Why is Polymarket legal? I just don't understand.

For a while it wasn’t in the US. They now have a cut-down version. But a lot of people use VPNs to access the less-restricted international version. So to answer your question, a lot of users are using it in a way that’s illegal.

It and Kalshi are not. But we don't have regulators that want to enforce the law here.

Polymarket in particular started out using crypto and off shoring with a "not legal in the US, wink wink" to get try and dodge regulations.

Why wouldn't it be

It creates financial incentives for anti-social behavior and the proposed benefits of it being a way to determine truth are dubious and self-serving and would not be worth the societal cost regardless.

Because we have laws that regulate gambling. "Prediction markets" get around them by bending the definition of the word "gambling".

This is something I wanted to get into after vising Alhambra, which really is the "mirror of paradise" that it purported to be. You say that the complex designs are done by hand, but given how mathematical they are it left me wondering if there is a thriving scene of computer-generated patterns?

The floral designs (arabesque) are done by hand and the geometric tiling is ruler/compass based. I focus mostly on the geometric part of it, since I dont have the dexterity to do the arabesque by hand.

To your point of Computer generated Imagery, I think it would be too easy, but that would definitely take the fun away

Wait why are there separate mens and womens prizes?

To encourage female participation and representation. Most people think it would be good for chess long-term to have a larger female player base.

There are "Open" (anyone can enter) and "Women" (only women can enter) events.

If you did not have the "Women" category, then you would see only men play in these events as there are no active women in the top 100.

There are no men prizes/tournament. But there are women tournaments and prizes.

it's not "mens" prize btw, usually the tournaments are "women" and "open"

There are currently no active women players ranked within the top 100 overall.

Like a lot of men dominated spaces, even when we know ability is not a definying factor, culture is.

Many male domianted spaces are pretty antagonistic to women, making separate prize pools, tournaments and events allows for women to play in spaces where they are the mayority. Normalise their participation and open the door to better performance on the mixed queue.

> even when we know ability is not a definying factor

Spatial reasoning?

Modern women are the most privileged class in existence.

you know why.

Bit confused, what's this to do with the CIA World Factbook?

> this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working

So the factbook is an actual book too? That's what I missed, I thought it was a webpage so this was referring to some other post.

The CIA Factbook being publicy available since 1971 has existed longer than the internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook

That's a great logo. What a travesty.

I remember that one of Stockholm's train line is also endearingly tiny too?

Half the Berlin lines are weirdly narrow, but not short.

Looks like TFL issued a whopping three fines in total last year...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdx4lje9jpjo

I know, it's pathetic. It's partly because they don't want to pay for the staff to do the enforcement and partly probably some other reasons.

In classic British style they just try to influence and nudge people with campaigns and posters. That way the organisation doesn't have to deal with awkward accusations of racism etc

Because silence is a common good, like clean air. It's everyone's. When people fill it with their noise they effectively privatize it for the duration. When they shout on speakerphone or play their music or blare sound from their apps it's especially selfish.

Imagine if they were dealing with the US police...

Same for bicycle lights too, and street lights.

Nearly all UK drivers say bike lights are too bright?

Do you have a citation or was that an edgy culture war comment?

I have a problem with many fellow cyclists here in Germany, because they seem to use something that shouldn't be street-legal as bicycle lighs (very annoying in the night on unlit road)

Not sure what UK drivers would say about that, though

I think it’s his personal opinion, so no need to provide a citation.

But don’t let that stop you from starting your diatribe

I don’t understand the seeming lack of regulation for flashing bike lights.

I don’t mean a simple “normal” flashing light, but the super bright ones that are like a camera flash strobe going off 2-3x per second which hurts your eyes and kills your night vision, making it hard to see anything including the actual cyclist.

It used to be law that a bicycle had to have a solid on light front and back at night, and any extra flashing lights were optional extras that didn't count, but they scrapped that law several years ago.

The sun as well, too bright.

The whole big blue room outside is much too bright, we need strict regulation so that nerds are finally comfortable leaving their caves.

Anyone working with a Smalltalk implementation?

I played around with Squeak this summer and made a few demos of showing how inserts and removals work in binary search trees and B-trees. I also wrote a tree-walking Smalltalk interpreter in F# and an implementation of the game of life for it. It was a blast.