how I wish that "patriotic" meant something instead of just "did what we wanted". I'm so tired of living in an era where every communication made by every organization feels like a lie

I think your opinion is popular here. Quanta is, while better than nothing, universally disappointing. It seems like it would be much easier for them to do a better job -- write less vaguely, fact-check more, assume the reader is a bit more intelligent.

This is entirely made up? Most people are totally fine with speed limits being what they are and don't say anything about it.

Oh, that explains the massive difference in speed limits from one country to another then, especially if they're next door neighbors.

i don't see what that has to do with it

In the sense that they don't care what the sign says when it comes to their own driving? Sure.

no, in the sense that they just follow whatever the rules are and don't care very much, or mildly break them as is convenient and still don't care very much

that's the point of the regulations...

that can't be right. If 90% of people are anti-airbnb and the other 10% are pro-airbnb then the 10% just open all the airbnbs.

cool idea

probably need to have better pre-loaded examples, and divided up more granularly into subfields. e.g. "Physical sciences" vs "physics", "mathematics and statistics" vs "mathematics". I couldn't find anything remotely related to my own interests to test it on. maybe it's just being populated by people using it, though? in which case, I'll check back later.

Yes, populated by users. The gallery uses the field taxonomy from National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES)

This is all stuff I feel like I was basically aware of but when it's described together it's so... depressing. Ugh.

it basically works outside of linear algebra also. For instance the function f(x,y) = x^2 + y^2 - 1 has as its 'kernel' the circle x^2 + y^2 = 1.

Aside: what's up with this style of article title? Reaching a boiling point... isn't a thing that really happens. It's not even a reasonable editorialization, given how many times, apparently, the same thing can reach a boiling point without anything changing. Why can't the title be something to do with what happened, like "Pentagon and Anthropic clash over policy violations after Venezuela" or something? Like the titles in newspapers of yore.

I'm sure the answer is somehow 'clicks', of course. But I feel like I see dozens of these non-titles every day and maybe if everyone else also parsed them as pathetic then they'd gradually start to fade out. (Hence my complaining, to raise awareness or something...)

If you're heating water, the heating is just "talk" while boiling is "action" -- but boiling takes a long time even once you've reached the boiling point!

What’s up with the amount of ads also. I’d actually love to read an LLM retold version of this article, would save me cognitive tension for sure.

I get the impression this is not at all confined to Stanford and is really just everywhere in the country at the moment. Not sure the word 'coward' is right though. Feels more like... people are far more interested in being 'normal' than ever before. Maybe a side effect of there being so much economic opportunity in regular jobs and career trajectories that nobody considers riskier paths?

I honestly think it’s the opposite cause. The odds of success have gotten way narrower than they used to be. When kids at Stamford are afraid of failure that says to me that failure is way more likely for everyone. People are taking safe options because the unsafe ones can lead to bottomless pits that even Stanford grads are concerned they cannot climb out of.

I agree they're right to be scared. The culture has regressed. When I was a teenager / in my early 20s I didn't really believe that was possible, and I thought the older folks were just bitter. But now that I'm older and have a firmer grasp of history (both from what I've read, and my own lived experience) it is so obviously the case that the cracks in this decadent society continue to grow bigger over time. Sadly younger generations will repeat the same error I did and waste their precious time taking poorly calculated risks, trusting the wrong people, and suffering the very real, sometimes permanent, consequences. It's a positive feedback loop that only gets more ruthless as the decades pass. Don't stick your neck out, it's not worth it, freedom of speech isn't real. The silver lining is, freedom of thought is real. There are ways to bend your speech to avoid persecution, and reach the people you want to reach. It's a skill that takes time to master. Some people have mastered it. They have been mentioned by name elsewhere in this thread.