0xbitcoiner

Music

Pubs Birthday edition! Daily Discussion Thread ~Music Saloon!

Public_N_M_E

happy birthday!

https://imgprxy.stacker.news/1RZAXLDCUQRb68riELJEnw1UrrXQDhDjH4iepiLnjqE/rs:fit:1280:720/aHR0cHM6Ly9tLnN0YWNrZXIubmV3cy8xMDkyNzE

charts_and_maps

HealthAndFitness

> **Knowing when people are most at risk allows us to offer support when it might make the biggest difference.**
>
> Mental health conditions can begin at almost any age. For many people, they develop in the early stages of life.
>
> Around a third of people who will ever experience a mental health disorder do so by the age of 14. Two-thirds do by the age of 25.
>
> But this varies a lot by condition. Some are much more common in childhood or adolescence, while others are more evenly distributed across adulthood. Knowing the age at which people might be particularly vulnerable to the onset of a mental health condition is important. It helps societies offer support — whether that’s an assessment of risk factors, screening, or preventive interventions — at the right time to make a difference.
>
> The chart below shows how this age distribution looks for nine different mental health disorders. Each curve shows, among people who will ever develop that condition, the share who first do so at any given age.
>
> The data behind this comes from a large meta-analysis of 192 studies by Marco Solmi and colleagues.
>
> I’ve sorted these conditions into three groups.
>
>
> ![](https://m.stacker.news/162281)
>
>
>
> [**...read more at ourworldindata.org**](https://ourworldindata.org/when-do-people-experience-mental-health-conditions-for-the-first-time)

When do people experience mental health conditions for the first time?

bitcoin

> From the project’s inception until now, [btc-verified](https://github.com/ProofOfKeags/btc-verified) has been focused on building up, layer by layer, a very minimal model of consensus. [Last month’s post](https://proofofkeags.com/research/2026-09-08-the-myth-of-the-valid-transaction.html) talked about how we can discover hidden subtleties in how something works when we try to formalize it. However, even as we formalize things we have to resist the temptation to merely assume that the precise map we have created actually reflects the reality on the ground. This month, however, I decided to take a stab at anchoring this model to the Bitcoin network as it exists in the real world.
>
> It’s tricky to do this type of thing because it forces us to ask the question how do we know the map matches the territory? How close can we get?
>
> For most software that you want to verify it is an option on the table to simply write the software in a verifiable language, compile that down to code that actually runs on silicon and be on your merry way. Alternatively, if the code you’re trying to verify is pure C code, there are ways to [verify the C code directly](https://www.frama-c.com/fc-plugins/wp.html) since C’s operational semantics are small enough to reason somewhat efficiently about.
>
> [**...read more at proofofkeags.com**](https://proofofkeags.com/research/2026-10-19-connecting-map-to-territory.html)

Connecting Map to Territory

Daily Discussion Thread ~Music Saloon!

