big-city-gay
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User ID: 1772
big-city-gay
1yr ago
The actual order of Musk’s tweets implies that he thinks withdrawing advertising dollars is suppressing free speech, which is a perverse concept of “free speech”, wherein a private company is compelled to put their ad dollars towards another company. And let’s put aside it could be something to do with Musk firing a huge percentage of the ad sales and marketing teams, and Apple doesn’t want to throw money into some black hole where they aren’t getting analytics back.
I wonder why most people don’t seem to care about thee drops?
Most people do not care even in the very very very slightest about the government maybe kind of pushing a private company to prevent conservative trolls from shitposting 280 characters at a time.
And they have absolutely zero patience, none, none at all for this being dribbled out slowly like this. It’s boring.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Or at least a bifurcation of the salt of the earth EA types away from the navel gazing longtermists.
Then what, exactly, is novel about EA once you get past the navel-gazers? I still do not understand what is new or interesting about EA.
Pledging to donate part of your income up front? Well, tithing is a well-known concept, and automatic paycheck withdrawals to your retirement account is a pretty well-established and useful concept.
Having metrics and quality control in regards to charities? It’s debatable when exactly effective altruism cohered as a concept, but critiquing donations to red tape-burdened inefficient charities is certainly not a new concept.
Like…once you strip out the funding for battling paperclip-optimizing super AIs, which still seems a silly concept given we can barely build a good Roomba to vacuum up my dog hair, let alone grey goo that will reshape physical reality…what is EA besides common sense? We don’t need Scottish philosophers to construct an elaborate taxonomy and praxis for automatic savings accounts and spending a solid 5 minutes to ponder that we are in fact quite well-aware of breast cancer by this point, and don’t need a month of NFL games to remind us.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Study by Dan Freeman and his Chinese-American wife in Nature:
The study…is that really the fully study, or just the abstract…has a total of 48 infants. And the primary criteria is quite subjective—besides blink rate, it was all unquantified “oh the baby struggled more quickly”. (And even the blink rate isn’t actually display in a table anywhere.)
And, it’s the least blinded study I could imagine. The authors quite obviously knew they were looking at white or Asian babies, so there’s a huge potential for bias…up to and including pushing some of the babies harder.
big-city-gay
8mo ago
Hell of a reach to say the President can micro-manage admissions at private colleges.
While almost all universities receive public funding in some fashion…Harvard, Yale, MIT, those are private institutions with great big investment funds. They aren’t government schools—the executive can't just unilaterally say that private colleges have to consider your Presidential Fitness Test scores.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
First off, safety: it's true that nuclear has a much better safety record so far, but nuclear seems to have the potential for black swan disasters in a way that coal is not.
It feels like that, but the number of direct, identifiable deaths from nuclear power plant accidents is tiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll
Fukushima, which is the big one in living memory for most people, killed, directly…one person. Maybe. Arguably.
Now, scale that way up, and who knows. Maybe there is a big black swan lurking out there, but it’s hard to predict that…and it’s hard to predict how a more mature nuclear reactor industry could design systems that are much more fault tolerance.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
What or who is stopping him?
Could that be…Donald Trump?
Who is invested in a Twitter clone that is trying to go public?
big-city-gay
8mo ago
Perhaps this is a sign of really good public speaking that he can be aggressive in one venue and come off compassionate in a different venue.
Or perhaps it's the sign of a grifter who views the circus of the Republican primary as a nice platform to set up himself up for a cushy consulting and lobbying gig, and he flip-flopped because it's good marketing to the base.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
On the one hand…yeah, this is endless horse race nonsense. Gotta churn up page views and eyeballs, let’s make up some Trump vs. DeSantis drama.
On the other hand…a lot of Florida lawmakers endorsed Trump. Which is part of a growing drumbeat of stories that DeSantis is really quite the unlikeable asshole. A very loud drumbeat. A very, very loud drum beat with lots and lots of anecdotes that DeSantis has terrible people skills, and with very few stories of how he’s a swell guy.
I don’t know. Everyone seemed to like DeSantis when they knew his policies…but now that he’s more in the public eye and people can actually hear his voice and see how he interacts with people…dude doesn’t have a lot of charm, and Trump, god help me for praising Trump, but Trump does have a certain rakish charisma.
big-city-gay
8mo ago
So you’re proposing recreating the mid-century Chicago political machine, but on a national level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_politics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_machine
There…are a few issues with that concept.
big-city-gay
11mo ago
Yeah, that’s some thin gruel from a leaker.
