MollieTheMare
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User ID: 875
MollieTheMare
3d ago
It is quite obnoxious to be using a different unit than the locals. A better test might be how long it takes the average person to develop an intuition for the alternative unit. Such that they no longer have to explicitly or mentally calculate.
MollieTheMare
3d ago
It's quite interesting to see the metric absolutists come out defending using ½ as a base unit of increment. Maybe powers of two fractional inches aren't so bad after all.
MollieTheMare
4d ago
Everyone here talking about the bridge. The bridge only cost $35 million (nominal 1933 dollars), the real thing to 'mire is the $400MM net, an unparalleled tribute to cost disease.
MollieTheMare
5d ago
I am not a gun expert
And it does show.
we don't have firepower right now ... It's all pistols
This is always going to be a problem when you bring only your sidearm to a gunfight. Even if your opponent only has handguns (which have the problem of being easier to conceal), you'd still be better off grabbing your long gun from the trunk. Or, more likely, for modern departments running Ford Explorers from a center console mount.
See rule 6 of gun fighting:
If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun.
Yes, any rifle cartridge fired from a rifle-length barrel will have more kinetic energy than a pistol caliber fired from a pistol-length barrel. No, this is not unique to guns that look particularly scary. No, there is nothing magical about 5.56; FMJ, varmint rounds, soft points, steel cores, etc., exist for all sorts of rifle rounds. The various American .30s used ubiquitously for game like deer in North America are all capable of being more powerful than the 5.56. The main advantage of the 5.56 is a flatter trajectory at intermediate distance, which doesn't matter indoors.
For home defense, there are different philosophies. The advantage of the 5.56 is the velocity gives you the ability to use frangible ammunition, which reduces the risk of overpenetration. There is also no need for portability or concealment for home defense, which favors the more effective long gun. See rule 6.
The cops do have other slight advantages in an indoor environment. Mainly, they can use carbine-length barrels, which are more wieldy for clearing work. The rest of us would have to fill out an eon's worth of paperwork to get permission from the ATF to make an SBR.
The AR platform is far from cutting-edge at this point, being designed in 1956 (70 years ago). They have, in fact, made a difference even if a government has armor, see, for example, the Troubles.
MollieTheMare
6d ago
Gin Rickey... bartenders feel like they should know how to make them
Or they will ask if you just finished reading The Great Gatsby. But seriously underrated.
G&T also solid, but only if served by a pretty British Airways flight attendant with a slight scowl but otherwise impeccable manners.
MollieTheMare
8d ago
adds cost to virtually every single consumer product currently in existence
I assume it was someone else who said they were a Gmail user? YouTube and Gmail are both extremely common and valuable consumer products. Equivalent levels of email service were and are much more expensive if not ad supported. YouTube provides you access to more media for free than you could ever consume, far more than premium paid services like pay-per-view or classic HBO. You can use both ad-free if you want to pay for the premium version or are okay with ad-block. There is clearly a category of products that is cheaper because of being subsidized by advertising.
To address your other point about polluting the information commons: it is a simple fact of life that the information commons is polluted in far more pernicious ways. People once espoused the idea that an object’s acceleration under gravity was a function of its mass. This was the accepted wisdom of both experts and the masses. There is wrong information out there. It's up to you to figure out what to believe; there's no oracle to consult for truth. Except, if you want to filter out advertising, then there is an oracle, and the pollution is trivial to filter out. A machine can literally do it. Ad-block at the browser or DNS level has nearly perfect accuracy.
You also assert that this hinges on:
advertising dollars from other productive uses
It's not at all shown that this is a zero-sum game and that advertising is net negative in sign. The marginal cost of actually delivering the advertisements on the internet rounds to zero. The question, then, is where the dollars used to produce and target ads would have gone. If your counterfactual is curing cancer, sure, but that seems unlikely. If the marginal dollar goes into producing Lululemon as a status and social signaling device which simultaneously makes my wife's butt look good, that has positive utility to me. If the counterfactual is my tax dollars go to support yet another starving artist who would have been a marketer at Lululemon, that's net negative utility to me.
I hate advertisements too. So I pay for services I value and ad-block everywhere else, because FM, they're still getting the analytics at least. I don't think anyone needs to come and save me from advertisements, and I don't think enforcing any sort of ban would be at all practical. Your assertion that it would be practical assumes:
because marketing by its very nature needs to be noticeable.
