It's like the strike we had (still have?) here in Canada for the postal workers. Hardly anyone has noticed - billers just switched to email if you were not there already and payment is done online. It hardly even rates a mention in the papers to the extent that I'm not even sure whether or not it has ended (a quick google later and it seems they resolved it with one union and the other union is having trouble polling its members on an offer).

If you go on strike and literally nobody notices it's time start considering a career change because for whatever reason your job is becoming obsolete.

Exactly. This is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted and the car has been (or is just about to be) invented.

YouTube's only concern these days is revenue and profit.

They breach their own community guidelines each and every day by running scam ads that continue to run despite hundreds or even thousand viewer-reports. Those ads run until the advertiser's spend is exhausted -- however if a creator (the life-blood of the platform) is falsely accused of "scams or deceptive practices" by YT's AI then they're gone in the blink of an eye.

They also allow AI spambots to post endless comments linking to porn pages/sites and claim that their AI can't automatically detect such things -- although that same AI, when unleashed on creator's videos, constantly demonetizes anything that is deemed to be unsuitable.

I hate the AI dross that is overwhelming YT as much as anyone but I really have doubts that YT intends to do anything effective to stem its flow. You see, so long as AI-generated videos are getting eyeballs on ads, YouTube will be happy because they'll be generating revenue and profits.

Let's face it, YouTube is actually *encouraging* the use of AI on its platform. AI suggests ideas for new videos and will create thumbnails for you. VEO3 will even create shorts or entire videos on demand. Google wants to sell its AI services and is pitching them at YouTube creators so they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot are they?

This is why I'm moving to self-hosting my own videos on an instance of PeerTube and I encourage other creators to do the same. When you self-host you have *FULL* control and you no longer have to worry about censorship or losing your entire community just because one of YT's AI bots has runamok and identifies your cute cat videos as CSAM.

That illustrates the fundamental problem with these systems though: you have to keep the noise rate low i.e. the rate of alerts that are irrelevant to the user. The system is designed to send out alerts over a wide area - here in Canada I have received alerts for e.g. a fire ~100+km away - but the rate of these alerts is low, typically well under one per year which I suspect is well below people's annoyance threshold.

Using the system for things like a missing child means that you are broadcast an alert to everyone in ~100km or so which makes them largely noise: if I am sitting at home 70km from where the child went missing I'm not going to be much help finding them. For this you need a more targeted system that goes to people in vehicles along a highway or driving/walking in a neighbourhood nearby to where the kid was seen or is suspected to be etc. If you just broadcast the alerts to everyone in 100km or more lots of people will disable them and even those who don't will learn to ignore them since the overwhelming majority will be urrterly irrelevant. The result is that not only do you not get help with missing kids but now you have effectively disabled your ability to alert people to regional emergency conditions.

Yes, evidence provides proof. However, proof comes in different degrees. In science we go for "proof beyond a reasonable scientific doubt" because, outside of abstract logical frameworks like mathematics there can be no absolute "100%" proof and so it is pointless to use that as a standard for anything that deals with the physical world. While that does leave it to subjective judgement about what constitutes a "reasonable scientific doubt", although standards can be quanified in some cases, the nature of our reality is that there will always be some doubt no matter how unreasonably small that doubt may be.

Elusive means "difficult to find, catch or achieve" hence, for something to be "elusive" it must exist and the degree of difficulty of the search for it determines the level of elusiveness. Being hypothetical does not make something elusive, you can hypothesize a very easy to detect particle but then your theory will not remain at the hypothesis stage for long since data will quickly confirm or deny it. Conversely, WIMPS have been hypothesized for decades and we have been searching for them for that long using increasingly massive detectors using more and more ingenious technology and operating deep underground in massive labs. WIMPS. If the next generation of WIMP detectors find them we would clearly conclude that WIMPS were extremely elusive.

