If your view of string theory is through the lens of media, you aren’t going to be up-to-date. String theory was and is the leading theory for quantum gravity, is actively worked on, and has only been supported in recent findings through quantum field theory.

But you’re talking about a field with little funding, that requires some of the most brilliant mathematical minds who have specializations, and in which experimentation requires super technology to build particle accelerators the size of the moon. It’s not a glamorous field and once the buzz of “theory of everything” wording died off, it was forgotten in media. Just like so many other topics before it.

The standard model for quantum stuff

The standard model doesn’t handle quantum gravity, which is kind of important. Nor does it address a slew of other very real phenomenon (dark matter, for instance). It’s not a theory of everything, just a good model. It’s also something that can be derived from string theory. The two are not competing ideas.

The scientific consensus seems to be that there isn’t really a good alternative to dark matter. Was it string theory that tried?

The alternative to dark matter is modified gravity/modified Newtonian dynamics. Neither of which have held up to scrutiny and have major flaws that would need to be worked out before being a legitimate competitor to dark matter. In every single permutation thought of today, these theories directly conflict with the reality we observe, while dark matter has been in happy agreement with new data.

that’s basically dismissed and disproven regardless of whether it had anything to do with dark matter.

String theory is not disproven and still remains the leading train of thought. It’s just a very niche field and progress is hard/underfunded! But so far we’ve seen things like AdS/CFT correspondence and it’s a more “elegant” solution than its competitors.

is there any reason to expect that the giant deep Antarctic ice-telescope will be able to observe dark matter?

Are you talking about the IceCube? If so, no, that’s a neutrino telescope. Although, in general, the answer would also be no; dark matter does not interact with itself or with regular mass in any way other than through gravity. It’s simply impossible to measure it directly - it must be done by measuring it’s gravitational effect on other things.

And because of that very property dark matter’s smallest observable structures are galactic in scale, so it’s also rather hopeless to try to observe them locally with current technology.

Sorry for not responding earlier, I don’t seem to be getting notifications! My other reply further down in the thread hopefully answers all of your (wonderful) questions, though. Have a great day!

I’m happy to talk about this more, but I’m afraid I don’t understand your analogy. I’m sorry! If you’d like to rephrase it, I’ll make myself available to respond. 🙂

my understanding is that string theory is basically dead, and only getting deader.

Huh… where is this impression from? String theory isn’t dead, it’s just a very narrow field in which most of the participants specialize in a subset of it that’s less concerned with completing it as a whole. It’s incredibly difficult work, progress is slow, and it’s currently too broad to be applicable to reality (which is important for funding). The tests we can think of to validate the correspondence of math to the physical world are… significantly out of reach due to the energy requirements.

But it’s still the leading theory of quantum gravity and there’s active work in, say, AdS/CFT correspondence - which shows that string theory can line up to reality and be predictive. It’s the best idea we have right now, it’s satisfyingly elegant, and it’s working as a useful tool at the very least.

There are competing alternatives that get their own research, of course. We should persue them all until a clear victor emerges!

But I thought modified gravity as explanations for the dark matter observations is seeing a bit of a resurgence lately.

Modified gravity, so far, is non-predictive and does not account for things like the bullet merger while also accounting for ultra diffuse galaxies and our observations of the CMBR. All proposed modified gravities have failed to pass experimentation compared to general relativity. Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) fails in the face of light and gravity having the same speed. And even if MOND were to be true, it still requires the presence of (albeit possible baryonic) dark matter to be even considered due to existing mass measurements of galaxies.

So, again, dark matter is simply the best model we have.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of physics if you think that analogy is even remotely similar to dark matter.

Poverty, lack of education, the US overthrew multiple democratically elected leaders during the red scare by funding extremist groups to commit coups, harsh environment.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Dark matter has been proven numerous times, is a predictive model, and is the only explanation that has held up to scrutiny and observations. It’s very clearly the right explanation and we know how dark matter generally behaves, we just don’t know specifically what it is.

