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The best understanding of matter is in the form of quantum field theory (QFT). QFT is always formulated with some background metric (geometry) of spacetime as an input.

One idea is that the metric (geometry, gravity) could be a field just as matter is a field and people tried to apply the standard rules of (perturbative) QFT to gravity but failed. This is because the theory of gravity is unrenormalizable [0]. An interesting avenue in saving this line of thought is asymptotic safety where the idea is that gravity coupled to the standard model could actually be renormalizable in a certain sense [1].

In any case general relativity and quantum theory have so far been irreconcilable and there is now consensus on how to bridge the gap between those two theories. It is exactly because of this that most physicists will think of gravity and the other forces to be of a different nature.

When people say that gravity is not a force they mean that there is no known particle which acts as the intermediary of said force. For all the other forces we have a theory that explains the exertion of force via a particle.

Your first point states that "general relativity is just a model". Many physicists believe that it is more than a model but a true description of what the world really is like. I understand your urge to label theories as models, but ultimately the question is whether or not there is some level of ground truth that can be accessed in the form of mathematical theories.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization#Renormalizabil... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_safety_in_quantum_g...


> been irreconcilable and there is now consensus on how to bridge the gap

Suspect the "is now consensus" should be "is no consensus" :)


"...but ultimately the question is whether or not there is some level of ground truth that can be accessed in the form of mathematical theories."

Didn't Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem show we should anticipate some unprovable fundamental Truths, since we are within the system we seek to define?


> The excellent VimTeX plugin is the reason to use Vim over another LaTeX editor.

I agree that the plugin is best-in-class. Whenever I write LaTeX in Vim without the plugin installed I feel incredibly handicapped. (Also the documentation of the plugin is fantastic.)


Thanks for the kind words! <3


Reminds me of the "lumiroses" from Margaret Atwood's dystopian MaddAddam trilogy. Although the roses are not integral to the books, the general theme of the series is taking bioengineering one step too far.


What kind of features are not covered by the current implementation of profiles? <https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...>


This is correct as long as you restrict your point of view only to sets. Even in pure mathematics one is usually interested in sets with additional structures. For instance, even though one speaks of the "set of real numbers" one usually implies that there is extra structure. In particular one usually requires that this set has operations "addition" and "multiplication" that make this set a ring. Then zero is the neutral element of addition and the annihilator of multiplication, so very special indeed!


Operations are just sets :)


Indeed. We can only hope this is an intentional self-referential joke.


  #! /bin/bash

  pdf_one="$1"
  pdf_two="$2"

  text_one=$(mktemp)
  text_two=$(mktemp)

  pdftotext "$pdf_one" "$text_one"
  pdftotext "$pdf_two" "$text_two"

  diff "$text_one" "$text_two"


It is entirely possible for that to present unexpected differences because of the way that the PDF format works. One can have two different PDFs that encode the same content in two different ways and unless `pdftotext` does virtual layout and then OCR-like extraction, you might end up with jumbled text or text in different orders.


not only is this the first solution presented in the article, you've not even bothered to pass -layout to pdftotext or -u/-y to diff which would make this marginally workable. spaces after shebang also doesn't always work (e.g. in qemu), you don't clean up the temporary files, and the temporary files have unhelpful names.


I did some research about the space after shebang and discovered that it was evidently a (bug/misunderstanding) from the autoconf "portable shell" guide that just stuck, even after being corrected in the modern manual

Links for those who are similarly curious, with the 2nd link being especially fascinating:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/276751/is-space-all...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170215070707/http://www.in-ulm... (courtesy of one of the answers in the first link but separately interesting IMHO)

I will say, I don't know if it's Stockholm Syndrome from years of writing them with the space or what, but I do find the space version nicer to read, doubly so when using the [almost obligatory on macOS] `/usr/bin/env bash` form since it makes all the participants in the shebang space delimited.

I can easily see the counterargument from those misguided souls who hard-code `/bin/bash` that the non space version is their muscle memory and requires less mental parsing


Won't that fail terribly if the text has been re-flowed?


> Ability to change order of accounts in UI

I was always perplexed when I had to change the ordering of my accounts and still had to do it manually by editing the configuration after all these years. A big improvement for sure!


I screwed up the configuration multiple times trying to do this. Thanks god for this feature.


While I agree that the article should have mentioned black hole evaporation, I would like to point out that "dA/dt > 0" is commonly referred to as "Hawking's area theorem" as a quick online search can verify and Stephen Hawking certainly did publish on this topic.


There are other forms of coercion than bribery.


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