BlokchainB

**Julia Jacklin - If I Had The Hand Of God**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjpDlXpbEnw

bitcoinplusplus

Keynote + Kickoff — niftynei, Rene Pickhardt | bitcoin++ Berlin, payments editio

Politics_And_Law

history

econ

> **Escaping Venezuela lays bare the human cost of the socialist project.**
>
> The documentary [Escaping Venezuela](https://escapingvenezuela.reason.com/) portrays the unprecedented unfolding of the contemporary Venezuelan crisis, one that cannot be grasped through constitutional, political science, international law, or electoral analysis alone. Its present dimensions are rooted in a broader historical arc spanning 1958 to 2026. That arc began with a functioning, peaceful yet imperfect democracy in what was then one of Latin America’s wealthiest nations (1958–1999). It gave way to twenty-first-century socialism under Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) and Nicolás Maduro (2013–2026), an era defined by institutional decay, the dismantling of democracy, the capture of state institutions by criminal networks with international ties, profound economic and social collapse, and systematic human rights violations. It now enters a new phase marked by the Trump administration’s asserted control over Venezuela, following the January 3, 2026, military operation that seized Nicolás Maduro, whom much of the international community regarded as a usurper, and brought him before the United States (U.S.) federal courts. 
>
> At the beginning of Venezuela’s democratic era, the system relied on consensus among the major political parties on key issues. It also gradually incorporated national business organizations, labor unions, and religious groups into a semi-corporatist framework that allowed them to participate in key economic and political decisions. Over time, the bipartisan system evolved into a complex, conflict-ridden multiparty system, with organizations outside the parties becoming increasingly influential. This convergence of diverse, competing interests, along with the risk these groups perceived to their sometimes-opaque privileges and interests from the market-friendly economic reforms of the late 1980s, weakened democracy and enabled practices that undermined economic and political integrity.  
>
> The documentary vividly describes how during the second presidency of social democrat Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989–1993), Venezuela was shaken by the *Caracazo,* a wave of protests, riots, and looting that began on February 27, 1989. Amnesty International reported that human rights organizations identified approximately 400 people who died or went missing during the events. Some commentators contend that the *Caracazo* was planned rather than entirely spontaneous. They cite reports that politically active students occupied public transportation facilities at 6 a.m. on February 27, 1989, and distributed preprinted leaflets. They also point to allegations that police had been instructed not to intervene, while President Carlos Andrés Pérez blamed police insubordination. Some accounts cite evidence of coordination and identify Jorge Rodríguez, then a student leader and later a prominent figure in Venezuela’s socialist government, as an organizer. Paulina Gamus, who chaired the congressional inquiry, believed the unrest had been orchestrated but had spiraled out of control. Chávez later said the *Caracazo* helped spur his plans for the 1992 coup attempt.
>
> [**...read more at civitasoutlook.com**](https://www.civitasoutlook.com/research/the-fall-of-venezuela-29f77b11-3ad0-49e3-abfb-4e53db499870)

The Fall of Venezuela

**Bloc Party - Coming On Strong**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1xnoEkr5Dk

BooksAndArticles

science

> **Moritz Hardt, author of a new book on benchmarks, believes these “standardized tests” for artificial intelligence are fundamentally broken — but not unfixable.**
>
> Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work according to an extremely simple logic: If you want to know what an AI model can do, devise a standardized test to gauge it. But AI benchmarks can also dominate the behavior of the entire field.
>
> In 1987, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s [first benchmark](https://arxiv.org/html/2404.06647v1#S5) on automatic speech-to-text translation showed that state-of-the-art AI could not outperform so-called “dumb” statistical approaches. The poor performance helped to usher in an AI winter. For 25 years, interest in AI research waned and funding dried up.
>
> Then, in 2012, [another benchmark](https://www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/index.php) called ImageNet swung the pendulum back. An eight-layer neural network [trounced](https://spectrum.ieee.org/alexnet-source-code) other algorithms at classifying images and kicked off a “deep learning revolution.”
>
> Nowadays, new AI benchmarks, geared at large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, get created and solved with clockwork regularity, purporting to measure everything from [domain-specific expertise](https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/technical-performance) to “[general intelligence](https://arcprize.org/arc-agi).” But rather than hail this trend as proof of AI’s skyrocketing potential, many in the field — [skeptics](https://x.com/GaryMarcus/status/2028488127875342724) and [boosters](https://x.com/karpathy/status/1896266683301659068?lang=en) alike — take it as evidence that benchmarking itself has become [fatally flawed](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02462-5).
>
> [**...read more at quantamagazine.org**](https://www.quantamagazine.org/he-wants-ai-benchmarking-to-be-a-science-not-a-dark-art-20261016/)

He Wants AI Benchmarking To Be a Science, Not a Dark Art

AskSN

Stacker_Sports

2026-27 UCL Pool: Week 3 submissions open

Carresan

Stacker_Stocks

Stacker Stocks Weekly Close Contest 🟩 or 🟥- Week #15 Win up to 30k Sats!

