ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
1yr ago
Daily chart and Weekly chart are throwing 500 errors at me, but I hadn't seen the stats page yet. Thanks for linking it.
ulyssessword
1yr ago
It's been a while, but the last time I looked at the models, all of the worst-case predictions for the next hundred years were manageable with currently existing first-world technology. If you can't buy an air conditioner or hurricane-proof your buildings, then you're in trouble. Similarly, wildlife and ecosystems (but not agriculture) are also in trouble.
A lot of the apocalyptic predictions came from war sparked by the sudden changes in every country's fortunes.
ulyssessword
1yr ago
The rule I created (that seems to work, but I haven't thoroughly tested) is:
! 2022-09-19 https://www.themotte.org
www.themotte.org##bdi
and the reddit one I mentioned is:
! 2021-08-04 https://old.reddit.com
reddit.com##.awardings-bar
To create filtering rules like that, rightclick on the offending element, choose "Block Element" from the contextual menu, then play with the two sliders until you have a rule that looks general enough without removing parts that you want.
I've beaten PoE twice (with years in between), and never needed to look things up. If you're just getting to the level cap and the end of the story, then you don't need a hyperoptimized build.
ulyssessword
1yr ago
"Open External Links In New Tabs" is inconsistent. I disabled the setting, clicked on an external link (the Forbes link here, if it makes a difference), and it opened in a new tab.
I just tried clicking on http://example.com/ in this message preview, and it respected my settings. (EDIT: clicking it in the message, after posting, opened it in a new tab).
ulyssessword
1yr ago
second unhideable-in-bulk comment
ulyssessword
1yr ago
first unhideable-in-bulk comment
If a comment is deleted, it can't be collapsed. This would be useful if it had a bunch of replies that you'd like to hide simultaneously.
Example below:
EDIT: hmm, didn't work? Maybe it's only mod-removed ones, not user deleted.
ulyssessword
7d ago
It's visible now, but yes, it was filtered when I commented.
ulyssessword
14d ago
It was Notepad. I'm comfortable with the synecdoche, but could have been clearer.
clearly marked as unsaved!
Are we using the same program? I can't imagine anyone calling a small grey dot "clearly marked", never mind "clearly marked as...".
For reference, the only visual difference between a saved file and an unsaved one is that the "close tab" location goes from [ ]/[X] to [•]/[X]. If your mouse is hovering over the X then there's no difference.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
...but 600 IU is, to put it bluntly, fucking useless.
Dosing confusion is frustratingly common. Do you know how hard it is to cut a 5 mg melatonin pill into 16ths so you get the right amount?
ulyssessword
2mo ago
(Reposting post-reboot):
(from the leadup to papardus's comment)
No matter how many epicycles go into justifying the position and adding layers of nuance to it, there has to be some point where you take a step back and notice that the only thing they care about is vilifying racial minorities, blaming all of our problems on them, and advocating for policies against them. There has to be a word for that position regardless of the aesthetics that it is cloaked in.
Well said, and I wish I shared your optimism. Unfortunately, the English language doesn't care about what "has to be".
Heading off to a calmer front of the Culture War, it would also be nice if there was a word for a fictional character that is confident, driven, and in charge of their own decisions. Unfortunately, attempts at describing that sort of person get misinterpreted as lifting heavy weights and punching really hard.
The problems with "strong characters" are magnified a hundredfold with "racist". I've largely given up on using both of those terms because they do not enlighten the listener as to which claims I'm making.
Do you truly, really believe that there should be no legitimate way to ever have that conversation [about racial bias] at all?
Quite the opposite: If elected to the position of Language Czar, I promise to simplify and enable those conversations by creating a single word that unambiguously and specifically refers to those people. This will fix a glaring oversight where cross-burning KKK members are given the same label as people who get high scores on implicit association tests.
What, roughly, do I think the word “racism” means? Not just what does it not include, what should it definitely include?
To a first approximation, I don't. That's the entire problem. Toss it on the euphemism treadmill (dysphemism treadmill?) and let it sit in the dustbin of history.
imagine if I argued “right-wing people have abused the term free speech into complete meaninglessness because almost all of them invoke the first amendment in response to private actors criticizing them or banning them from a forum etc”. You can’t really deny that a large number of people actually do this all the time, but this is a terrible comment, right?
Oddly enough, I don't think you would have the opportunity here.
Take this comment, posted today. It's about someone being fired for making political statements, but the phrases "free speech" and "freedom of speech" don't show up in any of the 20 comments currently in that thread.
If you did find an appropriate target, then go for it. I'm sure someone would clarify which principles were at issue, and if necessary expand on why they are worth defending (or defying).
ulyssessword
3mo ago
More "rationality competence is systematized winning".
If a protest's goal is to get people to show up and raise the profile of an issue, then your comment only focused on the participants and not on what effect they have on the wider world. I'm not fully convinced that conservatives are worse at effective outreach given the loss of prestige of the mainstream media, but those (alleged) failures can't be dismissed by pointing to the challenges they face.
ulyssessword
4mo ago
Related to @DuplexFields below, if you could create a system of weights and measures that would be used worldwide, what would you do?
