PokerPirate
3d ago
Whoa... I didn't know about the Heinlein juveniles. Thanks!
PokerPirate
3d ago
Measure of a Man
I'm pretty sure this is the worst episode possible as an intro. It's got lots of great philosophical nuggets to chew on, but there's no reason to identify with why Picard/Riker are so troubled by disassembling a "mere machine" if you haven't actually built a relationship with Data yet by watching him struggle to learn to be human. Without understanding that background, the JAG and cybernetics professor are "obviously right" and the whole episode is boring.
My problem is that all of the recommendations on trek sites I've seen are like this: they are geared towards the "best episodes for experienced fans" rather than "the best episodes for introducing the series".
PokerPirate
3d ago
Maybe people in this forum can help me:
I've got an 8 year old boy I'd like to introduce to Star Trek. I specifically want:
- To introduce him to the sci-fi ideas that shaped the 1960s-1990s and that all our current generation of scientists grew up with. (For example, he'll be growing up with personal LLM assistants as background noise, and I want him to see how fantastic this was to people at the time.)
- For him to internalize some of the leadership attitudes that Kirk/Picard/etc demonstrate. I don't know any other series (scifi or otherwise) where there are so many clear examples of how to effectively lead and motivate a team.
So my questions are:
- What's the right age to start with? Something like 13ish?
- And what episodes/movies should I "make" him watch? Wrath of Kahn seems like a decent stand-alone introduction to the whole franchise, but most of the other popular movies/episodes seem like they have too much "fan service" in them. I just watched a few "best of star trek" collection dvds, and all these episodes require way too much background knowledge about the universe to make sense. Something like Trouble with Tribbles, for example, could almost be a good introduction to the series for kids because of the cute tribble creatures, but you already have to understand that the franchise is about space exploration and colonizing planets and the prime directive and the war with klingons to actually make any sense of the setting.
PokerPirate
3d ago
If prosecutors wanted their testimony, they would grant immunity. We've had literal murderers granted immunity by prosecutors so they could go after the real big fish in mafia/drug ring investigations.
PokerPirate
9d ago
It is due to grammar. Here's a github issue that will give you lots of links to follow down if you're really interested in gory details: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/1773
PokerPirate
10d ago
Ummm.... computer science wouldn't exist without this formalism. Compilers use grammars to define/parse the syntax of programming languages. More recently, LLMs use grammars to enforce structured output (like returning JSON). Tiny models on a raspberry pi + good grammar will beat frontier models on many tasks.
PokerPirate
12d ago
I don't think that Chesterton would agree with your thesis that "trad-cath society" was "on the menu" in the 1900 in a way that it is not in the 2026. For example, he wrote in What is Wrong with the World:
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
That doesn't sound like the kind of person who thinks that his Christian ideal is actually "on the menu" in his own time period. Therefore, I suspect that his proposed solution would be basically the same:
the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough.
PokerPirate
12d ago
... ammunition will be the new currency
It seems like in any event where physical gold is more valuable than paper gold, ammunition (and food/tools/etc) will be more valuable than gold.
You missed the real culture war for a made up one.
The newest version of Muzzy omits all of the references to the queen being fat. I found this very frustrating because fat is a super important/basic word. But it's also a major plot point in the sequel that the queen gets stuck between two rocks because she is fat. (The video plays the same here and shows her getting stuck, but the audio goes blank for a bit and the narrator doesn't say that she gets stuck because she is fat.) It's a funny moment that should be teaching kids how to say "because" type clauses that gets removed. "Because" is a hard concept to teach through examples like this, so it's super frustrating that they removed one of the only examples.
Source: I used Muzzy to teach my kids Spanish and Korean.
Also, Corvax is legitimately cruel and evil. That's why the princess rejects him.
PokerPirate
13d ago
You are confusing the derivative of wealth with wealth itself.
There is a lot of human intuition for why these two quantities should be linked, but everyone else in this thread is assuming they are distinct quantities. That is why there is a disagreement.
PokerPirate
17d ago
I don't care about your opinion. I just want coherent rhetoric.
PokerPirate
17d ago
I'm not claiming you are wrong or lying. I am claiming you are ineffective.
If you are correct, then a more effective communication style (i.e. more consistent/less inflammatory) will probably get you the results you want faster. At least with me and fellow mottizens if not the general public.
PokerPirate
17d ago
By definition it was an extrajudicial summary execution, as it was a killing that was not sanctioned by the court and he was killed without the benefit of a free and fair trial. He was killed while restrained by multiple government agents.
OP describes why it is not an execution by highlighting the difference between an execution and an accident. You claim it is a summary execution by describing what makes an execution "summary". You did not respond to OPs points at all, and this rhetorical tactic of ignoring what OP said makes you look weak.
You may very well be correct, but you are not arguing correctly.
PokerPirate
17d ago
The "one of us" post you link complains about the left using "lies" (your word for their exaggeration / selective reporting of facts). But then you go and say things like "we are in a civil war" which is so obviously not true. Maybe we're on the path towards one, but even that is super debatable (and regularly debated here).
I just want you to know that I can't take you seriously when you hypocritically call other people out for stupid-language-tactics and then do your own stupid-language-tactics. Again, I'm sure you have lots of justifications for this tactic (many of which are valid!), but as a tactic for achieving your goal of getting me on your side, your rhetoric is failing.
