JulianRota
2yr ago
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When standing neutrally, my feet are angled outwards by around 15 degrees or so. Everything about them works and feels fine like this. I'm pretty sure at least one health teacher and/or medical professional has told me that it's a normal and common individual variation. But it's surprising to me how many gym coaches and other such lower-level professionals have acted like I'm doing it on purpose and I should be able to just stop and point my feet straight. I can point them straight ahead, but it feels highly awkward and unnatural, with a constant tension to move back to my "neutral", and I don't think I could keep them like that while doing any significant activity. So the behavior of my actual feet/legs is just fine as-is, but the behavior of certain people about it is highly irritating.
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I'm pretty sure my nose runs about 10x more than most people in all situations. It tends to be particularly severe around temperature changes, like eating temperature-hot food or going from a cold outdoor environment to a heated indoor. Keeping boxes of tissues around is pretty much a must.
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A possible advantage or corollary to the above, I basically never get sick. The last time I recall being sick was around 15 years ago, and I only noticed when I came home from work and went to go up the stairs of my place at the time and found it much more difficult than usual, enough to make me think something was wrong besides just being tired or sore. I actually felt fine again the next day, though I took the day off of work anyways as a precaution. Aside from that, nothing. I'm one of a relatively few people I know who, during the entire course of Covid mania, never felt sick a single day, despite taking few to no precautions and breaking most of the rules.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I'm not super against paying for it, I'm just a little reluctant to when I don't have any idea what to use it for that's actually useful. I've mostly used ChatGPT for things I might otherwise google for general explanations. It does mostly provide better results than whatever you'd find on Google.
JulianRota
2yr ago
How are you guys accessing ChatGPT4 anyways? I've used ChatGPT a couple of times and I was under the impression that GPT4 is only available via the commercial API with significant costs. Are you all paying for it, or is there some other site that lets you use it for free for some limited amount?
JulianRota
2yr ago
If lawyers and doctors were smarter, they'd get right on it too, at least by demanding regulators put massive burdens of evidence to prove that models perform better than humans do. Far easier to pull off today, when the models are still deficient in key areas, versus in 2 to 3 years when it becomes rather obvious they're on par or better. (Obvious, not that they already aren't in most ways that matter)
Is there actually an issue here? Doctors and Lawyers are already 2 of the relatively few fields that are legally regulated. A person with a government license must sign off on all significant practice of either and they are legally responsible if they make any bad decisions, regardless of whether they came from their own brains, a magazine article, or the most recent LLM. So even in the "worst case" what would they do to these fields besides make it easier for the licensees, who would probably get paid well for just reading the output, making sure it isn't insane, and signing off on it? I don't think there'd be much push for change until the general public says something like, hey, why do we have to pay this guy so much just to rubber-stamp this AI output.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Every programming language has a "standard library" of helper classes/functions/etc that are included with it, a library of loadable third-party modules that provide more stuff, and a way to specify and load those.
Python is a pretty good general-purpose language, and usually my first suggestion for what to learn for programming newbies. You can find the docs for the standard lib here - Python standard libs are known for being pretty comprehensive. Personally, I have trouble reading large volumes of docs that aren't relevant to anything I'm working on, so I recommend to anyone seeking to learn to just go ahead and install Python locally and start building things. Usually your 2 for local automation tasks and sometimes modding games are a good source of tasks that are simple enough to not overwhelm a newbie but still feel like you're accomplishing something useful.
I would suggest building some stuff using just the standard lib to get used to how to do things. Later on you can learn about how to find third-party packages, install them, and use their functionality.
