If checking for counterfeit bills becomes harder, trust in the currency is degraded. Once that happens, vendors will either incentive digital payments (which are definitionally tracked), switch to a tracked currency, or barter more. Trust in bills is super easy to take for granted.

Your use case asks for a visible watermark, not an invisible one.

US bills use both, and the invisible watermarks have proven their value. Imperceptible imperfections intentionally (yay, illiteration) placed on 100 dollar bills have managed to catch advanced North Korean forgery attempts. Same goes for magnetic inks and all kinds of visible and invisible watermarks on US currency.

This might be a result of me not understanding theoretical physics, but this seems "not even wrong." How could you even go about testing this?

Maybe you could disprove it by observing a electron/positron pair being created and then annihilating each other, forming a closed loop that couldn't be part of the single path traced by a single particle.

How would you observe that?

IANP, but Ive always thought you should be able to observe reverse causality in a positron if true. That’s the primary effect of going backwards in time - a reverse in entropy.

The other side of the theory is the positron hidden in the proton. I assume a particle collider should be able to falsify this.

But it turns out antimatter isn’t supposed to actually move backwards in time but follows the same causality as everything else. It’s just that they represent their matter pairs configuration mathematically by reversing the time orientation. This isn’t super obvious but it’s very much different than going backwards in time literally. Sad!

This is yet another case where a layman-written wiki article about physics is highly confusing to other laypeople, because it only tells you half the story. Particularly because it seems to be based on a chapter of Feynman's popular science book. But the book actually goes on and points out how Feynman immediately dismissed Wheeler's hypothesis, because the universe contains a lot more electrons than positrons. You'd have to explain that imbalance first if you want to entertain this line of thought.

As a layperson myself - how can we tell that a distant celestial object is not made from antimatter? Afaik, it doesn't behave differently from matter, other than it annihilates on contact.

Also even if we could, that would only describe the practically and theoretically observable universe, which doesn't rule out other places looking very different (on its own)

Because distant celestial objects accelerate a lot of matter away from them as parts of different processes. For example if there were a sizeable chunk of space were antimatter than at the edge of this space there would be a constant glow of annihilation. We don't see that anywhere (well except things like quasars doing this at small scales.

So, yea, it would have to be outside the observable universe in which that means we can do no empirical science on it therefore it not being real to us.

What if most galaxies are actually dark matter, and we are the exception?

Depends exactly how your phrasing this.

Dark matter represents far more of the universe than 'light' matter by volume if our physics is correct, so by that most galaxies are mostly dark matter by default. We have found a few very small ones that don't seem to be.

With this said dark matter still influences the curvature of space time so its not completely invisible. We could see a dark galaxy because it would alter the images of galaxies behind it with things like Einstein rings and crosses.

Yea, it's really more about the fact that all electrons are exactly the same regardless of the level of precision we look at them. It would be like if we found another earth and that earth was the exact same earth. Not earth like, not very close to earth. The exact same earth down to the smallest fundamental level.

The technology to kill hundreds of millions of people has existed for around 75 years now. This has been dealt with in the past through deterrence, and likely will be dealt with through deterrence in the future.

If you could make a nuke in your back yard and hide it in your pocket the world would look a lot different now. Digital technology is everywhere, going to be a whole lot harder to deter that.

You might be able to hide like a hundred drones in your backyard. Enough to kill a couple hundred people, maybe.

You cannot and will never be able to hide millions of drones in your backyard. That’s the relevant difference here. And that is not a mere quantitative difference, that is a qualitative difference that fundamentally changes the situation.

If piracy sites are a good indicator of locales that let you hide from American lawyers, then probably Russia

This is great. I've spent a lot of time dealing with 3rd party versions of this (which had all the finickyness expected of a reverse-engineered API) and hopefully this makes headless Spotify less irritating.

I wonder if Anthropic could rent or sell access to their collection to the internet archive? It would probably be a good PR move (which they probably need right now), but I'm not sure what type of legal shenanigans they would need to do in order to not violate copyright law.

Small-n fMRI studies tend to have issues with replication because of how noisy and difficult to use fMRI machines are. I would take this research more as an indication that more research is needed, as opposed to the be-all and end-all of how short-form video interacts with the brain.

(Caveat: I have no expertise with neuroscience or using fMRI machines. I'm mostly basing my comment off pre-replication crisis fMRI experiments that failed to produce useful data upon scrutiny.)

That's a really spectacular UI, and the concept is a lot of fun. However, the market ends up settling on the true value of PONZI ($0) pretty early on (n=2). The first three minutes are great, but after that the price is more or less stagnant.

Thanks for playing the game!

As for the price movement, I included bots in the game that move the price and provide liquidity by making orders. Even if there are only 2 real players playing against each other, the bots continue to trade and thus provide opportunities to profit from them. I don't find that the price stagnates until there is around 1 minute left, and even then sometimes there is some price movement and thus opportunity to profit.

The bots do have quite a bit of randomness in their decision making, so it could be that you got unlucky and they decided not to do much in your game. If this happens and you also don't decide to make your own moves on the market, it can end up looking like the market is stagnant.

Thanks for taking the time try my game and to provide feedback!

This is anecdotal, but "hate" is absolutely a good descriptor here