roystgnr
2d ago
roystgnr
3d ago
IMHO the mechanical mirrors are pointless; large lenses are really the only things phones lack. My DSLR is just old enough that mirrorless options were still kind of new. We also got a Nikon 1 around the same time, for portability, but unlike the DSLR that one's been completely obsoleted by our phones.
I'm not a fan of the current state of computational "photography", though. Detecting motion between multiple frames and trying to stack and deconvolve to get a sharp still image, that's fantastic, but when we reached the point where there's a "upsample moon photos using a neural net trained on moon photos" step, we'd lost the plot. If I wanted data from existing photos rather than my own photos then I'd be using the web browser, not the camera.
WMBF tend to look like they have more euro ancestry
I like your theory for this much better than mine, but I do have my own:
"Momma's baby, daddy's maybe" is an eons-old problem, and combining the lower certainty of paternity with the (typically) higher violence of males suggests there's been a long history of some nasty evolutionary selection pressure for kids to resemble their dads more than their moms. Infanticide in non-human primates and many non-primate mammals isn't uncommon, even many human "civilizations" took our damn time before deciding to punish it, and before agriculture it may have been a common form of birth control in tough times.
I'd guess even a couple million years of this would mostly affect which genes control appearance (or mediate other genes controlling appearance? there's not that much Y chromosome...), though, not habits. My interracial marriage is N=1, but while my kids look much more (75/25?) like me than like my wife, their personalities are maybe 55/45 on average and no more than 40/60 in one case.
roystgnr
3d ago
My family splurged for a DSLR a decade or more ago, but now it basically only gets pulled out when we need the 50-300mm lens for distant shots, or maybe once or twice a year when a few shots are so important that they're worth the extra hassle. We used to pull it out for low-light photography too, but at some point phone image sensors got so sensitive that it makes up for not having half a pound of glass in front of them.
Oh - I do still use the DSLR body with a telescope adapter. I tried an eyepiece-to-phone adapter for that, but the quality wasn't nearly as high. Maybe I just need to find a better one.
roystgnr
3d ago
The one opposing "everyone in the Big Yud singularity doomerist community"? The opposition itself isn't a deal-breaker (though it's clearly at least a non-central example), but the word choices to maximize emotional reaction at the expense of clarity are.
I was hoping someone would at least point out an interesting source being paraphrased. You see ML papers that talk about the infinite-width limit of neural networks, and sometimes that's just for a proof by contradiction (as OP appears to be attempting, to be fair), and sometimes it leads to math that applies asymptotically in finite-width networks ... but you can see how after a couple rounds of playing Telephone it might be read as "stupid ML cult thinks they're gonna have infinitely powerful computers!"
roystgnr
3d ago
Nitpicking, but: it wasn't a major plot point, it was a major MacGuffin. The critical thing wasn't that taxation of trade routes was in dispute, it was just that the immediate backstory had some important-but-subtle dispute that was threatening to blow up. You need "important" to make it plausible that things escalate to actual military conflict, and you need "subtle" to make it plausible (to characters who've never met Sidious) that the dispute was the result of behind-the-scenes machinations with no overt enemy or sociological force, but details of "taxes", "legal ownership of the Maltese Falcon", who cares? Trade and taxation was a great choice, because tax codes are exactly the sort of thing that makes most people's eyes glaze over but can be life-changing to the people most directly affected, but the details don't ever become important to the story.
Talking about that bit of backstory in the title crawl might have been just asking for mockery (because most of your audience is made of "most people", and the second sentence in your intro is a bad place for their eyes to glaze over), but that's bad editing, not bad plotting. There had to be some way to convey "the galaxy was so peaceful that everybody could freak out over taxes" without also accidentally implying "your fun spaceships-and-magic movie is now going to have more tax accounting!".
Wikipedia says there was a sex-and-coke scandal in 1983 (uncovering a 1973 incident and a 1980 incident), then a sexting scandal in 2006, and yet the discontinuation of the program (ostensibly because the House was finally sufficiently computer-savvy enough to obsolete "kids running around with documents") was in 2011. Was there an additional scandal they're missing, or is the inference that they wanted to shut down the program in 2006 (or 1983?) but just took 5 (or 28?) years to do it?
roystgnr
4d ago
Nah, the assumption here is "and then no miracle occurs".