I am sure there’s some elaborate game theoretical reasoning as to why he wouldn’t reveal in-depth details right now, but really, nothing on that materials science thing? Not even one truly specific claim? Nothing like…
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Stable transuranic elements
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Novel stable isotopes of known elements
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Exotic baryonic matter/“strange” matter with some weird configuration of quarks
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New metamaterials. Hell, just claim “novel metamaterials”, which sounds super-scifi but then also plausible enough to make skeptics look up with interest
But no specific claims? Hmmmmm, Occam’s Razor time: we are being visited by alien intelligences across the vast reaches of space, or the guy is a nutter.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
I had to do some looking here. I figured the fixation on not killing insects was an allegory for empathy for humans outside your tribe.
Nope. Dude has spent a lot of time really fixated on insect suffering. But not just suffering caused by humans. Oh no: he is seriously considering how to intervene in nature to reduce predation in all contexts. As in, he is torn up about spiders killing flies.
big-city-gay
8mo ago
Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here.
Understatement of the millennium.
People will say “humanity needs to become an interplanetary civilization to avoid extinction”, even though Mars…
- Has far less gravity
- A thin, inhospitable atmosphere, with no plausible way to make it thicker
- No magnetosphere
- An unknown amount of geothermal energy, but presumably far less than Earth, and you'd have to drill way deeper to get at it
- 44% less available solar energy than Earth, and that's the best case scenario, as what's atmosphere it as kicks up horrifying black-out dust storms for major portions of the year
The idea Mars would be some outpost of a catastrophe on Earth is farcical. We could fuck up the ecosystem good and proper, and at least Earth would still have gravity and a magnetic shield—we have absolutely no ability to create a sustainable biosphere on Mars.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Except for that bit in the Sermon On the Mount.
And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
There is a somewhat obscure bit of the gun control debate I’d welcome a legitimate steelman for: concealed carry on mass transit.
I live in a US city that is rather notorious for high crime rates, and grew up in a family that was…dad and grandpa were hunters held in very high regard, which is a long story, but I grew up familiar with guns. When there was a debate about concealed carry on the mass transit systems here, notably the trains, my instinct was to sneer, because superficially it seemed like bravado. But then past that, it seemed totally unworkable to me, because I just can’t picture myself getting a good solid bead on an attacker in one of those swaying clanking metal tubes.
Put another way, besides “feeling” that guns on trains are a bad idea, it also seems like concealed carry in those situations would end up with more friendly fire accidents than dead muggers. (Note: I’m a big-city liberal but also have absolutely no inherent problems mowing down criminals, especially after a robbery nearby where some bastard fatally shot the victim’s dog while out walking.) As someone who has had proper training, and not just flushing quail: any thoughts?
big-city-gay
7mo ago
I'd like to drop a link this thoroughly researched and footnoted article about metabolic adaptation.
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/metabolic-adaptation/
This doesn't immediately support or refute the 300 calorie a day delta here…but it's within the realm of plausibility that when an obese person loses a lot of weight, their system down-regulates non-exercise activity thermogenesis by somewhere in that range.
big-city-gay
8mo ago
But you're right to point out that the important thing here is the change, the increase - why wasn't this as big a problem thirty years ago?
Wait, in the Senate? Did you never hear of Strom Thurmond?
The Senate is a bizarre institution, and extrapolating…anything…from an N=100 dataset is folly. Once you’re in the Senate, it takes a LOT to get you out of the Senate, as seen from this list. There’s only 2 Senators from each state, and once you’re in you immediately accumulate a huge amount of power but then also pretty much vote along party lines, and unless you do something truly wildly insanely wrong, your state party has no particular reason to kick you out.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Compared to DeSantis? Yeah.
Trump is an omega-level asshole…but he can schmooze. He can work a crowd, and he can do interviews. I have seen no evidence yet DeSantis can do that. Have you actually heard him speak? He has zero charisma—none. Trump has a toxic, used car salesman charisma, but at least he has it, whereas DeSantis is an awkward blank.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Mr. Beast was recently the subject of…I hate to say “cancel culture”, it’s rapidly become a thought-terminating cliche…but he was the subject of a recent cancel culture overreach that was possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.