**Blasted Mechanism - Battle Of Tribes (Live - ॐ Anos) \[Sala Tejo - MEO Arena]**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOhIzCy_juw

![](https://m.stacker.news/161782)

[**🔗 visualcapitalist.com**](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-millennials-own-vs-rent-in-america/)

Where Millennials Own vs. Rent in America

> **Nobel laureates helped explain how expectations shape spending decisions, inflation, and the effectiveness of economic policy. Yes, that feels obvious.**
>
> On Monday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics to [Robert Hall](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2026/hall/facts/) (Stanford University and the Hoover Institution) and [Michael Woodford](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2026/woodford/facts/) (Columbia University) for their work on the “[microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2026/press-release/).”
>
> There are already several excellent articles summarizing the laureates’ contributions to economics. Some particular favorites are [Brian Albrecht’s](https://www.economicforces.xyz/p/and-the-2026-economics-nobel-goes) first-rate explanation of how their work fits within and transformed the broader macroeconomics literature, [Tyler Cowen](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/10/robert-hall-nobel-laureate.html) and [Alex Tabarrok](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/10/the-nobel-prize-goes-to-robert-hall-and-michael-woodford.html) over at *Marginal Revolution*, and [David Henderson](https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-nobel-prize-for-macroeconomics-done-right-7c71eb3a) writing in *The Wall Street Journal*.
>
> Whenever the Nobel is announced, we are invariably asked to summarize the work it recognizes into a soundbite. [James Buchanan](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1986/buchanan/facts/) won in 1986 for explaining that politicians are people and they respond to incentives. [Ronald Coase](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1991/summary/) won in 1991 for pointing out that finding a trading partner and signing a contract are costly. [Elinor Ostrom](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ostrom/facts/) won in 2009 for demonstrating that communities can work together to take care of the resources nearby. [Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2010/press-release/) won in 2010 for pointing out that economic policy can cause unemployment to last longer. This year’s prize can be summarized in two words: expectations matter.
>
> [**...read more at thedailyeconomy.org**](https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/expectations-matter-this-years-economics-nobel-explains-why/)

Expectations Matter. This Year's Economics Nobel Explains Why.

> Strategy’s stock price dipped 4% in after-hours trading yesterday as traders [speculated](https://x.com/i/trending/2110749738278518961) about its removal from the MSCI World Index.
>
> The stock indexation giant [announced](https://app2.msci.com/webapp/index_ann/DocGet?pub_key=aq0wbkjxPgo=&lang=en&format=html) on Thursday that it will adopt rules removing “non-operating companies” from its Global Investable Market Indexes, including its MSCI World Index that benefits from substantial, passive investment inflows. 
>
> Strategy is the biggest name those rules could remove, and the company’s MSTR common stock immediately traded 4% lower within 20 minutes of the closing bell after news of the rule change disseminated.
>
>
> ![](https://m.stacker.news/161779)
>
>
>
> [**...read more at protos.com**](https://protos.com/strategy-dips-on-bad-msci-world-index-news/)

Strategy dips on bad MSCI World Index news

Daily Stock Discussion ~Stacker_Stocks

Permaculture

> ![](https://m.stacker.news/161778)
>
>
>
> The ‘biofriendly’ nature of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) filament often gets touted as one of its main advantages over alternatives like PETG, but even a modicum of research ought to inform a person that the biodegrading feature of PLA is only true for pure PLA without additives and at temperatures at or above its glass transition temperature (Tg). Thus the [results of a year-long experiment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8GZxMg5IBw) by \[I built a thing] shouldn’t be too surprising.
>
> After burying said PLA in the garden like any self-respecting person does who tries to dispose of some evidence, the PLA suffered through a European winter and very hot, dry summer, before being dug up again recently for inspection and testing. Although not the first time that someone has tested this, it’s a good reminder considering just how much PLA filament is used each year.
>
> In total three sample sets were used, one being the control, the other two buried in soil and compost respectively. A visual inspection showed no major difference, and a tensile strength test also showed no statistically significant change among all three sample sets. The experiment could have been concluded here, but instead calorimetry was used in a laboratory setting to see whether exposure to microbes as commonly found in soil does anything significant.
>
> [**...read more at hackaday.com**](https://hackaday.com/2026/10/16/disposing-of-pla-and-why-composting-is-not-an-option/)

