> leaves a doubt if some of the praise being heaped on it is 'perfomative'.
This sounds rather like someone that doesn't like art in general complaining about those that do. I've heard many people complain about "modern art" in the same way.
I think it's a valid enough opinion but I still like Aphex Twin's music for the same reasons I like Eno's.
Googling and reading yourself allows you to assess and compare sources, and apply critical thinking and reasoning specific to yourself and your own condition. Using AI takes all this control away from you and trusts a machine to do the reasoning and assessing, which may be based on huge amounts of data which differ from yourself.
Googling allows you to choose the sources you trust, AI forces you to trust it as a source.
I know in Europe we have the GDPR regulations and in theory you can get bad information corrected but in practice you still need to know that someone is holding it to take action.
Then there's laundering of data between brokers.
One broker might acquire data via dubious and then transfer that to another. In some jurisdictions once that happens the second company can do what they like with it without having to worry about the original source.
For small screws, in the millimeter range, the jump between metric sizes is too big. So, in addition to M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, etc. standard metric screws include M1.4, M1.6. M1.8, M2.5, and M3.5 (rare) to fill in the gaps.
Screw sizes and drill sizes should have been sized by a ratio, like resistor values. But that would have been a pain for manual machining.
Domestic drill sets don't seem to be designed for tapping holes but if you stick to M3, M6 and M10 the tapping sizes do correspond with the 2.5, 5 and 8.5mm drills[1].
I guess if it was based on a ratio system you would need special tapping drills for all of them.
e.g. M4 needs a special 3.3mm tapping drill already.
I agree with that. For code, most of it was in a "public space" similar to driving down a street and training the model on trees and signs etc. The property is not yours but looking at it doesn't require ownership.
> The vast spider population is attributed to an abundant food supply: more than 2.4 million midges in the cave, ready to be entangled in the intricate web.
...although I guess the question then is what sustains the millions of midges!
From the livescience article linked by another poster: biofilm produced by sulfur-eating bacteria, which in turn metabolize sulfur from the sulfur-rich stream in the cave.
So the whole food-chain here is: sulfur -> bacteria -> midges -> spiders.
> The environment, too, is unusually protected. The cave is hard to reach and is filled with foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, in concentrations too great for most animals to live there.
That's the interesting part! (And which the submitted NYT story regrettably neglects). It's a chemoautotrophic ecosystem[0] largely independent of the sun, and of photosynthetic life.
Akin to hydrothermal vents[1] in the ocean, and the lifeforms that eat that effluent.
> "Stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) revealed that the trophic web sustaining this assemblage is fueled by in situ primary production from sulfur-oxidizing microbial biofilms then transferred through chironomid larvae and adults to higher trophic levels."
It is a chemoautotrophic system, but it is not independent of the sun and of photosynthetic life.
This is a hugely erroneous claim that is much too frequently encountered in the popular publications.
Both in this cave and in hydrothermal vents, most autotrophic bacteria use free oxygen to oxidize the hydrogen sulfide, producing thus the energy needed for autotrophy.
The free oxygen comes from the phototrophic algae and plants (located elsewhere), i.e. from solar energy.
On Earth, there are only 2 kinds of autotrophic bacteria and archaea that may be independent from solar energy, the acetogenic bacteria and archaea and the methanogenic archaea. Both kinds obtain energy from free hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the former producing acetic acid and the latter producing methane.
These 2 kinds of bacteria and archaea need free hydrogen and most of them are killed by free oxygen. Sometimes the free hydrogen is produced by fermentation of organic substances, like in our intestines, so also coming from solar energy, but free hydrogen is also produced by the oxidation of volcanic rocks by water, when its origin is independent of solar energy and dependent only on the internal heat of the Earth, which produces volcanic rocks that are in chemical equilibrium at high temperatures deep inside the Earth's mantle, but they are no longer in chemical equilibrium after reaching the cold surface of the Earth.
Thus deep underground or in certain places on the bottom of the oceans, where free dihydrogen is abundant and there exists no free dioxygen, there are communities of acetogenic and methanogenic bacteria and archaea that are independent of solar energy, but this is not the case for this cave and for many of the hydrothermal vents, where both hydrogen sulfide and free dioxygen are abundant, so aerobic bacteria are dominant.
Anywhere where there is either air or water with dissolved dioxygen, the living beings use the most efficient energy source, i.e. the oxidation of either organic or anorganic substances with the free dioxygen, so they depend on solar energy, even when there is no light in that place.
Also, this web is so dense it looks like a solid sheet of silk, studded with the remains of its past victims. Wouldn't that be a little too conspicuous? I thought spider webs were supposed to be nearly invisible to the prey.
Cave-dwelling animals don't just crash into walls all the time, so by "visible" I mean large enough and dense enough to be recognized as an obstacle in whatever navigation system they use.
Thinking back to my time as a contractor, this makes me wary.
In the UK at least, you would need to be careful that by allowing people to waste your time (and them paying for it) you would be breaking the dreaded IR35 tax rules by appearing as a “disguised employee”.
HMRC won’t tell you the exact rules but one of big tests is do you retain control of your time or not.
You need to be upfront with clients about what they are paying for or you could both be in for a nasty surprise.
It is a constant source of confusion. I see it constantly discussed in various freelancer whats-app and freelance groups.
I used to get contracts checked to see if they were Outside IR-35 and I knew I wasn't the only one. So it isn't straight-forward as you suggest.
It can also scare companies off, I have personally experienced this. As a result there are far less Outside IR-35 work. Almost every contractor I know has had to go back perm.
I understand there were many Contractors that basically milked forever contracts, but it kinda screwed over loads of freelancers.
I personally hate being perm. I used to work about 6-9 months a year and I found it relatively easy to find another contract. I had plenty of free time. Now I get the standard 1 month and bank holidays. Really pissed off about the rule changes.
The IRS in the USA has similar critera on the difference between a contractor and an employee, and it also boils down to who is dictating the time, place, and methods of the work.
Just the fact that they issued him a laptop and specific software would tend to indicate that he's an employee not a contractor.
Richard and James Aphex; the Aphex twins. :P
> leaves a doubt if some of the praise being heaped on it is 'perfomative'.
This sounds rather like someone that doesn't like art in general complaining about those that do. I've heard many people complain about "modern art" in the same way.
I think it's a valid enough opinion but I still like Aphex Twin's music for the same reasons I like Eno's.
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