The awful radioactive naked singularity that spawned this cancel being…
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/10/mrbeasts-blindness-video-puts-systemic-ableism-on-display/
…an article which posits that there is no such thing as disability, and all people are valid, and it’s charity porn to cure blindness, because how do we even know the “cure” will work?
A truly, shockingly stupid take, given it’s cataract surgery, which obviously works.
CNN is rumored to be suffering serious financial issues
I don't know if that's a "rumor". Well, I suppose the specifics of how CNN itself is doing is slightly a rumor.
But the stitched-together shambling corpse that is Warner Bros. Discovery is objectively in terrible shape.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/06/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-cash-flow-debt.html
NYTimes has done some fantastic reporting on the gamma ray burst of stupid that caused all this nonsense with Warner, but, paywall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/business/media/att-time-warner-deal.html
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Yawn, sorry, who are we talking about? That dude who used to be the president or something? Didn't he go to jail or…something…hey look a squirrel!
They're letting him back on because we've already moved on. Trump was super fun to beat on when he was in the news, but that's in the past now, and we are bored with that. He didn't get any juice from announcing his campaign, we've got some hot new conservatives and liberals to fight over, Trump is boring, hey look a squirrel!
Culture has no attention span. He is back on because nobody gives a shit—and the social media zeitgeist is now all about TiTok, and none of this tired old Boomer bullshit plays on there.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
I have no idea what the strategy on Musk’s part here as to the rollout of these files.
Not the rollout to “alternative” journalists—he is probably right that the “mainstream” media would not cover this. (Emphasis on probably, because the Times absolutely loves to hate on big tech, and if they had any scoop on this shit going down inside of Facebook/Meta, they’d be on it like flies.)
I mean, why is this getting dribbed and drabbed out during one of the lowest media engagement weeks of the year in messy Twitter threads? This is not actively ongoing suppression. There is no upcoming election or policy debate that is immediately impacted by this. Nobody outside the extremely motivated and extremely online and extremely right is going to give even the slightest notice to this, as it’s presented in such a slapdash way during the peak of holiday season.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
What's there to read? The federal budget is dominated by stuff that is pretty much untouchable.
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Social Security, 21%, can't touch that, old people vote.
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Medicare/Medicaid, 25%, good lucking touching that, because again, old people vote, and poor people are a cross-party voting block.
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Defense, 13%, haha, by all means touch that live wire, why do you hate America and freedom?
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Interest on the debt, 7%, sure can't touch that.
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Benefits for government employees and veterans, 7%, have fun touching that, it's great PR to screw with veterans.
And then past that, it's really, really popular programs like SNAP until you get down to the 1% range, where the vaunted “waste, fraud, and abuse and funding Piss Christ” programs live, and messing with those bends the cost curve not even a teeny, tiny bit.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Well, the Taylor Swift thing is superficially silly—of course basic white girls aren’t entitled to socialized ticket prices.
But Ticketmaster/Live Nation is the vertically integrated nightmare monopoly that haunts anti-trust’s dreams. While it profoundly doesn’t matter, because it’s just concerts, having a conglomerate that controls ticket sales and owns the concert venues and manages the artists that play at those venues is really kind of a textbook example of an evil monopoly. It is really quite difficult to establish a fair market price and have competition when one company owns so much of the live music scene. They are also just shockingly incompetent, speaking from personal experience—I live near and attend events at 2 Live Nation venues, and their apps and websites are failure-prone pieces of shit that fall down on the very basics of keeping you logged in and showing available tickets. I just don’t know how such a large company has such a bad UX/UI experience…oh right, monopoly power, gotcha.
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Now on the Nvidia front…yeah, that’s just whining. These cards cost so much at launch because they cost so much to make. These are fabricated on TSMC’s absolute latest process, and it’s thought the masks alone cost $100 million to fabricate. The EUV systems to make these require huge amounts of power and have very low throughput, especially for GPUs, which are just big honkin’ slices of silicon, and require lots and lots of patterning passes. And there’s a whole mess of supply issues for all semiconductors right now…including obscure problems like a global shortage of neon, because something like 70% of the world’s neon is captured in Ukraine, for odd reasons.
That's too much “Great Man of History” analysis. I think Disney was boned no matter what.
I doubt the DeSantis thing or the board room drama doesn't really mean a damn thing, versus the economic and cultural flow that's adjusting to a giant surplus of entertainment that's available everywhere all the time whenever you want it. Post-scarcity entertainment killed the music industry long ago, and now it's time that everything else gets shanked too.
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