mklauber1's comments

Definitely read that headline as "Purely Fictional Data Structures". My disappointment is immense.

I would argue that is the point of federation. Despite the fact that most of the users are on gmail, they can still email anyone anywhere else, without issues. And I've never heard of one of the big name providers blocking emails from another large provider, with the possible exception of spam heavy domains.

It's a lot better than social media. I feel like the analogous situation would be being able to follow someone's twitter feed in your FB feed, or send a twitter DM to someone's facebook messenger account, and how likely is any major social media platform to allow that to happen?

Despite the concentration of power, email's federation makes it much easier to choose which provider you want to use, avoiding the network effects that come from walled garden services.

I cannot speak for him, but to my mind, he's getting at the difference between being able to come up with an idea, and being able to explain it. If you've got a great idea, but you can't explain it so that others can understand it, it's unlikely to be used. Being able to explain yourself is a more useful skill, in more contexts, than any in depth knowledge of a particular problem space.

And that's before we get into navigating the political situation of getting ideas listened to. Knowing who to explain ideas to, and understanding how to learn their motivations are both important skills to navigating a social space like any company and team. And they are skills not usually taught during typical education in my experience.

In short, an idea is only as useful as the people who you can explain it to.

Take a look at this: https://www.dolthub.com/repositories/dolthub/hospital-price-... It's not a nice interface, but it's raw pricing data for 1400 hospitals.

They get interest from Person B, and when the short contract is up, they can force Person B (or more accurately their broker who passes the price on) to buy a replacement stock, regardless of the price. Alternatively, they can attempt to open another short contract, paying more interest to have continue to borrow the stock. Sooner or later, however, person B is legally and contractually required to to return an identical share to person A.

I'm curious about the idea of "allow[ing] negative masses to not only exist, but to be created continuously." Given the law (in the scientific sense) that matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed, on a scale of 1 to FTL travel, how crazy is this idea?

I think what they're saying is that positive mass galaxies attract the negative mass, even as the negative mass repels the positive mass (and all other negative mass). In a stationary system, eventually the two will reach an equilibrium.

However, the effects of this in a system in which the positive mass galaxy is spinning is that the negative mass counteracts the forces of inertia, allowing the galaxy to spin at higher speeds without shattering like a cd spun too quickly. Now, whether the math of all that makes sense, I'm am not in a position to comment on.