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.

Everytime Firefox updates I have to restart the entire browser or it won't let me open a new tab. This has been going on for years. As a dev, I can't dynamically edit source during runtime ever since the Quantum update. It's noticeably slower these days, which is especialy bad on mobile/laptops due to battery life. If you're on Windows, you don't get video super sampling (NVIDIA) or HDR videos.

I wouldn't call it a buggy mess that crashes frequently, but it's certainly constantly getting on my nerves.

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.

I use it all day at my job now. Ironically, on a specialization more likely to overfit.

It may be a statistical model, but ultimately nothing prevents that model from overfitting, i.e. memoizing its training data.

This seems to imply that not only did entire books accidentally get downloaded, slip past the automated copyright checker, but that it happened so often that the AI saw the same so many times it overwhelmed other content and baked, without error and at great opportunity cost, an entire book into it. And that it was rewarded for doing so.

AI could have free access to all public source codes on GitHub without respecting their licenses.

IANAL, but aren't their licenses are being respected up until they are put into a codebase? At least insomuch as Google is allowed to display code snippets in the preview when you look up a file in a GitHub repo, or you are allowed to copy a snippet to a StackOverflow discussion or ticket comment.

I do agree regulation is a very good idea, in more ways than just citation given the potential economic impacts that we seem clearly unprepared for.

Doesn't the ROG Ally just use Windows?

Fair cop.

Yeah, those are doing some heavy lifting for the aesthetic here.

I remember looking for a wrist rest a bit back, but it was hard to find something that was a combination of:

• Affordable
• Real wood (not epoxy)
• Didn't scream it's branding

This one is real sleek.