JulianRota
2yr ago
This appears to be a straight copy-paste of the following article:
https://caffeineandphilosophy.com/2017/05/15/the-violent-artwork-of-cleon-peterson/
Written by "C.B. Robertson" on May 15, 2017.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I wonder if it would help to create a mechanism/policy that did something like:
[Mod comment] This comment is too antagonistic/snarky/uncharitable/whatever. It is now hidden from public view. You may either edit it to be less [whatever] and submit it to be approved to show again, or delete it yourself.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Good explanation, thanks. I thing along these lines I've always wondered:
The housing crisis was spurred in large part by the Bush administration’s relentless push to ‘end the legacy of redlining’ by pressuring banks into lending to just about anybody without much consideration of their long term ability to pay, and many mortgage salesmen and retail banking compliance/KYC deliberately looked the other way as people lied and were coached to lie on application forms to borrow even more money.
My impression is that a substantial amount of the financial shenanigans that led to the crisis were based on all of the various actors who make up the pipeline of financing mortgages trying to figure out some way to themselves not lose their shirts in the environment of all of these sketchy mortgages the banks were forced to make. Where "forced" is not in the sense of "you will go to jail if you don't do this", but a more subtle indication that "we will audit and regulate your bank out of existence unless you do this". So essentially, deep down everybody knows it's going to collapse somehow eventually, and they're all trying to arrange things such that they're not the ones holding the bag when it does, which involves never acknowledging that to anyone else. Do you think this is accurate, or off-base?
JulianRota
2yr ago
I agree with the main point - that seeing that my comments mostly get a decent number of upvotes is good motivation to keep coming back and keep posting. I don't want to see that go away, and if we end up entirely replacing the voting and scores with the mod volunteer system, I hope we come up with some way to provide a visible signal to the effect of "5 of 8 mod volunteers rated your post as above neutral" (or didn't or whatever). One of the reasons why I don't participate as much on classic PHPBB-style forums anymore is there's much higher friction towards seeing if anybody liked or responded to your comments.
That said, I kind of like the 24-hour delay. It avoids negative feelings from possibly-temporary voting and snap judgements based on whether you or the person you're debating are getting better votes, and provides motivation to come check the forum the next day. Part of me would indeed enjoy seeing a total score that I can watch go up, but I think it might encourage less healthy thinking/posting, like too high of an urge to post thing that pander to the community to watch the number go up faster. At least, I think subtle changes to these things have a much stronger effect on behavior than we give them credit for, so we should be careful with it.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Do you not think people could dictate essays, draw with their hands, edit music, etc with this tool? Why does this entire OS seem fundamentally based on consumption to you?
Sure, you could do that, but what's the advantage over conventional hardware? I can do all of those things just fine with any ordinary computer and off-the-shelf accessories and software that has been available for years. The only really new thing that this device has is the immersive VR experience. That's cool, but I don't see how that gets you anything for creating content.
I'm betting that right now many people who would otherwise be more economically useful are not because they don't have the temperament, ability, or inclination to learn how to type quickly or move a mouse around quickly. With VisionOS and later generations, we'll see much more 'natural' inputs, or at least have a lower barrier to entry than, say, learning to type at 100 wpm.
I don't think that's the case. Keyboards and mice have been dominant because they are very easy to use. Sure, it's not easy to type 100wpm with good accuracy, but pretty much everyone can type 10wpm. Typing 100wpm isn't that useful outside of stenography anyways. Typically the limiting factor is how fast you can think of more meaningful words of text or working lines of code to type, not how fast you can physically type them. In fact, I'd bet that whatever the solution VisionOS uses for typing (we haven't seen that yet, gee I wonder why that is, you'd think if they have an awesome solution to getting text from the user's mind to the device they'd have shown us), it's less intuitive than a keyboard. How much skill does it take to get 10 correct wpm into a VisionOS document versus a regular computer with a regular keyboard?
And that's before we get into things like, how easy is it to read text or data off of a physical page while typing it or something loosely based on it into a VisionOS document?
