ace
7d ago
17 years. Summer and fall of 2008, I was searching for explanations of quantum mechanics because the textbook and everyone else's explanations were so goddamn confused, incomplete, and self-contradictory. Found Big-Yud's Quantum Physics sequence, which felt like the first time finding someone who had sane, coherent opinions on the matter. From there an easy step to the rest of the sequences, LW, and SSC.
ace
22d ago
ace
28d ago
You also need to manage IP addresses and browser fingerprinting. It's quite frankly a lot of work to do well, especially at scale.
ace
1mo ago
Guaranteed monogamy for all is nothing more than the socialized ownership of the means of reproduction.
That's good!
ace
1mo ago
The sats observe everything and images are kept forever. You are just picked out and individually tracked by software after the fact.
(I don't know it for a fact; it's just my best guess from extrapolating from leaks. I'd bet money on it if there were ever some way to get at the ground truth.)
ace
1mo ago
“The CIA is watching me 24 hours a day by satellite surveillance.”
Buddy, file this under extraordinarily likely. Unless you think they're filling up their Utah data center with cat videos.
ace
1mo ago
I also use the correct punctuation when writing in LaTeX, though not anywhere else. The mental illness label is accurate, though.
ace
1mo ago
Yea, the incentive structure of birthright citizenship is insane. Unfortunately, the other end of the spectrum is a permanent generation-on-generation underclass of non-citizens like Turkish and Arab immigrant communities in Germany. Seems a difficult needle to thread.
ace
1mo ago
“People thinking I’m this type of woman who didn’t protect my kids,” she added.
Perceptive lady, knowing exactly what I think.
ace
2mo ago
I have similar experiences, but the LLMs will correct their correct answer to be incorrect. I now just view the whole project as useful for creative idea generation, but any claims on the real world need to be fact checked. No lab seems to be able to get these things to stop confabulating, and I'm astonished people trust them as much as they seem to.
ace
2mo ago
I want to believe, but I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro to spec a computer for me, and it starts hallucinating motherboards that don't exist, insisting on using them even after being told they don't exist. Maybe it's OK for brainstorming, but everything it says needs to be double-checked. We ain't there yet.
ace
2mo ago
This is a form of Gell-Mann amnesia effect. When there's instant feedback and excellent legibility of when answers are correct vs incorrect, like programming, we instantly see the flaws. But on softer squishier questions, you accept the answers. But it's all similarly bad AI slop.
ace
4mo ago
three co-equal branches
This business about the three branches being "co-equal" has always rubbed me the wrong way. It doesn't appear in the constitution. Congress has the power to set the president's salary and to fire him. But not vice-versa. It sure sounds like Congress is the boss. To boot, Congress is set up first in the constitution, in Article 1, whereas the president second in Article 2.
ace
4mo ago
Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.
- Dr. Strangelove (and you)
ace
4mo ago
Star Trek the Next Generation. TV shows, not the movies. Competent professionals working together to solve problems.
ace
4mo ago
That's certainly a delusion, but a bad example because it's political, not one held by experts. If athletic coaches held this belief, it'd be a better example.
ace
4mo ago
What I've seen over the past few years is that higher interest rates don't drive house prices down at all -- instead it causes would-be sellers to wait it out. You'll see a dearth of supply.
ace
5mo ago
Trump lifted Obama's ban on gain of function research which directly led to COVID. So he gets the blame.
ace
6mo ago
We'll see.
After the last disaster (GoT), my policy is to not start TV shows that haven't ended yet.
ace
6mo ago
I don't think you can judge shows like that until they're done. Mystery box shows have a tendency to devolve into utter shit.
ace
6mo ago
Maybe in the heady carefree days of youth you can manage a separate diet from your significant other, but adding kids sucks away your time and increases the stress of even the best relationships. I think it's not sustainable for you to marry and have kids with somebody who is not mostly on the same diet as you. Plus, if it's for ethical reasons, why would you want to marry someone who is unethical by the standards you hold yourself to? It doesn't feel good to be on the other end of that equation, either.
ace
6mo ago
I'll add my voice to the chorus of people telling you to break up right this instant. It wasn't a terrible mistake to sleep with her the first time, but what were you thinking moving in with her? Good lord your self-esteem must be in the toilet. Try to see if fucking the next girl will fix your problems.
If you have half an interest in physics and are not yet totally convinced by Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, I recommend it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/the-quantum-physics-sequence
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