The same as all those other recent technological advances: they were given to us by our alien overlords.

Enshittification is defined as the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

I think that’s overly broad in comparison to Doctorow’s original meaning (which they also cite in the article). The critical element missing from their definition is that the enshittified product/service never had a viable business model to begin with: it uses the hype cycle to sell users and investors on an unsustainable mirage before inevitably collapsing.

Depends on whether you define a “free speech platform” as a platform that doesn’t impose its own constraints on speech, or a platform that enables speech without constraints. Because there are social pressures that also constrain speech, and hate speech can be a tool of those pressures.

To explain any macroscopic effects that necessarily depend on matter waves. If there are any. Which is my question.

Whatever rules you make up must be consistent with macroscopic observation, though. So if you postulate that matter is formed from the flesh of a dead god, you still need to prove that it doesn’t need to quiver.

As a consequence of the incompressibility of the flow and Darcy's law, the pressure fields must be harmonic...

Every time I start to feel complacent with my ignorance of complex analysis, another harmonic function pops out of the woodwork.

The Romans don’t eat garum for its own sake—they use it to cover up the flavor of their other food that tastes even worse.

A reverse clepsydra: an air-filled container that releases bubbles at a constant rate.

“And we were talking about the podcast world and some of our friends and Rogan and guys like you.”

It kind of destroys any pretense of neutrality when you refer to them as “some of our friends”.

It depends on the joke: most are funny regardless, but for some jokes a straight/deadpan delivery is part of the humor.

They don’t look that much like seals.

They should be called “saber-toothed wilford-brimleys”.

It’s so secret, it’s already scrubbed itself from the internet.

Black holes (and their singularities) never cross each other’s event horizons—their event horizons just merge.

Maybe you’re imagining event horizons as being caused by the singularities inside them. That isn’t strictly true: when a star collapses into a black hole, the event horizon forms before the singularity does. And once the event horizon forms, nothing inside it (including the not-yet-formed singularity) is part of our universe any longer—as far as the outside universe is concerned, the event horizon itself is the black hole (and is its own cause).

Think of black holes merging like soap bubbles merging—it’s the surfaces themselves that merge, not anything inside that’s generating them.

As a mass falls into a black hole, the radius of the event horizon increases, the black hole is pulled toward the mass enough to conserve their combined momentum, and their electric charge and angular momentum similarly combine. Those are the properties that change when a black hole merges with another black hole or any other infalling mass, and none of it depends on anything that happens inside the horizon.

And it’s true that events near the merging event horizon would appear to undergo time dilation to an outside observer, but I assume that rotational frame-dragging would balance out that effect on the gravitational waves produced (although the actual math is beyond me).

The imaginary numbers and real numbers cross at infinity (on the Riemann sphere).

An object that accelerates as it falls past the event horizon toward the singularity will cause gravity waves to propagate outward from the object at the speed of light. But those waves will never reach the horizon (or an outside observer) because everything leaving the object at any speed or direction will converge at the singularity; from its frame of reference the horizon only exists in the past. Anything that enters the horizon is no longer causally connected to the outside universe.

I would think that the ability to change from a democracy to some other form of government with the consent of a majority of the people wasn’t something Gödel (or the authors of the Constitution) would have viewed as unintentional or problematical. I think it more likely that Gödel thought he’d found something the Constitution’s authors didn’t anticipate and would have changed if they’d been aware of it.

Look at the semiotic theories stemming from Ferdinand de Saussure over a century ago: he would reverse the relative importance of your 1 and 2, arguing that words derive most of their meaning from their arrangement and interrelationships, and that most of the meaning we see in the world flows from the relationship between signs/words into our perception of their referents.

the tech community keeps waiting for everyday people to take the baton of self-hosting. They never will—because the effort and cost of maintaining self-hosted services far exceeds the skill and interest of the audience.

The same argument could have been used a century ago to claim that everyday people would never switch from trains to private cars, because the effort and cost of maintaining a car exceeds the skill and interest of most travelers. That may have been true at one point, and may be true again in the future—but it’s contingent on changing circumstances, not a categorical truth.

The general category of potential use case is when you want some information to be public, undeletable, and outside of corporate or government control.

While I can’t think of a compelling use case at the moment (other than whistleblowers, maybe), given the direction our corporations and government are going it seems like the sort of thing that might become increasingly useful in the near future.