JulianRota
2yr ago
I'm not seeing this at all. First off, while the VisionOS sounds really cool, fundamentally it sounds pretty similar to the iPad - a device for consuming content, not creating it. Sure the interface is cool, movies look nice, and properly recorded immersive experiences are super awesome. But I don't see how it's a significant advantage in any type of content creation. For writing text and creating graphics, it's pretty much the same interface you can use now, except with a bigger virtual screen. You're going to be entering text by typing on a real or virtual keyboard I guess, or maybe speaking, either of which you can already do. If you want to do something more technical like writing code or system admin, it doesn't seem super well suited to the precision required. Sure it can do it, but it'll be emulating a conventional 2D UI with keyboard, so not really doing anything that you couldn't already do with any regular computer.
I guess you could also code by voice, per the video. But 1. I don't get that at all. Maybe you can type up some basic code if you know the special words and phrases, but it doesn't seem very practical to me to maintain or debug a large complex program. And 2. even if you could, you can already do that with a regular computer with a microphone and that software.
I don't see the supposed culture war impact at all either. First, I don't buy that "nerds" / tech workers are significantly less fit as a whole than the general population. I'm a developer and have worked with hundreds of others, they seem pretty average to me - a few are more muscular or athletic than usual, most have pretty standard office worker physique, a relative few look a bit more like the stereotypical nerd but are still perfectly capable physically. Next, even if that was the case, I don't see what VisionOS and related technologies would have to do with it - nothing about it is more physically intense than walking around a room. The number of people of all walks of life who would find anything about it the least bit physically challenging is probably effectively zero. Finally, as far as physical prowess being less important for societal status, that goes back at least to the start of the Industrial Revolution, if not further. Blame the backhoe, not the PC. A new user interface for PCs that may or may not make any difference in how they're effectively used won't make any difference at all.
JulianRota
2yr ago
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What are you trying to say?
I'm sure the case of "nerd" is perceived as (whether or not he actually did) making a pass at "jock"'s girl so jock beats up nerd, has happened. I am also sure that this couldn't possibly explain more than a small percentage of bullying. So what exactly is the point here?
JulianRota
2yr ago
A good point. Which means they'd need survival suits and/or a good life raft to not die of hypothermia in minutes. Which they may or may not actually have time to put on in their teeny little sub with freezing water gushing through the giant hatch on the side, even if they had them, which they probably don't. But is there even any point in bringing along that kind of gear given the other issues?
And all of this is probably irrelevant anyways, since it now looks like it did indeed shatter on the ocean floor. Which means the whole crew got mashed into paste faster than they could blink.
I guess it actually was cost-cutting! No need to make it reasonably practical to survive on the surface in this thing when it's already so shoddy it'll probably fail catastrophically at depth anyways.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I don't see a strong culture war aspect to this one actually. As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone thinks that thing was obviously a death-trap and the CEO was an idiot. There's only a little variance on how hard to sneer at the passengers for being foolish rich people and whether to trash the CEO for claiming he "didn't want to hire 50 year old white guys". Okay, they're foolish, but they've suffered pretty severe consequences for it. And the CEO sounds kinda racist with that statement, but I think he actually cares more about not bringing in anyone who would question the bad design and lax safety practices than their skin color - the staff pics I've seen look pretty lily-white.
A few other notes that I picked up in my reading about this:
The hatch is only rated to a third of the depth they were diving to, and the pressure vessel was never actually proofed to any depth at all. It's made of carbon fiber mostly, which tends to shatter instead of deform when over-stressed.
The life-support limit is a bullet point on a document, and a suspiciously round number. Nobody knows how they actually came up with this number or whether their life support systems were ever actually tested with 5 people for 96 hours. It's not clear how it works either or what its failure modes are. It's possible it could lead to an abnormally high oxygen level, which makes the environment highly flammable, and doesn't appear to have any firefighting capabilities or smoke mitigation systems.
