CharonY

Must be geolocked. Here is a Guardian article on that, if it helps. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/sep/21/john-oliver-united-healthcare That being said, even without that I suspect folks from most countries have an idea how inherently weird and messed the US system is. I remember furious debates with my American colleagues when Obama tried to pass ACA, and one of the most common arguments I heard was: "but that would be socialism!"

The point is not only to list up facts but you also need the evidence connecting those facts to your argument, as @swansont pointed out repeatedly. Take just any one of your argument and show the evidence that they are linked to direct democracy. To be clear, in order to make that argument you would need to find a mechanistic link, e.g. some clear path between direct democracy and suicide or at least a correlation. E.g. you could plot suicide rates vs governmental system. The issue is that even a very cursory reading of the data you provide almost immediately invalidate your argument. If you think direct democracy is a driver for lower suicide rates, why is it that some countries with the lowest suicide rates are not democracies at all? Or even if we stay in the European context, why do other European countries without direct democracies like Ireland, UK, Romania and Slovakia have lower suicide rates or similar suicide rates? I.e. you cannot just look at one data point and then create a whole story from there without any evidence to substantiate that connection. Otherwise, as @TheVat demonstrated you can just take any random curiosity and make your story from there. E.g., I could claim that in Switzerland direct democracy is caused by being landlocked at high elevation. The evidence? It's average elevation is 1,350meters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_elevation If that argument makes sense to you, I am afraid there is little to discuss.

There are multiple hypotheses. One is that eukaryotes have intracellular compartments and organelles, which have to be able to selective macromolecules (plus there is a lot of veiscle trafficking to sustain that). It is assumed that this relatively active and leaky membrane system cannot be built in a heat-resistant way. Thermophiles have modified membranes with lower fluidity, for example.

The authors acknowledge it, but I want to emphasize that neat things about this paper is not the fact that there are thermophilic eukaryotes. But rather the 3-4 degrees in excess of 60 C. The reason is that key studies in the 70s looked at heat tolerant fungi and based on this and similar studies, it was reasoned that around 60C is likely the upper thermal limit for eukaryotes. This study pushes it a few degrees higher and it will come down to really fine nuances.

I think the plan would not be to repel an invasion, just to make it costly. The more important and in my mind likely scenario is a blockade to enforce capitulation. As you mentioned, reports have suggested that Taiwan would run out of resources fairly quickly most put a depletion of resources in less than 2 weeks. The downside however, is that it could put China in direct conflict with countries who trade with Taiwan. Japan, for example has stated in 20205 that a blockade of Taiwan would be considered a survival-threatening situation, which would essentially be a per-requisite to activate its self-defence force. Again, I think the calculus of the situation extends beyond whether the US will or will not interfere.

I concur with MigL and I think the Ukraine angle is more important here than US' weakness. I think for the most part Xi is a rational actor and he is aware of potential costs. Invasion of Taiwan really only is beneficial if it can be done at a relatively swift and demonstrate the overwhelming power of China. However, with Russia in Ukraine and the US in Iran, there are examples where inferior military is extracting a high toll on superior armies. The main question here is how effective Taiwan has been in recent attempts to draw up new defensive plans, including for example production of drones. If there is an obvious weakness that China is certain that they can exploit before Taiwan can address it, it would increase the risk. But in the absence of such evidence, a quagmire like Iran or Ukraine would be disastrous, especially as China is a somewhat precarious situation. A war that is not quickly won could add quite a bit to the woes.

Actually, it has done pretty well for extremists, historically speaking. I think the author of the substack is looking at short term perspectives in which at least some far right parties have gained, then lost power. But the bigger picture here is that fringe parties, parties that decades back were not electable, to a large degree because of their often fascist and racist views, have become mainstream and where they are not in the government, they are contenders and often are just barely held in check by a coalition of virtually all other parties. It is a bit like the boiling frog situation where the water dropping a degree or two is seen as a big relief. And the fact that much of their agenda is failed is because most really suck at policy. Yet instead of being laughed out of power, at best they lose just barely. You only need a handful of semi-competent folks within the apparatus and you can have the biggest idiots wield immense power.

Literally none of that has anything to do with the handicap model, nor with the fact that its core assumptions likely do not hold.

But may chatbots will eat you? I am not quite sure whether LLMs are really collective intelligence as such. They process collective intelligence into something artificial.

Absolutely fair. I think that goes towards the argument made in the article. From a mathematics rather then physics perspective, developing and approaching questions, even if they do not have any real-world counterpart can be relevant for the field itself, but only if the work is being demonstrated and can be read and understood by humans. I think OpenAI offered to publish with Buckmaster as author. However, there was a second mathematician (Alpoege) who worked with Buckmaster which they didn't want to have on the paper. The reason was because Alpoege works for Anthropic. In addition to the maths and the issues of potential negative AI influence on science we also can add conflict of interest and the perhaps the negative impact of companies on scientific integrity....

As you may have heard, Open AI claimed to have solved the Navri-Stokes problem https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ However, there are multiple discussions around that claim. For now, the full solution has not been presented so there are a few uncertainties regarding the validity of the claim: There is also another controversy: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaster-openai-math-navier-stokes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.CA12.DVpcZwQn9Yl6&smid=url-share That opened up a completely different question. Let's assume that a mathematical problem is solved without human input but at high cost (the estimated computation time was valued at around 15 mio) what is ultimately worth? I also like the final point made in the last paragraph here: Often, AI compute time is seen as free, but it ultimately is expensive. And I wonder whether 15 mio in form of grants to further mathematical research group would have yielded more insights, for example. I also see parallels in the use of AI in biological research where (as also mentioned in the article) the actual work starts after hypothesis generation. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/opinion/artificial-intelligence-ai-danger.html?unlocked_article_code=1.DVE.uGAZ._2SuQ4ojyQES&smid=url-share

That really sounds like a pellicle then. If you ferment for 2 weeks do you get something like 5-6% (v/v) of alcohol? Concurrent acetic acid fermentation will carve out a percentage depending on oxygen availability but with CO2 in headspace it can be very low. But I would have expected a fairly thin pellicle layer at most. Wild yeast also forms pellicles alone, but due to the lack of cellulose, they tend to tear easier and are not really rubbery. There are members of the Acetobacteraceae that are able to produce cellulose even under microaerobic conditions. IIRC Gluconacetobacter would fall under this category.

Is the stuff only on the surface (like a pellicle), are there gelatinuous blobs throughout and/or does the rest of the liquid seem more viscous? Surface is smooth?

I think based on what has been described how the hack happened, ants, bees and other eusocial insects are actually poor models. Paradoxically because of why they are good models in bionics. One of the reason why they are used as model in these areas is because individually ants are considered to be very simple and can be modeled with a limited set of instructions, the colony as a whole has limited complexity in terms of roles (e.g. often the colony can be modeled with limited granularity and required number of roles), and each role has somewhat limited flexibility. I.e. the idea is that we can understand the emergence, because each element is very simple, not very flexible and is mostly governed by limited instructions and feedback loops. AI swarms on the other hand have more flexibility in each role (and they invent new roles) and as such are quickly almost like a chaotic system that cannot be understood from first principles. I always have some issues with these overarching narratives. They make things feel like they are easy to understand, but they often clash with the minutiae of things we understand/don't understand.

It is a bit unclear, as functional characterization is missing. The targets are among the usual suspects that can modulate pathogenicity and/or virulence but from a skim, nothing really unique.