If we're really improbably lucky, then we do get a miracle: the level of intelligence required for an ape to create civilization (i.e. the point we're basically still at, because the millennia of memetic evolution afterward has grossly outraced the eon of genetic evolution beforehand) turns out to be essentially the same as the maximum level of intelligence achievable by any technology. AI could pass the C3PO "somewhat annoying but helpful" level, but it couldn't possibly pass the Data "better at math but wouldn't clearly be better in command" level. All those log(N) curves turn out to actually be logistic(N) in the limit, and human thinking remains relevant indefinitely after all.
roystgnr
4d ago
But it's still weird how everyone in universe takes it so seriously.
Well, that's just because the Jedi Council knows The Truth of the Sith. (trigger warning: Yudkowsky fan fiction)
roystgnr
7d ago
I wanted to use it to learn and do slightly riskier things
So ... done, and done? Congrats!
It sounds like I'm mocking, but I'm serious. My first investment account was a whopping 4 figures of "play money", split between one stock that promptly quadrupled and another that went bankrupt, and I'm really glad I got a nice lesson in diversification well before it was time to invest with kids' college money.
roystgnr
15d ago
In this metaphor, the first boyfriend being cheated on is the Taliban? That's not really a "his girlfriend got seduced by another guy" situation so much as a "when he tried to help his murderer friend hide from the cops, his abuse victim made a break for it and told them" situation. Maybe it's a risky idea to date this girl, but if the guy gets off on a technicality it still seems cruel to send her back.
roystgnr
15d ago
I know that Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People, of course, but it's always nice when one of the 99%-sane people spends part of their remaining 1% to pop in and confirm.
"Yeah, of course I'm not writing much on discussion forums. I decided to prioritize employment and family and friends and such instead."
It's generally very politely worded, but always wonder if the "I'm just explaining myself" attitude is merely a guise, and the real driving emotion is "I feel sad for you all and wish some of you would take the hint." If so, then thank you very much, but no, I'm sorry, we probably won't.
roystgnr
15d ago
Presumably by "developments" he means how muskets would develop in their future, not the contemporaneous state of their development.
Though IMHO this argument doesn't apply extremely well to the Second Amendment. Some of the Founding Fathers thought it was just Common Sense that private merchants should be allowed and encouraged to own their own warships. I don't think "maybe they can have a ship with fifty cannons on it, but surely they can't have a semiautomatic rifle!" would be the devastating argument that some people imagine.
roystgnr
15d ago
I think it’s a lot like the spree shooting phenomenon in the USA, which doesn’t seem to have any sort of ideological Origen that I’ve been able to find.
"Every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice."
roystgnr
16d ago
their state flagships, which are as good on a resume as any non-Harvard school.
At first glance, Harvard appears to have about a 4% salary premium over the top California state schools or Georgia Tech, 15% over U. Virginia, 20-25% over U. Michigan or UT-Austin, and about 55% over my childhood state's "flagship".
Plus, even the flagship schools aren't exactly guarantees. UT-Austin just tightened its auto-acceptance rate (the way 85% of its in-state students get in) to the top 5%. If you were only in the top 6% of your high school, I'd say you're a good student, but you didn't make the cut this year; if you were in the top 10% of your high school, I'd still say you're a good student, but you never really stood a chance.
roystgnr
17d ago
I wonder if there would be any way to get statistics on this.
When I went to college I moved out of a city where Burger King was staffed by teenagers managed by late-twenties workers, all of whom seemed to see this as a stepping stone to bigger things, and I moved to a much bigger city where Burger King workers were all twice my age and clearly not proud of or happy with where they were. I hoped the under-seared patties and limp lettuce were just due to heedlessness and heat lamps rather than spite and spit, but either way I found different places to eat.
roystgnr
17d ago
Yeah, but if the admissions officers are in the filter bubble then the filter bubble effect becomes a real effect. The belief doesn't need to be "a teenager working a low wage job is a problem", it just has to be "a teenager who did these fancy things would make a better admit than a teenager who just didn't seem to have as many man-hours of accomplishments for some reason we don't understand".
roystgnr
18d ago
Very fair point.