No, these are just the most annoying ads to you. Guerrilla advertising and astroturfing are real things. And no, ads in general are not "noticeable" to normies; they are just part of the background fabric of life. Have you ever watched a normie browse the web? There are advertisements that would make my eyes bleed, but they just scroll along happy as a clam. They do not feel bothered by them in the same way you or I feel bothered by them.
MollieTheMare
9d ago
Rereading what I wrote, I was pretty unclear.
More explicitly: yes, I agree. The economic and ethical considerations of ad-block are non-trivial and annoying to constantly rehash. From a practical perspective, if you are so inclined to absolutely hate advertising, using an ad blocker, or just paying a trivial amount of money (for an upper-middle-class consumer) for premium service, seems eminently more feasible than trying to figure out how to ban advertising outright.
MollieTheMare
9d ago
Zero research was done going into this
I do wonder what a more convincing version of this for the modern internet would look like. Like, the idea there is some reflexivity that negates some of the utilitarian arguments for capitalism is not new. There is extensive literature:
In the revised sequence, this flow is reversed and businesses exercise control over consumers by advertising and related salesmanship activities.
It does also seem like several of the most obvious threads were not addressed. MotteAnon12345:
The obvious reasons: ads are annoying and obnoxious and degrade the general experience of the web.
Um, if internet ads bother you → ad-block?
MollieTheMare
10d ago
I have already said in the past here that my head canon ends with Voyager. Even in that universe, they have to deal with backtracking on the crime and poverty front of a Roddenberry utopia.
They do have crime, at least at the frontier. For example, in DS9 the Orion Syndicate is treated extensively. In “Prodigal Daughter,” they are dealing with a Federation species (Tril), but I think it is implied the law enforcement there is not Starfleet.
They also do have scarcity, and credits are mentioned in canon. They also have private property, e.g., Château Picard. In Voyager, being limited on energy, the ship has rationing, and therefore, for some reason, a cook? Beta canon suggests that normally there is some sort of replicator energy–equivalent UBI in credits, so there is effectively no poverty when there is no scarcity. My favorite part of DS9 is during the Dominion War, when the Federation rediscovers scarcity in “Treachery, Faith and the Great River.” Nog, coming from a society that still values money, demonstrates that efficient markets, or the “Great Material Continuum” in canon, can help reduce scarcity.
Of course, I do not expect Paramount to respect any established canon New Trek, thus my head canon ending.
MollieTheMare
11d ago
I was being imprecise here, and I do not have all that extensive of knowledge of the landscape of instruction sets and architectures out in the wild.
That being said. If you already know what you want, AMD64 is unambiguous and interchangeable with x86-64. As a name it is less legibly part of the x86 lineage than e.g. 8086, iAPX 286, i386, etc.
I am not aware of a second 64-bit instruction set invented by AMD. It is plausible there exists some highly specialized instruction set out in the wild invented by AMD that is 64-bit, but no one would reasonably assume you were talking about that if you referenced AMD64. AMD the manufacturer does or has produce other 64-bit instruction set processors e.g. the AMD Opteron A1100, which uses the ARMv8-A instruction set.
MollieTheMare
11d ago
Yes, this does look like what you read when you look up what it's supposed to do.
And it hurts when you pull off the adhesive on the cups and it takes chest hair with it.
My electrodes may or may not have been bare stranded copper wire duct-taped to myself. I still can't believe what we used to get away with.
You can decompose arbitrary [X] into a sum of [Y basis]
It is in fact all linear-algebra all the way down.
SOTA models
I don't think it's so much a problem with the power of the model, but rather my own vagueness with recollection and prompting that I get back out what I put in.
MollieTheMare
11d ago
I often have to look up whether I need an x86 or x64 executable
It doesn't help that sometimes they refer to x86-64 as just x86 (assumes 32-bit address space are obviously deprecated) or AMD64 (as if that tells you anything about the instruction set). I suppose this is also a product of age and the computer market you grew up in. There was a time in the US when the IBM PC running an 8086 was the personal computer, and the fact that all other 86s descend from there feels natural. There was also a time when a 64-bit CPU felt like you were living in the future, e.g. Nintendo 64.
ECGs
I leave this one to the physicians. Small related story, though. In an effort to get me to stop bothering them, I once had a circuits lab TA tell me to go off and build an ECG. I did at some point succeed at "building" the world's shittiest ECG; at least it made an appropriately squiggly-looking line (relying on the oscilloscope for 98% of the work, of course). I'm pretty sure that experience has only left me more mystified about what an ECG is supposed to do.
Fourier transforms
Two useful notes here.
