SkoomaDentist
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
Really bad tinnitus is much worse than being just deaf. It's being deaf with infernal ringing going in your ears every moment you're awake and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. People have killed themselves over it.
Was very thoroughly scolded by security for crossing the street to go to the mall next door. Security guard was impressed that he came back unscathed.
A close relative of mine visited SA around the turn of the millennium. They were about to walk one block to a restaurant when the hotel receptionist ran in panic after them and told them in no uncertain terms to take a taxi if they wanted to get there without being at least robbed and potentially much worse.
Around the same time I visited San Francisco and was surprised to read later that I had apparently stayed right next to ”the most dangerous block in the city” (according to our local newspaper). I never noticed anything during daytime other than the occasional homeless (who back then didn’t bother random passersbies).
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
I was reading just yesterday about GPTZero which is an AI model designed to determine whether a body of text was generated by an AI. Apparently it used GPT-2 to train.
I now desperately want to see how GPTZero classifies typical corporate HR speak.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
A better question is, why do random Eastern European towns let an NGO (aka a lobbying group) do anything whatsoever to public property?
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
On the face of it, I don’t see any strategic reason for NATO or the Allie’s to really invest in a free Ukraine.
I'm pretty sure what you mean is you don't see reason for US / Canada to invest in a free Ukraine. For European Nato countries there are blatantly obvious reasons such as Russia being a hostile country just a 1000 km away from most and neighbouring others (including direct threats by multiple high officials that several Nato countries "are really part of Russia").
It's fine if you think US should be isolationist but don't pretend that you can speak for Europe.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
I happen know quite a few Brazilian nationals and expats due to a hobby. I’ve not once heard them blame Europe or US for their problems. When they’ve talked about the issues, they blame the local politicians and general poverty.
I’m pretty sure your experience is explained by the three letter term ”NGO”.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
Not in vogue, you say? (That's the 2020 winner)
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
It's particularly crazy when both terms translate to the exact same thing in many languages.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
There's another easy solution: Ban admission based on anything other than test scores (like in most of Europe).
SkoomaDentist
4mo ago
ICBMs, MIRVs and more accurate missiles basically made multi-megaton nukes obsolete. You get much better destructive power over an area if you spread a bunch of 100 kton nukes over it instead of concentrating all that power at a single point because of the three dimensional nature of the explosion.
I see this in one music related hobby that leans heavily towards people with interest in the details of physical instruments. Trans women outnumber cis women by a large margin in all english speaking forums related to it, to the extent that assuming every female coded name is trans is right much more often than not. Based on their comment history and profiles, more or less all of those trans women are on the spectrum (and much further than most men in the forums).
Isn't the main problem with woke departments that they insist on shoving their politics on everyone's face?
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
The last-mile problem seems pretty bad for legal and medical professionals (i.e. if an LLM makes up an answer it could be very bad) but theoretically we could use them to generate copy or ideas then go through a final check by a professional.
I predict absolutely nothing will happen to medical professionals because of AI. We've already had "AIs" (aka expert systems) that perform as well or better as trained medical professionals in diagnosis for decades, yet they're used approximately nowhere.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making
[Citation needed]
In most of Continental Europe admission to universities is based on entrance exams or national exams test scores. This eliminates any power the school has in selecting applicants.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
As a counterexample, I think the scientists arguing for funding for near-Earth asteroid surveys and funding asteroid impactor experiments are quite reasonable in their proclamations of concern for existential risk to the species: there's a foreseeable risk, but we can look for specific possible collisions and perform small-scale experiments on actually doing something.
This is a good point. The scientists can point to both prehistoric examples of multiple mass extinction events as well as fairly regular near-misses (for varying definitions of "near") and say "Hey, we should spend some modest resources to investigate if and how we might divert this sort of cataclysm". It's refreshingly free of any sort of "You must immediately change your goals and lifestyle to align with my preferences or you are personally dooming humanity!" moralistic bullshit.
SkoomaDentist
2mo ago
For literally the rest of the planet, voter ID is a uncontroversial requirement.
Nobody even thinks of it as voter ID. It's just some ID (passport, drivers license, dedicated ID card etc) that you use in any situation where your identity must be verified.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
any judgement like this depends on your own, idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences
This is a false premise not supported by any evidence. There are loads of commonalities that humans find aesthetically pleasant. Things like nature, symmetry, balance etc. Sure, you might be a massive outlier but then who cares? Outliers are irrelevant when it comes to what should be provided in the public realm.
In hindsight, calling the Pope a simpleton and then doubling down on that wasn’t the best career move, especially when the available evidence at the time was against Galileo.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
So it boggle my mind why they needed to have 20 HR folks in the first place.
Lol, that's outright insane amount of HR people.
I started working in the R&D dept for the local subsidiary of a decent sized multinational company and I remember the HR person complaining that she was responsible for hiring and onboarding ~100 new people during the spring (including all the temporary workers for the assembly plant).
In a previous job with around 30 employees in the country, we had one person who spent maybe a third of their time on HR work and the actual official HR person was situated in another country (and was responsible for most of Northern Europe by themselves).
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
Islamic Republic of Iran was, for each person killed in 9/11, ordered to pay upto 12.5M USD.
Wait, why was Iran (a Shia country) ordered to pay for an attack commited by a Salafist (Sunni fundamentalism) terrorist organization?
SkoomaDentist
5mo ago
I would say that Twitter witch hunts are less common in Finland than what seems to be the case in the US, which of course might simply reflect that in a smaller nation it's harder to create the sort of a critical mass that you really need for a proper pile-on with an effect.
Or - as is my theory - witch hunts are deprived of much of their power if what they ask for is explicitly illegal due to well established workers' rights legistlation. When most people outright can't be "canceled" the "cancellation meme" loses much of its power.
Why do people who do a lot of exercise just never seem to be obese?
Plenty are!
Several years ago I lost quite a bit of weight by tracking my calories. I made no changes to my exercise routine which had been stable for the previous six months or so and just made sure to keep average consumed calories around 2200 kcal (maintenance level for a person my age and height). I ended up having an average 1000 kcal daily deficit for months while losing around 25 kg overall, meaning I'd been exercising ~1000 kcal worth daily for many months prior to that while having obese BMI and without any weight loss.
Exercise alone really doesn't work for weight loss for most people because they just end up increasing the number of calories eaten without even realising it.
SkoomaDentist
10mo ago
I dearly hope you're right. Twitter has been the worst thing that's happened to the political discourse in Finland by a large margin. I've said for years that politicians and journalists should have been forbidden from writing, reading or discussing anything on Twitter or seen there with the threat of a heavy fine or jail sentence.
SkoomaDentist
1yr ago
Moreover, this isn't Norway - even going back centuries there has always been a non-trivial proportion of ethnically English people at least as 'swarthy' as Meghan. Personally, I did not realise that Meghan was officially black
I doubt Meghan would be considered black in Norway either. She certainly wouldn’t here in Finland.
What’s bizarre is people expecting a language model to not just make up data. It’s literally a bullshit generator. All it cares is that the text seems plausible to someone who knows nothing about the details.
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