PokerPirate
19d ago
Father in law gave us a bidet for Christmas. Kids immediately learned how to turn it into a squirt gun. We had to return it.
PokerPirate
21d ago
Because if your goal is "live in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts", handing out free things to violent drug addicts directly undermines that. With allies like these, who needs enemies?
I think you will find that this is not in fact the goal of the poster you are replying to or any of the other related posters.
Your stated goal is easy to "paperclip optimize" away by, for example, killing all of your neighbors. After the massacre, you would clearly "live in a neighborhood without violent drug attics", but you would also be living in a much worse neighborhood.
To use proper RAT/utilitarian/machine learning terminology, I view Christian morals as a form of regularization on goals like the one you state. You already are applying a regularizer that prevents you from considering murdering all humans as the correct solution to your optimization. The Christian is applying a stronger regularization where the ultimate goal of "living in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts" is just as much about wanting to benefit the drug addicts as it is about wanting to benefit yourself.
PokerPirate
23d ago
Kids are playing luanti (an open source clone of Minecraft). They love it, and it saved me $200 on 6 licenses and their friends can also come over and play.
I'm sure they would have actually enjoyed Terraria more (because 2d easier than 3d) if it weren't for the Minecraft Movie and all their friends playing Minecraft.
PokerPirate
24d ago
Also if we're talking about UBI how hard can it be to get a robot to drive the buses and trains and cut down labour costs?
Ummm.... we've literally got private companies sinking billions of dollars into the much easier problem of self driving cars. (Buses are much harder to control than cars, there's much less training data available, and the driver does a lot of things besides drive like monitor fares and kick off druggies.) And while I like the self driving progress, it's still obviously not ready for production yet.
PokerPirate
26d ago
I have no idea what you mean. When Jesus says (Matt 4:21)
Would anyone light a lamp and then put it under a basket or under a bed? Of course not! A lamp is placed on a stand, where its light will shine.
this seems to be exactly him talking about "keeping" a light in a "place". I guess it's the passive so you could conceivably argue that he is not talking about "us", but come on...
PokerPirate
26d ago
I'm pretty sure that everyone who wants an ad-free internet also supports taxes funding public libraries (up to lizard-man's constant).
PokerPirate
28d ago
The ubiquity of credit card use allowed the companies to charge higher interchange fees, and since the fees were accounting for a share of revenue on par with interest payments, it made sense to try to attract these no-balance customers through reward enticements, which are paid for out of the fees.
This right here is how I think the poor are subsidizing the rich.
@Opt-out's claim is that market segmentization means that each category is profitable on their own. But your claim is that the high end market only exists because of the infrastructure provided by the low end market.
My hypothesis is that if credit cards never made any money via usury, then they would never have been in a position to make money off of interchange fees. And a slightly stronger hypothesis is that, if we limit their ability engage in usury, then we will see a drop in their ability to offer good rewards.
PokerPirate
30d ago
If you’re open to it, I’d actually be very interested in how you decide which NK-related variables are worth tracking at all—that feels like exactly the frontier Tetlock is gesturing at.
I don't track anything in any quantifiable way right now. I mostly just browse the .kp tld whenever I feel bored.
PokerPirate
30d ago
I turned 40 last month. For my midlife crisis a decided to get back into some of the things 20 year old me used to do. So I got a used unicycle and erg (a type of rowing machine). It's been a blast. But it almost wasn't... because I have one less testicle now than I did back then.
Both unicycling and erging are notorious ball crushers, and it's much worse when you've only got one bad boy dangling down there because it hangs right in the center where the seat is and it's constantly trying to get crushed. When you've got two, they hang just off to the side a bit and so you're much less likely to crush them. I've had to splurge and get special underwear so that I can do my unicycling/erging.
I lost the testicle when I was 29 to testicular cancer. One day I was straining a bit too hard on the toilet and heard a "pop" from my right dangler. Worst pain of my life by far. I was on the floor for the next 30 minutes unable to move, then I barfed a couple of times in the toilet, then I hobbled my way over to the ER where I got the diagnosis. Surgery was scheduled for about 1 month later.
The main thing to know about a cancer cell is that it wants to reproduce. This leads to exponential growth in tissue size, and my type of cancer cell had a reproduction rate of 3 days. So every 3 days, the size of the right little dude doubled. And soon he was not a little dude at all. By the time of the surgery he measured 4 inches in diameter.
The weirdest question I've ever been asked was the day before my surgery: "Do you want a prosthetic testicle?" The surgeon had a handful of models lined up on a shelf for me to pick from. The cheapest one looked like a rainbow colored bouncy ball and was $200. That was way more than I wanted to spend on something only my wife would ever see, and so I declined.
And so now---in the middle of my midlife crisis---whenever I ride my unicycle or sit down to exercise---I have to put on special underwear first.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
My young kids have just gotten into minecraft, and this seems like something they'd love. We actually play luanti (an open source clone) so there's no chance of connecting to your server, but maybe I'll have to tinker around with something like this. There's been a lot of cool work in reinforcement learning with minecraft, but I never did anything with that since it sounds too compute intensive for me, but stuff with llms would be much easier/cheaper.
Only that this is like watching two hours of tv everyday for a year. That's way more tv than is appropriate for a kid.
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