- The vast, vast majority of applied math at this level is just linear algebra with a Scooby-Doo mask on.
- If you're looking for a 'picture' to hold in your head, this 3Blue1Brown is a classic. Surprisingly appropriate for a huge range of mathematical sophistication.
And many more, all of which stubbornly refuse to come to mind, because of course they do.
This happens to me all the time, which calls back to my annoyance with LLMs sometimes. I'm sure it's partially a problem of imprecise prompting.
Often I will ask: "I'm trying to recall the name for something that is like X, Y, and Z. Can you help me determine what concept I'm looking for?"
Reply: "The concept is called XYZ and it works by X, Y, and Z." Entirely a hallucination when you then go to search for XYZ.
MollieTheMare
12d ago
I'm not even against using a LLM to refine your writing. I wish I had so I wouldn't have made that annoying set of typos.
I do think that particular bit of criticism was poorly formed, and I would have been very annoyed as well. I didn't understand of all posts to try to call out like that you would choose that one. Somehow I thought it would be unhelpful to leave it as if it was just one user trolling you though.
I make an intentional effort to be less acerbic these days.
Ironically, maybe that is what I've been noticing. I think, I'm probably unreasonably annoyed by that cloying droll persona that they give the average chatbot. I suppose, liking a slightly facetious and combative tone is slightly pathological on my part.
Not @jkf, and don't particularly want to get caught in this shit-storm. I also acknowledge I like your writing, I think it's some of the most consistent and interesting posting here. I also think you are a much better writer than me, so if that's your standard for receiving feedback feel free to just ignore the rest.
All that being said. It is uncanny, I have more than once in the last week been interacting with ChatGTP and thought "This could just as well be a Mechanical Turk and @self_made_human is on the other side." It's not just the use of bullet points, it's your tone, word choice, argument structure. It's not just the use of markdown, it's extremely machine like choice of formatting. I don't know what pangram looks for, they probably don't disclose to prevent people from gaming their system. And I'm not going to scrape the (already brittle) motte to do a textual analysis. But jfk is not the only one who has noticed that your writing has picked up somthing from ChatGTP.
I've always written like this.
Do you honestly not think your writing style has not changed at all over the course of three years? I think it's would be extraordinarily unlikely that someones writing style does not change at all over the course of years in their 20s. If you acknowledge your style has changed, is your claim it's directionality away from LLM style?
the only notable events in your mod log
I'll welcome your criticism about my writing style when you write something to impress me first.
This strikes me a quite distasteful. It strikes me as someone being upset they got some criticism, then decided to use their mod powers to make an ad hominem attack rather than ignoring or addressing the criticism. If you really don't care what the lesser writers here think of your style, why bother to dig through the mod log?
Edit: I wanted to add. I'm not saying you shouldn't adopt LLM style if that's what you want. I'm saying if that's not what you want, look out for it. It's possible other people can see it in your writing before you do, and it would be sad to loose a unique and interesting voice because someone accidentally let theirs get co-opted by a machine.
If it makes you feel better, you have a very different writing voice than ChatGTP or other LLMs. Not in a bad way! I come to the forum to interact with real people, if they all sounded like chatting with ChatGTP there wouldn't be a point.
Our Dear Doktor on the other hand. Very compelling posts sometimes. Very well articulated. Very well formated. But I prompted ChatGTP yesterday, and got a response so similar to his tone and style I did a double take. I'm actually not accusing him of using more LLM than he has let on. My reaction to the experience was "I have to be sure this doesn't happen to me, what if I'm vulnerable to letting ChatGTP gradually replace my voice"
MollieTheMare
13d ago
If exotics are out of your price range. You might consider buying a cheap motorcycle and riding the shit out of it. Also a classic midlife crisis look. Just make sure the bike kills you before the fiancé does for buying a motorcycle, otherwise you're in for a world of pain.
MollieTheMare
13d ago
For much the same reasons I stopped taking photos on my phone at some point.
I do like having photos to reminisce on though. So do still take photos of things.
It know it looks like obnoxious hipster shit, but I like the intentionality of film. Somehow the lower fidelity and conscious decision to use up a frame makes it feel like I am recalling the actual event, rather than reconstructing it from a forensic image. Extra obnoxiously, I like 120 6x9. Something about each frame being the size of your phone screen makes it feel extra tactile. And the fact that pushing the shutter button costs like (I shudder to think of it please don't tell me the actual cost) $4 a frame, and I only have 8 frames, is enough of a barrier where I'm not tempted to take photos "just in case."