See, for example, the behavior of the bullet cluster merger.

I mean, if we’re talking Hamilton it’s even further, being pretty clearly a commentary on the whole “founding fathers freeing everyone while most of them owning human beings they refused freedom to” thing.

How is Xorg a “direct competitor” to Microsoft? Especially Microsoft’s trademark to X in the gaming market where they own the Xbox and Xorg doesn’t participate at all?

Trademarks protect consumers by preventing fraud and misleading naming. It makes perfect sense that Microsoft owns X in the given market space due to the enormous prevalence of Xbox. Their first console was literally X-shaped and it would be bad for consumers for anyone to be able to make the “X-station” or “X-cube” or some such.

Yeah… they still haven’t added back live editing of JS. Their new profiler doesn’t provide framerate graphs anymore. Nothing like Lighthouse on offer. Gotta keep a Chrome-based browser around for any non-trivial frontend work.

They’re just build flags or compiler versions being different, no need to be melodramatic.

It would quickly need to be an allow list. It’s basically free to spool up an instance with Docker, it’d make those randomly named Chinese companies on Amazon look slim.

Thanks, I’ll look that up later! Hope you have a great day.

Does Lemmy have the ability to move an account to another instance? I know you can delete and recreate, but the former would be useful for occasions like this.

Come on, let’s be adults about it. Beehaw has always had stricter registration requirements, but didn’t defederate until just now. The problem was that they simply don’t have the tools needed to moderate such a huge influx of people from uncurated instances and it was interfering with the culture they prided themselves on.

I’m not a member of Beehaw, but I can respect them knowing both what they want to be and when their limited ability to enforce it meant drastic measures to preserve the community. This is one of the good things about federation: they’re allowed to do that and we don’t need to switch platforms entirely!

Wish everyone luck going forward.

Beehaw has sign up requirements to curate the type of community they are. These other instances do not, allowing anybody.

Since any account can be used for in any instance still federated with the instance they made their account on, Beehaw was upset that their curated community was being interrupted by troves of unregulated members of the large, general servers. The tools for moderating Lemmy are also still in their infancy, so the Beehaw moderators were finding it harder to do their jobs.

So they defederated for the time being.

Very nice! Smart thinking using the multireddit link there, never even knew that existed! 😅

I think the next step is to secure VC funding or something. Yada yada yada, then collect your profits! /s

How are you liking Svelte?

1. Sorry if it was an assumption, I was speaking to the context you posted.
2. I’m not discriminating between the specific abstraction layer. Anything that provides an HTML canvas, CSS, and JS is fine. But, at least with Electron, you can fine-tune things down really well with the use of native code and an API less constrained than the web standards. This is why VS Code is quite the snappy fella.
3. Cross-platform is Electron’s second selling point, really. The first is the ability to create desktop apps using the fun JS web frameworks rather than learning Java, C#, or C++ and having to use the unpleasant UI frameworks they have - like QT. Clearly that’s the case for all the folk who only support one platform, at least.
4. WebAssembly doesn’t seem weird to me at all? The web is a great way of distributing end-user software but can suffer from performance and control issues in the case of heavier applications. Web assembly is the logical conclusion that allows us to leverage the browser’s crazy powerful and optimized DOM, JS runtime, and layout engines, while having a super fast layer with a low interop cost to do that heavy work. Especially as they move towards gaming support via WebGL. Furthermore, it provides a sandboxed runtime with privilege control that downloading binaries from Itch simply can’t. It has a real purpose. Albeit, I again agree it’s execution has some issues.

All this just to say: I think the common denigration of this tech (not specifically your comment, since you clarified) is a cynical take that ignores important economic factors. Modern web development is flawed, but the direction it has moved is still forward.

Anyway, hope you have a good day!

It would normalize bot submissions, which is bad for a lot of reasons. Not the least, disproportional bot activity is one of the categories used for defederation for instances like lemm.ee.