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Never thought I'd see the day that third world countries, banana republics and military dictatorships have to send observers to the USA to verify that the current President doesn't try to pull a fast one in the upcoming election. And the way he's mis-handling the Coronavirus pandemic, waiting until it is safe to have an American election, would effectively make him President for life.

“Trump floats election ‘delay’ amid reports the economy underwent an historic and unprecedented contraction” See also: “Child kills parents, demands mercy because he’s an orphan“

This is just more shitflooding. Sew doubts in order to eat away at consensus. Say unreasonable things to dumbfound your opponents, and claim everything they say is fake. He's simply corrupt, immoral, ignorant, and the worst person possible for the position. These are the tactics of corrupt and ruthless businessmen. We may not think much of politicians, but this is one thing they (normally) would never do in the US.

He doesn't have the authority to move the election; presumably he knows that. But this announcement has done a marvelous job of distracting people from the latest economic figures. He may also be setting the stage for claiming that the election result is wrong and he should stay on... forever.

As long as you just look at a teacup, or a graph of a function, I fully agree with you. I would say, yes, you do it, and time is the parametrisation you use. In my opinion, if somebody says that 'y changes as function of the change of x', she is saying 'if you change x from a to b, then y changes according f(a) to f(b)'. But a change of x is an activity of an observer, and observers exist in time. And concerning your points with MigL: of course change can occur without observers. But observing a change means either a passive observer sees things changing (you are sitting quietly at a veranda, and you see the streets changing from dry to wet (a very common experience in Ireland...)) or you look at an non-changing object, but you let wander your gaze from one place of the object to another, and e.g. see how the colour 'changes' dependent on the place of the object where you look. But the latter also means a change in time. But the change is in the observer, not in the object. The object is static.

There is a great series of lectures by Andrew Ng at Stanford University: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLssT5z_DsK-h9vYZkQkYNWcItqhlRJLN He starts from pretty much nothing and quickly builds up to a pretty good level of detail of most aspects of ML. Also available on Coursera, if you want a more structured approach with tests of your understanding, etc: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/home/welcome

The image size increases linearly as you make the camera longer. It’s also going to depend on the object’s angular size.

And what I'm failing miserably to explain, is that this is not true because you and I are intrinsic to this universe, which has three spatial dimensions and one of time. But it certainly would be true if we were intrinsic to a universe with only three spatial dimensions. You could NOT get hit by a bus, or a giant jack, and I'm not sure an orbital even makes sense in such a time devoid universe. Our definition of 'change' applies to a universe which includes a time dimension, OR, we are extrinsic to a universe which has no time. IOW, I can look at a 2D sheet of graph paper with a teacup drawn on it, and notice 'change' because I'm extrinsic to that 2d graph. But if I was a flat-lander intrinsic to that 2D graph sans time, I could not possibly note any change.

Isn't systems collapsing by themselves a big problem in quantum computing? It doesn't depend only on an observer right? It collapses by itself all the time. Awesome that they were able to maintain superposition of a 2000 atom system for 7 ms.

But that is not the important part.

Nope. It is very obviously about superposition.

Schrödinger hated cats He was very much a dog person, which is why he came up with such a cruel thought experiment... Besides - my own cat definitely exists on both sides of the door simultaneously, as it is impossible to keep her out of the kitchen. Indeed. And that’s the crucial point - the cat should be in a state of superposition, but when we look at it, it never is. And this is true for any observation we make, be it on a quantum system, or on something macroscopic - we never observe any superpositions, only definite outcomes. So how does the system prior to observation, which demonstrably is in a state of superposition, get to take on precisely one definite state when we look at it? This is essentially what is called the ‘measurement problem’.

Programming books have sadly been vanishing over the past 10 years. My local bookstore used to have a "computer" section that took up an entire corner of the store. Now it's down to a few meagerly populated shelves. Everyone seems to recommend "The Pragmatic Programmer" and "Code Complete," but I actually haven't read either one of them, at least not yet. A 20th anniversary edition of "The Pragmatic Programmer" appeared late last year. The publication dates on these books keep pushing them to the bottom of my reading list. I've read numerous great programming books on C#, JavaScript, Angular, SQL Server, Java, etc., but they become obsolete so fast these days. Most of my new learning comes from sites like Pluralsite or Udemy now, though I enjoyed learning from books much more.

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