No, that’s not really a useful way of modeling it for the case of light traveling through a linear medium.

The absorption/re-emission model implicitly localizes the photons, which is problematic — think about it in an uncertainty principle (or diffraction limit) picture: it implies that the momentum is highly uncertain, which means that the light would get absorbed but re-emitted in every direction, which doesn’t happen. So instead you can make arguments about it being a delocalized photon and being absorbed and re-emitted coherently across the material, but this isn’t really the same thing as the “ping pong balls stopping and starting again” model.

Another problem is to ask why the light doesn’t change color in a (linear) medium — because if it’s getting absorbed and re-emitted, and is not hitting a nice absorption line, why wouldn’t it change energy by exchanging with the environment/other degrees of freedom? (The answer is it does do this — it’s called Raman scattering, but that is generally a very weak effect.)

The absorption/emission picture does work for things like fluorescence. But Maxwell’s equations, the Schrödinger equation, QED — these are wave equations.

Dispersion and nonlinearities would like to have a word ;)

*in vacuo

Not sure why you’re saying Python forces everything to be object oriented…?

I particularly like the truck/engine correction.

good enough simulations that you can’t tell the difference.

This requires us having actual conversations with those dead people to compare against, which we obviously can’t do.

There is simply not enough information to train a model on of a dead person to create a comprehensive model of how they would respond in arbitrary conversations. You may be able to train with some depth in their field of expertise, but the whole point is to talk about things which they have no experience with, or at least, things which weren’t known then.

So sure, maybe we get a model that makes you think you’re talking to them, but that’s no different than just having a dream or an acid trip where you’re chatting with Einstein.

It’s overpriced hardware

Have you seen the M4 benchmarks?

If you’re memory bound then sure, you can get way more bang for your buck with Intel/AMD. But for pretty amazing CPU performance I think the “Apple is overpriced” trope isn’t really true any more.

Pick your favorite tech company, pick a small team with a “nerdy” engineering mandate, and I’m confident you’ll find the academic, geeky science and engineering types you’re talking about.

They probably aren’t very vocal though, because 1) there’s a huge PR/marketing budget which is responsible for being the face of the company, and 2) well…these are nerdy STEM folks who probably like their job because they get very well compensated to be nerdy STEM types, and not because they’re fanboys/girls.

And environment — DISPLAY and PATH in particular.

Verizon will tell you to fuck right off and will never unlock your device.

Will never unlock their device.

Take numbers with a grain of salt, e.g., this link says a 7200RPM 160GB SATA drive from 2004 is $107, or about $0.67/GB, instead of the $5 claimed in post.

You can!

Getting it published is another matter though…

Maybe they mean four year uptime…

Yeah, I would additionally like to see fines be in units of revenue — $50M means wildly different things to different organizations.

For very simple tasks you can usually blindly log in and run commands. I’ve done this with very simple tasks, e.g., rebooting or bringing up a network interface. It’s maybe not the smartest, but basically, just type root, the root password, and dhclient eth0 or whatever magic you need. No display required, unless you make a typo…

In your specific case, you could have a shell script that stops VMs and disables passthrough, so you just log in and invoke that script. Bonus points if you create a dedicated user with that script set as their shell (or just put in the appropriate dot rc file).

Diesel engine, Fischer-Tropsch, Homeopathy.

I like the “this can’t really be compared to Windows or macOS” aspects of tiling window managers. I like it when the window manager sort of “gets out of the way,” but that’s just me.

Yeah people don’t seem to understand taxes wrt stock at all. RSUs are definitely taxed!

Only thing I can think of is they’re thinking of options? Afaik those can be advantageous, tax-wise, because you are taxed when you exercise, not when they’re granted or when they vest (this is my understanding — I could be wrong).

Search the Internet for RSU tax liability in the US. It’s taxed as supplemental income and is subject to withholding.

Are you thinking of options? That’s different — “stock grant” afaik almost always refers to an RSU grant/vest.

“It’s not that I’m against vaccines, it’s just that I want my body’s own antibodies to fight off the virus.”