The hatch is installed in the center of the endcap of the cylindrical vessel. It's pretty clearly designed to only be opened on the submersible sled thing it gets launched with. It seems likely to me that if the sub was floating on the surface and the hatch was opened, it would rapidly flood and sink. Maybe slow enough for people inside to get out, maybe not. I guess (if it made it to the surface) being able to maybe get out and float around on the surface in the middle of the Atlantic is better than definitely suffocating, but not a lot. I guess life vests, survival suits, and life rafts would be too much to expect here.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I don't know if I'd be considered an expert or anything, but I've long had a pet theory/argument regarding torture. It seems intuitively strange how so many people seem to have enthusiasm for it despite the enthusiasm in other circles for declaring that it "doesn't work". I think this can be resolved by my statement that torture works really great at what it's actually for - suppressing dissent in an authoritarian regime.
Some may say that it doesn't work very well for actually investigating dissident movements. But working well at that was never a factor. If you grab and torture some poor fellow and he gives you 3 random names out of desperation, and you do nasty things to them too, that's a feature, not a bug. Justice was never the goal, terror is. You've successfully terrorized 4 people, and anyone else who can see what happened to them, out of having anything to do with opposing the regime, whether or not they wanted to in the first place. And you've also made it so the security forces can never defect from the regime, either individually or en masse, as too many people hate their guts.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Technically UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, so anything that's airborne and you don't know what it is right now is one. So in that sense they're real.
I don't think any of them are actually any kind of craft built by non-human creatures. I think they're all either normal animals doing normal things, or human-built aircraft, possibly weird and experimental ones and/or viewed in strange circumstances. At least, the ones that aren't hallucinated or completely made up for whatever reason.
Here is a video I found with a detailed explanation confirming what I had figured to be the case for the recent Navy videos - it's raw video being shot in infrared through a sophisticated aircraft tracking camera system. Once you fully take into account the characteristics of infrared cameras (lens flare from very hot things like jet exhaust which is invisible in visual spectrum) and how the tracking system automatically maneuvers the camera to track a moving aircraft while mounted on an aircraft itself, and unwind those things, the targeted object acts an awful lot like a perfectly normal aircraft doing perfectly normal things.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Wow, I wasn't aware of any of this. Despite being a developer, I don't really engage much with SE. If I find an answer to something there on a Google search, I'll usually prefer it over random blogs, but I don't have much interest in writing questions or answers there.
It seems to me that SE is designed to maximize karma given for fast answers to simple newbie questions, so that's where the great majority of the energy of it goes to. IME, it's very rare to get a real answer to an actual hard question. If I manage to find an unanswered hard question that I know the answer to, I'm willing to post mine, but I don't see much point in asking questions there.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I'm not so sure that a multiple-choice framework can really work for something like this, there's such a huge variety of possible positions.
I'd start by doubting that food insecurity is a meaningful vulnerability in the modern era. It seems highly unlikely that anyone could maintain a shipping blockade against a first-world island nation for long enough for food supply to actually be an issue with a reasonable stockpile in place. Even if you had perfect food security, wouldn't shortages of something else start to hurt almost as much soon enough anyways?
If you had to, though, I'd say you should rejigger the property / tax laws in order to make it reasonably profitable to produce and sell local food at a price competitive to imports with modest tariffs.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Well technically it would work I guess. But then you could also torture anyone suspected of disloyalty to the regime to death while forcing them to name accomplices. That also works quite well, but I don't think I'd want to live in a country where that was routine policy.
Exactly where to draw the line is a little tricky, but I think if we're routinely persuading malcontent teenagers to do just enough to get them convicted without them ever having spoken to an actual dissident group of some sort, and this happens say 10x more often than actual terrorist acts, we've gone too far in the direction of suppressing dissent.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Thinking about this some more, I came to an interesting realization:
Up to now, everything that Reddit did around this issue seemed boneheadedly stupid in pretty much every way. This might be the first psychologically smart thing they've done in this whole scandal.