I suspect the answer intended by the US Constitution was also the one you'd get from game theory: treaties are supreme over other laws, and require a 2/3 Senate vote to ratify, and naturally you're not going to swing wildly from "2/3 in favor of ratification" to "2/3 in favor of nullification", so once a treaty is ratified it should be relatively trustworthy.
Unfortunately the Constitution doesn't actually spell out the "2/3 in favor of nullification" part of that, and so the status quo for terminating a treaty ended up somewhere in between "big legalese mess" and "the President can do whatever he wants", leaning towards the latter. I would still trust the US with an alliance more than Russia, but not as much more as I'd like to.
roystgnr
18d ago
the US should look to ally with Russia
Can one ally with Russia, in any sense that requires future commitments rather than presently verifiable terms? What has changed in between the Berlin Blockade and now that makes them less likely to use such an alliance when it might benefit them but then ignore it as soon as it might cost them? (Fun aside: though it sounds like one of Aesop's, The Scorpion and the Frog is a Russian fable)
in order to build an economic and diplomatic relationship with China:
China is already our third-largest trading partner (right after the two that each share thousands of miles of border with us), and though our diplomatic relationship is somewhat strained by philosophical tensions similar to our tensions with Russia, e.g. between "conquest is bad" versus "if the other guys are basically the same ethnicity then it shouldn't even really count as an invasion when we send in the military", I don't think the proper resolution here is to just switch teams. There are a lot of potential Sudetenland "special military operation" opportunities in the world, and it's a better place when they're unrealized opportunities.
and we allied w/Japan
Despite my suspicions above, I would agree that if Russia agrees to an unconditional surrender, demilitarization and disarmament, an American rewrite of their constitution, and acceptance of military occupation to enforce it all, that would be ample evidence of sufficient change for us to ally with them afterwards.
roystgnr
20d ago
The hostage doesn't have a gun, but by not resisting, the hostage is enabling a criminal with a gun to get away.
By not resisting, the scientists are (checks notes) noticing that scientific studies done in a Hispanic country might help more Hispanics want to become scientists.
The hostage still isn't coming off as the better of the two here.
roystgnr
20d ago
Keanu Reeves character, "Speed", trying to be edgy: "Shoot the hostage. ... Go for the good wound and he can't get to the plane with her."
The_Nybbler, actually understanding edgy: "Shoot the hostage. Once they've obeyed the terrorist they can't legitimately complain of being treated as an enemy."
roystgnr
20d ago
Zelensky is asking for American boys to die on the steppe in Ukraine on the other side of the world.
I thought he was still just asking for materiel. When did he request troops?
roystgnr
22d ago
A bit of a stretch, but also interesting to read about in its own right. Three of the FDR justices in the majority vote in that case also voted with the majority to overturn it just 3 years later, with a separate concurrence to specifically discuss why they deliberately did so. Their concurrence isn't entirely the paean to freedom I'd have hoped for, but it's still impressive to see people change their minds so significantly, publicly, and (relative to the judicial workings) quickly.
On the one hand, the Comanche territory didn't come within 500 miles of Austin until after they had Spanish-descended horses to conquer it with, and it's pretty ridiculous and racist for the bleeding-hearts to bemoan the fact that Texas doesn't belong to those conquerors rather than to their conquerors' conquerors. I'd paraphrase it as "Those Natives are all alike, right? Who cares when one of their tribes is dispossessed by another of their tribes; it's like flipping a two-headed coin!", except that would suggest a verbal rationalization and I doubt anyone made it past a non-verbal gut feeling.
On the other hand, despite the ridiculous intention of the land acknowledgement, I feel like the Comancheria people would have been the sort to appreciate what the land acknowledgement means de facto. "You took this land from us, and you're not giving it back, and you're so confident about your conquest that you're willing to rub it in, at public festivals, while our descendants live among you? Impressive. Kudos!"
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