Closing a traffic lane on the Story Bridge for a temporary cyclist and pedestrian lane has been ruled out

Of course.

Yeah, with a Lagrange keyhole orbit past the Moon (which is what OP is asking about, not just plain escape velocity), you could park an Asteroid Belt asteroid in an orbit around the Earth. But it will be a high orbit. Not sure how low you could get it, I’m hoping a circular geostationary orbit is possible? But more likely something in the 300,000km range.

Low orbit is out of the question. Maaaybe you could park the asteroid in a highly elliptical orbit where the perigee is inside the atmosphere. The drag will circularize it if the asteroid is small enough. But not so small or weak that it burns up or breaks up before that happens. And not so big that drag takes too long and the orbit wobble makes it hit the surface. In a low Earth orbit you now only have 8km/s delta-v to deal with.

But to get the asteroid to gently touch the surface the way OP describes it, like some sort of skyhook? Is impossible short of a planet X or a rogue black hole passing even closer to the Earth than the Moon at the right moment. And whatever remains afterwards would be hard to call a surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlhlCWplqk

they build a new path

Hahahaha!

But seriously. They took a streetcar lane, which has been torn out and repurposed for a car lane, but is so narrow and uncomfortable to use that in modern day few cars ever use it. I took a note to count the cars last time I rode over the bridge - the middle lanes were bumper-to-bumper, but only two vehicles used the outer streetcar lane. It’s open and accessible, the drivers just choose to avoid it. Even the current pedestrian/bike path in the former streetcar lane on the other side is too narrow to use, which is why adding more pedestrian space is necessary.

The 4 car lanes on the top level are the ones that repurposed the original pedestrian path, as well as replacing two additional railway tracks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensboro_Bridge#Levels

What about the “Protocol on Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices” that somebody linked above? Not sure if it’s the same as the “1996 Geneva Amendments” you mention, but both Ukraine and Russia are listed as signatories, and the language does seem to me to cover this exact situation:

Article 7
Prohibitions on the Use of booby-traps and other devices

1. Without prejudice to the rules of international applicable in armed conflict relating to treachery and perfidy, it is prohibited in all circumstances to use booby-traps and other devices which are any way attached to or associated with:
   (a) internationally recognized protective emblems, signs or signals;
   …
   (d) medical facilities, medical equipment, medical supplies or medical transportation;

It says “medical supplies”, without reference to humanitarian aid, and clearly stressing in “any way associated with”. A “red cross” is also a recognized emblem. I can appreciate how “humanitarian aid” can be narrowly defined as medical supplies under direct control and chain-of-custody of the Red Cross Organization and doesn’t apply to random medkits. But I can’t see how this language above would not apply.

Or is it the case that this would be a crime, committed during war, but not a war crime? How does that work? Does it have to be a violation of a specific Geneva Convention® version to count as a war crime, and not just any UN war-related convention?

Only because it’s English and the model is already trained on a large corpus of English text, so it has some idea of what a “table row” is for example. It could learn the concept from reading assembly code from scratch, it would just take longer. Hell, even Lego bricks can be trained on! https://avalovelace1.github.io/LegoGPT/

Our system tokenizes a LEGO design into a sequence of text tokens, ordered in a raster-scan manner from bottom to top. … At inference time, LegoGPT generates LEGO designs incrementally by predicting one brick at a time given a text prompt.

Racing is fundamentally incompatible with safety. I’d like to see racing replaced with something like cooperative touring, where you compete to commute the most people the greatest distance along the most interesting routes with the least number of injuries and impact on the environment and surrounding communities.

Language is language. To an LLM, English is as good as Java is as good as machine code to train on. I like to imagine if we suddenly uncovered a library of books left over from ancient aliens, we could train an LLM on it (as long as the symbols themselves are legible), and it would generate stories in the alien language that would sound correct to the aliens, even though the alien world and alien life are completely unknown and incomprehensible to us.

was executed was allegedly executed

Modern journalism sucks. Can’t use affirmative voice for anything. Everything is “alleged” this and “sources say” that. Even with a concluded court case that has found proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt - the fairest way that we as a humanity have settled on for determining the truth or falsehood of questions like this - they still won’t say the words.

quantum computing is revolutionary because it allows instant transmission of information across unlimited space

False and common misconception! In quantum mechanics there is even a theorem called the no-communication theorem that mathematically proves that no information can ever be transmitted by quantum entanglement. Sorry!

12:30 AM GMT 🤡

Good find!

Height: 45cm

Muwahahaha! Finally a table for my cat!

No way the table would be structurally strong enough, unless the flat part is made of steel painted to look like wood, therefore fake and imaginary.

Gravity—the curvature of space-time—can’t stop changes in the curvature of spacetime from propagating outward.

This is false. If it were true, you could build a device to communicate from inside a black hole event horizon. By waving around a heavy ball you would create gravitational waves that a sensitive enough LIGO outside the black hole could detect. But this is impossible. You would create gravitational waves, yes, but they would fall towards the center singularity same as you, and will never penetrate and escape the event horizon.

NYC is using “Leading Pedestrian Interval” on most intersections. This feature has been installed about 10 years ago. When the cross traffic light has turned red and your (the car driver’s) traffic light is about to turn green, the pedestrian traffic light in the same direction turns green first. Your traffic light turns green a few seconds later, and the pedestrian light stays green. 15 seconds later, pedestrian light starts flashing red, and 30 seconds later both lights turn red at same time.

This few second advanced-pedestrian-green protects pedestrians from collisions with cars by allowing the squishy road users to saturate the crosswalk before the cars trying to make a right/left turn get a go. Cars making a turn have to wait. When both lights used to change green at same time, the drivers making a turn had too much temptation to just gun it across an intersection before the pedestrians reached the middle of it. NYC has very many intersections and very many pedestrians. This caused many collisions and injuries.

A 2019 city council law ammended the Administrative Code section 19-195 to clarify that bicyclists should use the advanced pedestrian green as well. This makes sense because bicyclists ride on the side of the road (in the right turn danger zone) and are in the squishy human category. NYPD hates bicyclists and ignores the law, pretending to “forget” it exists every time they write a citation violating it.

otherwise empty bike lane

Over here in New York, everyone got an e-bike and now we get bike jams in the bike lane during commute hour. Dunno how I should feel about it. Aladeen? :(: Still faster than a car for sure.

I saw a study that DHMO is stored in the balls.

OVPN is a 1-to-1 feature clone of mullvad (wireguard, multiple device keys, crypto payments/cash in the mail, no usernames/emails, etc.) AND has port forwarding. Switched to them when mullvad sadly closed their ports, no problems since. Can’t live without port forwarding.

sudo ufw default deny outgoing

I’m guessing this would block the VPN packets themselves as well.

The yyyy-mm-dd format (ISO 8601) is the only one that is unambiguous, because no one so far in history has ever used the yyyy-dd-mm format (at least until some xkcd-reading jokester probably will start using it just out of spite). I use ISO 8601 everywhere. It has the additional benefit that filenames get sorted correctly in lexographical order.