Disposing Of PLA And Why Composting Is Not An Option

tech

> **We've shown that magic state cultivation works on Google Quantum AI hardware.**
>
> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtTr87pij54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtTr87pij54)
>
> Google Quantum AI has demonstratively opened up a key bottleneck in quantum computing: we’ve shown that “magic state cultivation” works in practice on our Willow processor, reducing errors about 40x compared to without it. This breakthrough, published today in [Science](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee7961), is a crucial step towards scaling up quantum computing to practical use.
>
> ## The "magic state" bottleneck
>
> Since 2004, long before quantum computing was a practical engineering pursuit, researchers have foreseen a particularly tricky bottleneck.
>
> To achieve “universal” quantum computing and execute useful programs, you need to be able to run (and [error-correct](https://research.google/blog/making-quantum-error-correction-work/)) a specific set of quantum operations. You can do this by first creating what are called "magic states," so dubbed because they can help you create the operations you need for going beyond classical computing.
>
> [**...read more at blog.google**](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/quantum-computing/magic-state-cultivation-quantum-computing/)

Bringing the magic: Google breaks open a bottleneck in quantum computing

Animal_World

siggy47

> Paramount Skydance’s (PSKY) recent $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) was one of the largest corporate takeovers in history. Despite the deep equity pockets acquiring parties, it required a massive $52 billion in new debt financing across investment-grade bonds, high-yield bonds and leveraged loans, making it one of the largest debt financings in history. For high-yield investors, we estimate that the $12.4 billion of new bonds, combined with the existing bonds, will represent somewhere between 1.3% and 2.0%+ of the ICE BofA High Yield Global and US Indices respectively, making it difficult for index-aware managers to ignore, regardless of their reservations or enthusiasm for the combination.
>
> This got us thinking about not only the scale of the transaction, but about a blog Luke published nearly a decade ago and how dramatically US TMT has evolved since then.In 2017 when the blog was published, the US TMT sector was rife with merger and consolidation speculation as companies navigated a rapidly changing competitive environment and shifting consumer behaviour. US spreads had largely recovered from the Energy downturn and base rates remained low, encouraging acquisitions that were hopefully accretive and, no doubt, beneficial to lizard-faced management teams’ incentive plans as well.
>
> Our analysts put together the chart below summarising many of the mergers, acquisitions and industry combinations being discussed across the sector. [https://bondvigilantes.com/blog/2017/04/telecom-acquisition-spree-set-kick-off-u-s/](https://bondvigilantes.com/blog/2017/04/telecom-acquisition-spree-set-kick-off-u-s/)
>
>![](https://m.stacker.news/161720)
>
>
>
> [**...read more at bondvigilantes.com**](https://bondvigilantes.com/blog/2026/10/what-the-past-gets-wrong-about-the-future/)

What the Past Gets Wrong About the Future

> *by* [**olkurbatov**](https://delvingbitcoin.org/u/olkurbatov)
>
> **Abstract**. BIP-352 does not recommend FROST- / MuSig2-based inputs “due to lack of a security proof”. This post describes a protocol that lets a multiparty sender perform a secure Silent Payment: the wallet computes an ECDH share as a weighted sum of the signers’ contributions, and 𝖠𝗀𝗀𝖣𝖫𝖤𝖰 aggregates their responses into a single BIP-374 proof.
>
> **Notation**. 𝐺 is the generator of secp256k1’s group, and \[𝑎]𝐺 is scalar multiplication.
>
> ## A shared interface for multiparty keys
>
> We can represent a wallet key as a linear combination of per-signer secrets:
>
> [**...read more at elvingbitcoin.org**](https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/silent-payments-for-multiparty-wallets/2960)