Yeah, I definitely read that as an effort to preempt the folks who were going to yell about how clearly this means the Flipper Zero should be illegal. Hacking has been so poorly represented in TV and films that there are a distressing number of people who don’t realize the term can even have a positive connotation.

Also the mathematicians wouldn’t decline to give an answer.

Are you sure? I only minored in math, but even I would struggle to provide an answer to this. It would have to be something incredibly vague, like “a number is a mathematical object that has certain consistent properties relevant to the field of study.” Because otherwise you get situations like “is infinity a number?” and you can’t answer categorically, because usually it’s not, but then you look at the transfinite numbers where you can indeed have omega-plus-one as a number. And someone asks if you can have an infinite number of digits to the left of the decimal place, and you say “well, not in the reals, but there are the P-adic numbers…” and folks ask if you can have an infinitely small number and you say “well, in the reals you can only have an arbitrarily small number, but in game theory there are the surreal numbers, where…”

So yeah, I’m not sure “what is a number” is even a math question. It’s more a philosophy question, or sometimes a cognitive science question (like Lakoff and Nuñez’s “Where Mathematics Comes From”).

Obligatory XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/1428/

I sincerely think that China’s massive government investment in solar panel production is the biggest thing our species has done about climate change. It’s the reason it’s now cheaper to build a new solar plant than to continue to operate an existing coal-powered plant. (Though we’re not doing that in the US, because we’ve bottlenecked grid connection requests, which is holding up a ton of new solar buildouts.)

I mean it’s not enough yet, but it’s made a huge dent in the problem. Economics actually favor shifting to renewables at this point. It’s just the entrenched interests working against it we have to overcome now.

I’m not getting the same error anymore, but the site still seems fucked up. At one point it loaded the desktop version of the old reddit format for no apparent reason on Firefox mobile.

The speculation I saw was that it’s just Firefox in general. Folks were saying turning off ad blocking didn’t help.

It’s really weird rewatching MythBusters at this point, because the show is so heavily structured around ad breaks. It starts with a teaser that includes clips of moments that will happen in the show, then it has an overview of the myths, then it splits into the A myths and the B myths. Each of these gets touched on, then there’s a preview of what will happen in the next segment after the ad, then there’s the implied break, then there’s a review of what happened before the break, then there’s a new piece… it’s constantly revisiting and excerpting things to blow up about 15 minutes of content into a 50-minute show.

Back then it all seemed so normal…