The SI system is pretty good (and a vast improvement over the mishmash of units that they replaced), but IMO there's still room for improvement. The "kilo"gram is the most obvious failure with its extraneous prefix, a change of one Kelvin is too small to detect unaided unlike one second, meter, or kilogram, and the ampere and mole are just weird numbers.
My proposed system would keep water as the informal reference material, as well as the second. Everything else would change to match the new discoveries in the last ~150 years: I would keep the rotation of the Earth, the mass of an atom, and the density and freezing point of water, but replace the circumference of the earth, the force produced by electromagnetism, and the boiling point of water with absolute zero and the elementary charge as follows:
| Dimension | Value | Original Metric Derivation |
New Derivation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | 1 s | 1/(24 * 60 * 60) day | No change |
| Length | 2.71 cm | 1/(40000000) circumference of Earth | A 1x1x1 cube of water masses 1 |
| Mass | 19.93 g | Water has density 1000 kg/m^3 | 10^24 carbon-12 atoms has mass of 12 |
| Electric Current | 160.3 mA | Magnetic force between wires | 10^18 elementary charges per second |
| Temperature | 2.7316 K | 100 degrees freezing-boiling |
0 is 0, freezing is 100 |
| Amount | 1 | Atoms per gram | None |
| luminous intensity | ?? | Whatever. |
Do you have any improvements to the metric system you can think of? Any other changes you'd like made?
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Thanks for reminding me to check my clocks.
Good news: Neither Google nor Microsoft overrode my timezone preferences (this time), so I don't have to adjust my "automatic" clocks to the correct time.
ulyssessword
6mo ago
62% from one part of the "Religion in US" wikipedia page (they have other numbers elsewhere), and 46% from the linked post. I don't think the actual calculation is important, as I would've made the same argument if it was 40% or 4%.
ulyssessword
6mo ago
I don't think there are any houses with grass around them in the immediate area.
I'd call that the deciding factor. It's not a super-principled decision, but the density you're describing doesn't sound suburban.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
Nevermind, I've fallen for the narrative. Death rates at residential schools reached acceptable mortality rates by 1949 (Source Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (PDF), p17, from this website).
ulyssessword
8mo ago
Nevermind, I've fallen for the narrative. Death rates at residential schools reached acceptable mortality rates by 1949 (Source Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (PDF), p17, from this website).
ulyssessword
8mo ago
I've played Cultist Simulator, and it's great. It fills a niche I didn't even know existed.
There are a lot of games (and other stories) that present something mysterious and ask you to find the answers. Cultist Simulator is part of the rare breed that makes you find the questions first. Some of the (gameplay-related) questions I discovered quite late are:
- Are the different lore types (moth, lantern, forge, etc.)
sorted, or unsorted ? - Do the available rewards from
dreaming in Mansus change based on your choices? - How about
challenges in expeditions ?
The friend who recommended CS to me shared a screenshot of his recent playthrough, and he still hasn't asked that first question, and therefore can't take advantage of what the answer reveals.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
I think what the first author meant was that the increase in prices would be compensated by the potential savings from using electric cars
There would be even bigger savings if the price of electricity didn't go up, though. Also, they didn't mention "more economical" or anything like that, they mentioned "powered by the grid". If that's what they meant, then they should have at least alluded to it.
As for AC, technically it is true - any AC would waste energy as heat (thermodynamics commands us so) and thus, inevitably, heat up the city
The process's waste heat isn't heat from homes, though. It's brand-new heat that is generated within the machine.
Even if I agreed with the factual contents of your comment, it wouldn't substantially change my mind. It would change it from "blatant logical or physical errors" to "blatantly deceptive presentations of logical or physical systems", which is hardly any better.
ulyssessword
11mo ago
Thanks for the clarification.
ulyssessword
11mo ago
I'm more sympathetic to that argument when we have months of factfinding followed by days of debate on the minutiae of the event, like in a criminal trial. We don't usually have that much detail available, so we have to use something to fill in the blanks the rest of the time.
The flow of information from the "unknown" background to the actor isn't magic, it's just not explained in the text. For a more concrete example of how background characteristics can change the events in a way that aren't reflected in a description, consider:
Alice shot Bob after he approached her in the alleyway behind 1st street. She stated that she feared for her life, as he was carrying knives "in an obvious manner". Bob was a 23 year old male who...
The end. Everything else is background that she couldn't have researched (and even the age would've been a guess). Otherwise it might change your opinion that he:
A) ...had a history of mugging, a rap sheet as long as your arm, etc.
B) ...was a culinary student heading home from class.
I think that variant A was likely justified, and variant B likely wasn't. Do you think that both are, or neither?
ulyssessword
1yr ago
For literally every rich country? I know that there's some amount of conspiracy regulatory coordination that goes on between different countries, but that seems like a weak argument at the world scale.
No worries. It took me years to learn that you can just look up public information when things are unclear.
(One of the more recent places where "just look it up" helped me was reading about Carolyn Strom: every news source printed an almost-identical, obviously incomplete story. Sometimes, they were actually identical because they were reposting from a wire service. Going to the court records was so much more informative.)
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