Andrew is mistaken, the paper he cites doesn't say that levitation is possible in a dipole field. Brauenbecker showed that diamagnetic levitation was possible at all (e.g. in a quadrupole field), but not in a dipole field.
Stable levitation in a dipole field is still thought to be something only type II superconductors can do, and Andrew should not uncritically repeat what he read on /sci/ - which is one of the only other google results for "Brauenbecker extension" currently (after his tweet).
Here in Australia, the regulator requires banks to assess your ability to make repayments at an interest rate three percentage points higher than the actual rate. A few years ago it was a floor of 7% rather than a buffer, and they'll probably go back to something like a 2% buffer and a 7% floor (rates increased by more than 3 percentage points in recent times, so looks like a three percent buffer alone isn't enough).
But yeah, mostly what happens if rates go up is that you begrudgingly pay it, because most in that situation can afford it (those who have changed circumstances may not be able to, but most can).
Edit: also, the fact that mortgage holders are more sensitive to rate increases means (it is thought that) the central bank doesn't need to change rates by as much to get the same effect. If there would be widespread mortgage defaults given a certain sized rate increase, then that probably means the central bank can stop short of an increase that large.
So the problem is sort of self-limiting. Rate hikes are designed to induce financial strain, but too much isn't desirable, so central banks don't hike too much on purpose (they sometimes do by accident).
Yep. I just got diagnosed recently. Still figuring out the right dose of the right meds, but in the meantime it has become painfully obvious that a lot of discussion around productivity and procrastination is happening without a lot of people realising they may simply have ADHD. There's a reason psychiatrists treat ADHD with medication first rather than trying to get you to follow productivity hacks or change your habits. Would have been good if ADHD was on my radar as a possibility much earlier.
Yeah! I think of Metaculus vs Manifold a bit like NYT vs Twitter -- or to borrow another analogy, lawful good vs chaotic evil. But we're both great places to think about the future in a bit more structured way than pure punditry!
Intelligence is consistent with the laws of physics but given our rudimentary understanding of it we have no idea if super-intelligence is. I'm defining super-intelligence as at least an order of magnitude increase in intelligence, not just "high IQ".
Intelligence is correlated with brain size, not just in humans, but also between species. No physical law prevents us from building the equivalent to a house sized brain. Perhaps not even a moon-sized brain. The only real limit seems to be mass (we don't want the whole thing collapse under its own weight) and signal delay due to the speed of light.
> No physical law prevents us from building the equivalent to a house sized brain
I think you'll find the speed of thought is much lower than the speed of light, I believe nerve impulses max out at about 120 m/s. The difficulty of supporting such a large mass of nerve tissue is also a problem. There is also the trouble of whether intelligence is purely electrically mediated or if it relies on the soup of hormones and molecular machinery of DNA and proteins for some of its functions. We also need to specifically consider the neocortex here since it is the only differentiating brain structure in animals with human intelligence. Other animals have much larger brains but no signs of human like abilities.
If you are suggesting we build an artificial brain then we need to wait at least a few more years if not decades to find out if that is possible. The current transformer models are quite advanced at language production and seem to have some simple reasoning abilities but they are very far from being intelligent.
I mean, we don't need to call our house or Moon sized AI "brain", but it seems clear that no laws of physics are preventing us from building something so intelligent that we are mere ants in comparison. The old Gods, while powerful, would pale in the light of its intelligence. A true God, hopefully a benevolent one. It doesn't seem many decades away.
The issue of non-ASCII-constrained environments is that it's still not easily accessible on most keyboards.
I do know and use the compose key but it's not the same as having a standard key for it. Trying on a mobile device, long pressing the dash key there suggests 2 dashes (not sure if the second choice is en-dash or em-dash), which is some but that's not the 4 types discussed here.
Do you know one where it's easy to type? There are many international keyboards but I don't think any has that many dashes. Compose key is the best I think.
It’s easier to type HYPHEN-MINUS‐the‐keyboard-key, but text should be displayed using the appropriate glyph, depending on its semantic meaning, which is never HYPHEN-MINUS‐the-glyph.
(This discussion is similar to the classic net discussion about TAB‐the‐ASCII‐character versus TAB‐the‐keyboard‐key, with some people having trouble conceptualizing the difference.)
That's not quite right. UTF-8 is not arbitrary length.
Officially, it's at most four bytes, of which 21 bits are usable for encoding codepoints - so that's an upper limit of 2^21 codepoints.
There is an initial byte encoding the length as a series of ones, so if you went ahead and extended the standard to simply allow more bytes, you could get up to 8 bytes, of which 48 bits would be usable.
I can see that a six-byte version with 31 data bits was previously standardised before they settled on four.
I guess you could extend it further by allowing more than one initial byte encoding the length, then it would be arbitrary length. But at that point I'm not sure if it loses its self-synchronising ability, and in any case it would be a different standard at that point.
> if you went ahead and extended the standard to simply allow more bytes, you could get up to 8 bytes
I think you'd only be able to go up to 7, since 10xxxxxx is still reserved for trailing octets. And even with 7, the entire first octet is consumed by the length indicator alone.
So you get 0xxxxxxx, 110xxxxx, 1110xxxx, 11110xxx, 111110xx, 1111110x, and 11111110 as the 7 different length-indicating head octets. In the last case, you'd have 36 usable bits for encoding a codepoint.
11111111 is technically possible to use, but it would cause some problems. Sending it over the wire would break telnet, for example. Also since we already introduced 11111110 for 7-byte encodes, we're getting dangerously close to making the UTF-16 BOM character (11111111 11111110) accidentally show up in UTF-8 (this is also why 11111110 wasn't in the original maximum-6-byte UTF-8 spec). I still don't think it's possible to have the UTF-16 BOM show up in our hypothetical extended UTF-8, since 11111111 could never be immediately followed by 11111110 (or vice versa) in a well-formed UTF-8 stream.
Also note that if you did add 11111111 as a valid head octet representing an 8 octet long encoding, you'd still only have 42 usable bits (since the first byte is still entirely consumed by the length indicator)
Stable levitation in a dipole field is still thought to be something only type II superconductors can do, and Andrew should not uncritically repeat what he read on /sci/ - which is one of the only other google results for "Brauenbecker extension" currently (after his tweet).