VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16d ago
I went to a smaller school that often had take-home essays and even exams (up to the professors, more common in smaller honors classes). While cheating might have happened somewhat, it is possible IMO to instill a culture that expects people to follow the rules even when they aren't being watched closely. But it was occasionally enforced by expelling violators.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
I actually use it and am pretty happy with it, but it is really heavy. That said, I'm not really trying to run other heavy applications at the same time other than compile jobs, so it's not really inconveniencing on any reasonably-modern hardware ("I have 1-2GB of RAM available for this").
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
LaTeX users will probably type three hyphens for an em dash.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
12d ago
I think smartphones/TikTok/AI are making us lose our attention, our ability to analyze and to think, and they don't offer anything in return
I would posit that the smartphone has observably reduced the need to store specific data because it's much easier than it used to be to load it (I'm old enough to "search the Internet", the kids these days "ask AI") on the fly when necessary. Lots of encyclopedia facts are useful to know on rare day-to-day occasions ("Which rivers empty into the Aral Sea?"), but I think in practice things are "better" (for some definition of "better") where I can pull up that fact at hand, which maybe a generation ago sometimes required referencing my shelf of encyclopedias or a trip to the library. And maybe I can use that mental space that was previously holding the population of Iran or the specifics of red-black trees for something that is more useful to me today [1].
I recall hearing from a historian a while back that the most numerous book on US Navy ships in the 1980s was a dictionary: has ubiquitous spell checking (and sometimes-wrong autocorrect) lost us something of value other than the "character" built by having to thumb through the dictionary to spell right? That one feels similar as a technology question, but I'd bet you have fewer takers for "the good ol' days" before spell check.
- I think whether that space has been efficiently re-purposed is a valid question, and I'm not convinced capacity hasn't declined somewhat. But I think that's best addressed as a separate question.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14d ago
The term antisemitism came into existence from Germans trying to justify that This Time it wasn't just dumb, bigoted Judenhass (literally "Jew-hatred"), and they had good (pseudo)scientific reasons to dislike them. Bringing other semitic peoples into it implicitly validates Nazi race science like talking about related Aryans in India.
Although some seem to be trying the This Time approach again, using "anti-Zionist" as the new label. Maybe in a century someone will claim it applies to Zionist Mormons in Utah.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14d ago
the theory hides behind ... the science in order to try to gain legitimacy as a "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is"
Many such cases: this is a generic problem, IMO, with several branches of science, maybe even every branch with immediate political impact (also economics, epidemiology, climate science, [group] studies). I don't think you're wrong that this even happens to HBD folks who are probably diametrically opposed to plenty of those other examples.
I don't know of a generic strategy to counteract this human failing: my first recommendation would be to reject claims that "the science is settled": the scientific process is never truly settled. But if you go too far in the un-trusting direction, you'll start questioning the concept of childhood vaccinations or jet fuel melting steel beams.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
24d ago
It's weird that "National" refers to the US and Canada together here (the NBA has one, previously two Canadian teams). The last guy to call them one country got a lot of grief for it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
VSCode is just the spiritual successor to emacs: it's an operating system in search of a good text editor.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23hr ago
but the bigger flaw would mostly fall for technical reasons due to clouds or nighttime imagery
Synthetic Aperture Radar can do some of these conditions, but isn't exactly equivalent to visible imagery. The technology exists and there are commercial providers operating satellites that acknowledge working with the US government.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14d ago
I think your idea here is plausible, but I have trouble seeing how you'd isolate nature from nurture here for these axes without some industrial-scale twin studies that seem implausible.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17d ago
You could do far worse than Terry Pratchett, IMO.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17d ago
public high schools in the US average around $19k in per student spending, no correlation between spending and outcomes.
Is that true across public schools? I've often wondered if the extra funding thrown at Title 1 schools that typically underperform actually makes the correlation negative, but I've never found an actual dataset.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18d ago
The Federalists were absolutely right
The Federalists were against adding an explicit Bill of Rights, and only chose to do so as a compromise. The Anti-Federalists wanted to enumerate the rights, and I think have ultimately been proven right.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23d ago
The zipper and button closures on men's and women's jackets and shirts are traditionally reversed from each other, too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
“Best” is a meaningful term because Israelis don’t have the means to actually destroy the facilities themselves
IMO it's not inconceivable they can figure out a way. WWII had the Grand Slam and Tallboy bombs built specially on fairly short notice for attacking hardened German targets. Desert Storm was a short war, but special bunker busters were developed and dropped in combat within a month.
Israel has had quite a bit of time to consider the problem, and given that they have total control of the air, dropping something very heavy with a modern guidance kit from a cargo plane doesn't seem that inconceivable.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Just like beards, they used to be non-conformist now they're common enough.
Hadrian has entered the chat.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
Conceptually, I think the choice of "grifting" has a fairly limited cap on median outcomes. Limited cases might exist, but it's hard to sell indefinite affirmative action or reparations for a minority doing better than the median. I can't see democratic will supporting that for long, and it's unpopular even when isolated exceptions come up: Elizabeth Warren, or affirmative action for Obama's kids applying to college.
Chinese-Americans seem to have taken the "work hard and naturally do better than the median" option, which I think sounds better if it's available.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21d ago
This would be an interesting case if some state decided it wasn't going to recognize marriage at all.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21d ago
It missed its chance to be the one and only 10th Amendment precedent.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22d ago
I wonder if that's how presidents had to be in the past, and the rest of us reading the newspaper listening to radio watching on TV following social media real-time feeds just weren't as knowledgeable about those realities until recently.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
24d ago
The modern theory of deterrence may look more like identifying the humps that disrupt the slippery slope, and trying to beat your opponent back to one of those humps but no further, versus... trying to push your humps as far up the slope as possible?
I think the term in the literature you're looking for is "escalation dominance."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
15hr ago
The Anthropic case there is focused on "Is it a copyright violation to train models on copyrighted data without licensed distribution?", which is an interesting question, but my comment is more on the separate "Is the resulting model I've trained something I can claim copyright over?" question.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I remain of the opinion that it is likely (but not guaranteed) that courts will find "training models" to not be a sufficiently creative endeavour to merit copyright protection. "Throwing a bunch of data into the GPU blender and doing massive least squares" isn't IMO more creative than scanning a painting, compressing the works of Shakespeare with gzip, or having a monkey press the camera shutter.
Yes, if you want to run the world on solar cells and batteries, you need two ramp industrial capacity, hard, for at least the next decade.
Does this account for shifting heating loads in northern climates from combustion to electric heat pump? I think what you're talking about works for the Sun Belt, but I am not convinced that, for example, Sweden, can ever keep its citizens from freezing in winter (when it's dark most of the time, the sun is low, and frequently cloudy) without like 3-4 more orders of magnitude battery storage than currently exist. Current storage is on the order of what, grid-minutes? It's not going to adequately transfer energy from summer to winter, and I honestly don't see a viable non-carbon approach there without (1) superconductors solving the transmission problem, (2) evacuating northern latitudes (lol), or (3) nuclear and maybe wind picking up the tab all winter.
The closest I'm aware of is the nominal academic license of Facebook's llama models that seems to have been largely ignored once they were out in the wild. At the time, Meta was trailing a bit, and it probably helped their mindshare overall, but they didn't bring any court cases that I'm aware of either.
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