MollieTheMare
14d ago
So not speculative from Orwells perspective, who already recognized the hazards and badness of at least Stalinism. But not yet recognized as a prescient critique of repeated failures of general socialism.
I don't think that's contradictory to what I recall. Maybe it's time for a re-read anyway.
MollieTheMare
14d ago
Well, super duper extra embarrassing given my user name. But was Animal Farm not an allegorical criticism of Stalin? Like the badness was known?
Again, sorry if I misremember, I've used this handle on various parts of the internet for literally longer than I can remember.
MollieTheMare
20d ago
My main complaint with Urbanists™ analysis is they fail to acknowledged that (until 2025) CAFE standards produced an enormously perverse pressure that contributed to the bigger and bigger vehicle trend. Normally people would be incentivized to buy smaller cars because they would be cheaper. The footprint model instead meant that small already efficient cars required expensive add-ons like hybridization or turbocharging to reach CAFE standards while giant trucks and SUVs could continue rolling along with much cheaper less fuel efficient systems.
There's also a pretty big gap on the enforcement. We have already crossed the diminishing returns point into negative territory with respect to additional vehicle safety you can buy. Despite progressively increasing vehicle safety standards and size, fatal crash rates are up from their lows. People clearly are at the point where their perceived safely produces absolute shit tier driver ability and attention. A huge portion of vehicular crashes are single vehicle incidents.
It's clear people in general don't realize how much of a hazard obstructing traffic with a two ton Honda Pilot is. Two things I think could help send the message that you need to pay attention and not block regular traffic.
- Increased enforcement against left lane campers. If you don't have the awareness to see a cop coming up from behind you and move over, you probably shouldn't be driving.
- Hear me out. Green light cameras. When the light turns green it detects when a car is still on the sensor after say two seconds. The light then takes a picture of the driver. If you're on your phone, automatic ticket. If whatever you're doing on your phone is more important that getting to where you're driving to, then pull off the road. I've more than once been stuck behind someone on a set of synchronized lights where me missed every green because it took them 20 seconds to move after the light change. You would think that after the line of cars behind them started honking at the first or second light that they would try to pay attention at the next red, but no. I'm sure it's wasn't just vindictiveness from being honked at too, you could see them go straight to their phone through the rear windshield.
Being distracted and obstructing traffic should not be normal parts or every day driving.
Semi related, but the US probably does need more tiers of vehicle licensing. Right now it takes extra testing and training to drive a motorcycle, where you're mostly a hazard to yourself, but until you hit 10,000 pounds GVW you're good to go with the license you got at 16. The 15 hours you spent with your driving instructor at 15 behind a 3,000 pound Chevy Cruze apparently did not prepare people to avoid rolling their Ford Explorers. Instead of being like, if you want to drive a huge SUV you have to demonstrate you are not going to be a hazard to yourself and others, we have TPMS requirements. A very small factor in this most recent incident, but the car clearly spun out the drive wheels. In that case you are clearly not in control of the car, which is at least reckless on a public road, especially when surrounded by people. TPMS discourages people running dedicated winter tiers at slightly lower pressures, even though climates like Minnesota clearly warrant them. The difference in traction on snow and ice between dedicated winter and (even good quality) all seasons is vast.
MollieTheMare
21d ago
Well, yofuckreddit already answered your direct question, but clavicle fracture is one of the most common semi-serious cycling injuries. You instinctualy try to protect your head when you fall. Some combination of the angle you fall from a bike from, the fact that your arms are already in front of you, and you often have a bunch of forward momentum means you normally break your fall with some part of your arm. Compare to when running where rolling, sliding, or diving lets you land on something with more cushion. Under compression the clavicle is normally the weak link.
Both types of football concussions are probably the most concerning long term. For women specifically, they should learn to cut in a way that reduces stress on the MCL as tears are extremely common due to the higher Q-factor. Rugby you should probably watch out for concussions as well, though cauliflower ear can be unsightly and a risk.
Lifting of all sorts is statistically very safe. For olympic style lifting learn to bail, and bail if you are going to black out or hyperextend something. Keep a neutral spine when pulling from the floor. Statistically most importantly, never bench without either a competent spotter or full coverage safety arms.
For tying to saddle a bison watch out for getting gored. While manually stimulating a horse try not to get kicked, which is mostly a function of not surprising the horse when approaching from behind.
The short version it's not something I would mess around with. You are probably just screwed. But that's easy to say for someone that doesn't have this problem.
A few thoughts:
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