Whether it was explained differently, or a foundational bit of knowledge made it click, how did you finally understand?

No politics – I'm thinking along the lines of math/programming, language, crafts, etc.

I have a few spare glass bottles and want to explore what decoration I can make with them, without just painting outside them.

Preferably safe, in case of an accidental breakage or leak. Preferably indefinite shelf-life.

Some ideas:

• Density layering experiments ('rainbow in a jar', maybe suspending an upside-down toy boat in a dense clear liquid with a blue watery liquid on-top)
• Phosphorescent liquids to glow in the dark (pref with no UV lamp needed)
• The oil+water+antacid+food coloring lava lamp, but the effect is probably too short-lasting to have running for a few hours

Let's say, I sit down in a mall, open my laptop and connect to a secured mobile hotspot. Then I do it again next week after a reboot. What information would a nearby shop or a passive malicious hacker be able to find about my device? Does my device send out identifying information before joining, like a MAC address? Is this persistent, or randomized?

I intentionally haven't specified a distro, so if something only applies to some network managers, give some details.

Bonus points: what about Android phones?

I recently discovered the Banana Ball exhibition baseball games, and their custom ruleset, featuring limitations, crowd participation mechanics and special roles among other things.

This reminded me of (and it's an derivative game rather than an alternate ruleset) Three-Sided Football, which, among other things, is a Situationist, philosophical and sociological rabbit-hole.

I also recall dark chess, a chess variant with line-of-sight mechanics, to emulate the fog of war. There are thousands of chess variants stretching back a thousand years, this is just one of the first I learned of which really interested me.

Full 30 min film: A Welcome to Britain, 1943

After being reminded of incidents where US soldiers started riots in allied countries due to racism (UK, Aus, NZ), I wondered if there were any surviving videos briefing soldiers on race relations outside the US.

This pub clip is not about race at all, but I found it interesting, and as someone who has seen many a stereotypical "loud American" tourist, relatable.

(For an example of a racial diversity training, see that full film link, starting from 25:19

Most of us are familiar with what (your local equivalent of) $10 USD is worth, or $100 or perhaps even $1,000,000.

But larger amounts soon become unrelatable. And with the huge wealth inequality at play, it's easy to come across stories where something worth hundreds of millions was wasted.

• How much money would it take, under our current systems, to solve various societal problems? (e.g. food shortages, infrastructure fixes, public health efforts, new transport)
• How much did the achievements of various organizations cost?
• What could individuals spend such money on? (luxuries, marketing)

And make sure to give evidence for your answers!

Yes, this instance is definitely the wrong place to ask, but maybe I'll be surprised.

I hate commercial ads. I consider them intolerable and violating. I'm far from alone in this perspective (see: famous Banksy quote, and subvertising + related cultures). It's one of the rawest forms of exploitative manipulation.

So surely you can understand my confusion whenever I see people just watching ads on their phone until they finish, or even watching ads on television until their show starts again. Come on, just do something else for 4 minutes (most channels run two 4 minute segments per half hour, that why your downloaded TV episodes are 22 minutes each instead of 30)

Is there a more meaningful answer than "laziness"?

I want to build a small site which acts as a broad, searchable FAQ for a certain topic.

Consider I have the FAQ:

What is the approximate mass of Earth?

It's 5.9722 × 10^24 kilograms, wow!

I want the user to have a chance at finding this FAQ by asking How heavy is our planet

Looking at this basically, the two similar questions have only one shared word, "is", which is an extremely common word. So using something really simple like word comparison or even stemming/lemmatization alone won't help.

On the very other end of the spectrum, a search engine's AI feature can interpret this effectively, rephrase the question and give a similar answer. So, what strategies are are in-between these two extremes?

1. A few people will be adding questions to the site regularly.

2. If possible, no external services, just self-hosting on an affordable server.

3. Simpler and lighter solutions are preferred.

Are any of the features in OpenSearch (ElasticSearch/Lucene fork) able to do this? Is it overkill?

Since the site will have new questions to match regularly, will a solution require the repeated, wasteful retraining of NLP models to to create weights? Or is training so efficient for small-scale text datasets that it's responsible and reasonable to do on a cheap low-end server?

edit: Just spitballing here, I could try a solution which does the bulk work at insert-time rather than runtime, by asking a general pre-trained language model to rephrase the question many different ways, or generate keywords, then use those responses to generate tags for a basic keyword search to match. This would avoid making a heavy search function or retraining any model on the server.

GPT-4o mini

Here’s a list of synonyms for the keywords in "What is the approximate mass of Earth?" formatted as an array of strings:

json

[
  "weight",
  "heaviness",
  "bulk",
  "load",
  "volume",
  "estimated",
  "rough",
  "approximal",
  "near",
  "close to",
  "planet Earth",
  "the globe",
  "the world",
  "Terra",
  "our planet"
]

Finding a wholesome community archive with tagging done well is a rare treat, so I think this place is worth a special mention.

PSA is a public service announcement, an awareness campaign.

It could be as simple as teaching everyone to walk on the same side of the footpath in each direction, to demonstrating how quickly a fire spreads and ways to prevent and react.

I'm asking this out of curiosity; I don't need to host anything that can't already be done in the West

Lots of countries have very relaxed or non-existent enforcement of torrent filesharing. That's not what I'm asking.

I'm asking about what place one could openly host every known commercial pop song and every Hollywood film without any worry about being shutdown or sued.

For a reference, according to a one-minute check of Wikipedia, the only countries which haven't ratified the Berne Convention or the TRIPS Agreement in any way are Eritrea, Kosovo, Palau and Palestine. While joining these agreements doesn't imply they're enforced, it gives an idea of how widely governments do agree to intellectual property rights.

~~how much would it cost to launch an independent server into orbit?~~