Okay, I can see that they have an interest in and a right to make a fair amount of money off of their APIs and data. But why in the world do they have to jack the prices so high that third party apps are mostly unviable, and do it at such short notice that the few who thought they might be able to make it work can't get things arranged in time? I can't see how that benefits anyone. And why have they been sitting on their asses so long, ignoring all of the extra features and capabilities provided by third-party mobile apps and mod tools? It's like they don't even have a clue what those features are, how much difference each one makes, or how hard they would all be to implement themselves. Any dope could have come up with a fairer solution that lets the apps stay alive and still gets Reddit a cut of the money. It's framed as the stupid and thoughtless Reddit admins against the power users, who just want to contribute content and commentary basically for free.
I'm not super inclined by my side of the culture war to care about the Reddit PowerMod clique. But the issue was framed in such a way to paint it primarily as an attack against the more everyday Reddit powerusers, the people who post and comment a lot and usually prefer third-party mobile apps, and also taking out the disabled who depend on them, just for kicks I guess. So I felt like I at least weakly supported the blackout, though I didn't care enough to actually take any significant action based on it.
Now, with this new statement, Reddit has successfully re-framed the issue in my mind and, going by the sentiment I see around the internet, in the minds of many other users. Now it's the reasonable Reddit admins against a whiny and petulant clique of PowerMods who run all of the major subs with iron fists and revel in their tiny little empires. They're whining that their jobs might get a little bit harder, they think they're so great and awesome that they can't be replaced on a whim, and I feel happy to see them get proven wrong. The majority of Reddit users don't really care what app they have to use to access Reddit, many probably weren't even aware of these third-party apps at all, and they're starting to get pissed that their favorite places are being shuttered because the mods are throwing a tantrum as they see it.
JulianRota
2yr ago
This post alone may not be, but the user is well-known for making "edgy" top-level posts which are mostly copy-pastes of articles elsewhere without any original commentary, performing minimal to no engagement in the discussion generated, and usually deleting the post within a few hours. You can argue for any position you want here, but you have to actually argue for it, not just stir the pot. He seems like he's either pot-stirring for the lols, or is some sort of "researcher" trying to generate comments that can be taken out of context to paint the whole forum as some kind of racist cesspool.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I doubt starting a general discussion community ever works. It seems to me that basically all the ones that exist started out as a discussion community for some specific thing, which then starts its own general channel for people into thing X to talk about anything.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Is it that the only thing that can get people really caring nowdays is when a piss water manufacturer offends them? I'd say the military going woke is a bigger deal than piss water going woke, but I don't see the red tribe treating it this way.
This is somewhat tangential to your main point, but the point of the Bud Light boycott was specifically to avoid getting into endless arguments about what's the best or most important target or how there are X many other deserving targets. It's to pick a single target for maximum visible effect and hit it with everything you've got while avoiding any distractions. If people are awed about how effective it was and afraid that they might be targeted next, then it did its job. In this view, those complaining about why we aren't going after some other target should be seen as concern trolls.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Your post is a bit on the snarky and sarcastic side, but I do see the point a little bit. If we're keeping a little perspective, this is still just an internet forum we're talking about. There are many thousands of them, constantly getting created and destroyed for any number of reasons. The worst "bad thing" we're talking about here is a moderate number of people being a little sad for a few weeks until they find a new place to post on the internet. It doesn't exactly hit my sympathy threshold.
And you might want to check out, say, /r/ShitPoliticsSays. It's full of heavily upvoted posts on Reddit default subs usually wishing things considerably worse to Red teamers than losing their favorite internet forum.
The "majors" - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc - have gotten much harder to reliably make an email account on without a real phone number or other email. You can avoid this by going with second-tier providers, like Protonmail, Fastmail, etc. You may have to pay a small amount for it, but it's probably worth it. Not sure about phones - you can get a cheap temporary phone number with various apps, but IME they're usually filtered for all of the usual services that use phone number verification, and it might be necessary to buy an additional actual real phone to do it. Probably better to avoid if you can. You can handle payments by buying prepaid credit cards, with cash if you're particularly paranoid.
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