While axions we also hypothesized decades ago the concerted effort to find them has only started relatively recently. The scope and size of the efforts of the effort to find axions is nowhere near the level we have used to find WIMPS yet. Hence, we cannot claim axions are as elusive as WIMPS. Indeed, if the next generation of axion experiments found them we'd have to conclude that axions were not very elusive at all. Thus, so far, axions are not known to be as elusive as WIMPS.

Really? Why would you spend $299 on a webcam that can wiggle when you can just buy a webcam, or even two if you want binocular vision, for much less and use that to teach with?

Yes you can but it is really hard to achieve and it is something hotter than any positive temperature since the higher energy states are more likely to be populated than lower energy ones. Indeed, if the OP has achieved this it's possible they might actually be the cause of global warming...

No, just misleading presentation of the data. The headline should be "Europe breaks record for Hottest June 3 times in 3 years". Breaking one record is just weather, breaking two might be considered unlucky but when you break the same record over 3 consecutive years it's hard to see how that is not a very clear signal for climate change.

That's my biggest beef about the media reporting on climate change. They do not understand the difference between weather and climate and they tend to focus on reporting the weather as "evidence" of climate. Indeed, as this article shows, even when they are literally sitting on clear data that show significant climate change what they choose to focus on is how hot it was last month!

Axions are arguably not as elusive as WIMPS - they mix with photons and can be searched for with low temperature experiments on much smaller scales than most DM experiments. The difference is that we have not been pushing their detection for as long as we have with WIMPS but they are, I would argue, easier to detect and hence less elusive.

LIGO goes after the intermediate BH masses - substellar size mergers are detectable with their projected upgrades at closer distances where there should be enough to mergers to detect close enough to see them if these are Dark Matter. As the mass drops, the number of BHs needed to explain DM increase and so the chances of a much closer-by merger increase.

The frequency is determined by the orbital period and for larger masses this is lower giving a shorter sensitivity period for really large mass BH mergers. Lower mass BHs would generate a detectable signal for longer but at lower amplitudes hence the need for increased sensitivity to see them - at least according the last talk I saw on this. While the mass range of BHs that are still not ruled out is not well theoretically motivated, I'd argue we should still cover since theorists are not always right. Small BHs under ~5 x 10^11 kg can be ruled out as Dark Matter since their lifetime is short enough that most would have decayed via Hawking Radiation within the age of the universe.

There is a difference between knowing something is true and suspecting something is true. This is why we invented science: it let's us test our ideas to see whether the data support or refure them. This is why it is always important to check what you think you know against reality: you don't know something until you have the data to support it and there is always a chance that you may learn something new and surprising.

This is statism, writ large.

You get paid for work you PERFORM, but not work you RECORD. Copyright is anti-individual rights and liberties.

I'll be glad when Ai truly replaces all of these artists.

That's not really true. Axions - that solve the strong CP problem - are looking like an increasingly likely candidate for Dark Matter. LIGO can also test the hypothesis that Dark Matter is just small Black Holes - while the source of such BHs is not theoretically motivated it's not experimentally ruled out yet and if they were found we all know the theorists would come up with ideas of where they came from!

While you could argue that none of these are "obvious paths" with the death of the WIMP miracle I would argue that WIMPs are not the obvious candidate anymore either.

True, but 100+ years ago when the Michelson-Morley experiment did not find any evidence of the aether that was supposedly the medium that transmitted light, it helped to completely reshape our way of understanding physics since it directly led to the discovery of relativity.

Negative results can sometimes be very profound...although for LUX that is not really the case. I would not describe this result as exciting but it is useful. To be exciting they would actually have to have found evidence of Dark Matter and increasingly it is looking like the WIMP model for Dark Matter is not the one that nature uses.

I don't want to unsubscribe to this or that.

I want to give natural language filters like "I never want to see a political email again, from anyone"

Or maybe "If they make it sound urgent but it's not urgent at all, don't show it to me and remind me a week before the actual deadline if it's at all important".

As others have said, unsubscribe links often do not work and it's probably all the Gmail feature will use.