you won't be able to say anything meaningful without more precisely specifying the time and region (e.g. "medieval west Africa").
• This isn't fixed by changing to "pre-European Africa".
• Both "pre-colonial Africa" and "pre-European Africa" additionally suck because, instead of using a more relevant division, you are using a less-relevant Eurocentric term.