ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
No bio...
User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7d ago
Now and then I need to print sensitive documents like account recovery codes, and I don't trust internet-connected devices like basically all modern printers. I decided to see what kind of printers were out there that didn't need internet connectivity. There are a few that one can supposedly use over USB, but the printer I settled on was actually a USB receipt printer intended for point-of-sale use. The output is plenty big enough for notes, shopping lists, and recovery codes, and it's easy to operate, so I bought one.
It's been a lot of fun playing with this printer. It's really fast, and there's no ink to deal with. The best part is the document length is unlimited; it's just continuous paper on a roll with no page breaks. So longer-form documents come out as a looooong narrow page.
What has been interesting has been seeing the software bugs this exposes in common software. One would think that page size is completely arbitrary and it should be possible to print in any dimensions, but no.
- Chromium can't print pages longer than about a meter. It also (unrelated to the printer; I just discovered this during this exploration since I don't ever use Chromium at home) cannot print from reader mode.
- Firefox tries to be extremely clever in how it parses the paper size, and ends up barfing when it encounters the description of the receipt paper size. It falls back to treating the document size as A4 with the narrow column of text centered, which means the only visible portion of the document when printed is the blank left side of the A4 page.
- Many programs (Obsidian looking at you) can't print natively, falling back to a PDF renderer from which one is supposed to print. The trouble is that Obsidian's PDF renderer only allows common paper sizes like US Letter and A4. There's a community plugin for printing, but with this printer it only succeeds on every other attempt.
- Many websites can't render properly in a narrow window or document. Combined with Chromium not printing from reader mode and Firefox failing completely, I haven't figured out how to print blog posts and essays formatted nicely.
I'm not sure what I expected given that I was doing something unusual, but I also expect software to be getting better over time so I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised. Still, it works for what I really need it for, and maybe I can figure out how to work around these bugs.
I'm having a hard time thinking of any children's media from 20+ years ago where the main character really loses something at the end. There are a lot of stories with a loss at the beginning (Batman, The Land Before Time, The Lion King, for example). Let me do an informal survey:
G:
- Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971): happy ending
- Robin Hood (Disney, 1973): happy ending
- The Fox and the Hound (1981): loss
- An American Tail (1986): happy ending
- The Land Before Time (1988): happy ending
- The Little Mermaid (1989): happy ending
- Aladdin (1992): happy ending
- The Lion King (1994): happy ending
- Toy Story (1995): happy ending
- Babe (1995): happy ending
- Mulan (1998): happy ending
PG:
- Jaws (1975): loss
- Star Wars (1977): loss
- The Empire Strikes Back (1980): loss
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): happy ending
- The Return of the Jedi (1983): loss
- Ghostbusters (1984): happy ending
- The NeverEnding Story (1984): happy ending
- The Karate Kid (1984): happy ending
- Back to the Future (1985): happy ending
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1986): happy ending
- The Goonies (1985): happy ending
- Stand by Me (1986): loss (I think)
- The Princess Bride (1987): happy ending
- Willow (1988): happy ending
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989): happy ending
- Home Alone (1990): happy ending
- My Girl (1991): loss
- The Iron Giant (1999): loss
- Spirited Away (2001): loss
I'd do a more thorough survey but I'm tired. The basic story, though, is that G-rated movies have always had happy endings without much real emotional impact (The Fox and the Hound being a notable exception).
If you're looking for kids' movies with depth, I'd recommend Studio Ghibli. There's not a lot you can do about your kids' peers liking saccharine trivialities but it doesn't hurt to try introducing something more interesting.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
24d ago
I just would have zero care that someone told me they thought about and planned to do a school shooting but didn’t. It’s not like they were stopped - they just didn’t do it.
I had the same reaction - who cares? This might really be a class thing. I think it's more about thinking of a gun as a legitimate tool than it is about how she planned to use it.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
5mo ago
This study has quite different distributions from the one atelier posted above, and yields about a 1.2% chance with a randomly sampled pair that the woman is stronger, compared to 7.11% with the other study. 1.2% is very small! I wouldn't want those odds in a fight. And if the distributions are truly normal, then the fatter tails on the male distribution mean the upper end is basically 100% men.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
5mo ago
There's still a surprising amount of overlap. With a randomly sampled man and woman, the woman has about a 7.1% chance of a stronger grip.
- Men: N(48.6, 8.5)
- Women: N(32.9, 6.5)
- Difference: N(48.6 - 32.9, sqrt(8.5^2 + 6.5^2)) = N(15.7, 10.7)
- CDF at 0: 7.11%
And who must have used that teacher status to get to know her, as a teacher, prior to graduation.
That is important context and completely changes my view. If it's true, then the charges, with potential for a 20-year sentence, are completely appropriate.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
Yes, the law applying to this case seems misguided.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
It makes sense to prevent sexual relationships between a teacher and their students. The 90 day limit should be even longer for such cases, at least a year. It's way too big a conflict of interest to allow that for teachers. It's also a breach of trust of the teacher's position. However, the fact that this law applies to any teacher and student regardless of whether the teacher ever taught the student seems misguided.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
One difference is that people can act on predictions of real-world events like elections. The information that the prediction market reveals has value. There's not really anything you can do with knowing which football team will win the Super Bowl.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
The whole point of prediction markets as a concept is to aggregate information for the benefit of non-participants. All the participants are playing by the same rules (which don't prohibit insider trading) so I have no sympathy for anyone on the losing end of those bets.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
I didn't specify, because almost any deliberate purpose is better than the hedonistic pursuit of subjective experience. I'll give some examples:
- Living a life of virtue
- Discovering or creating something of lasting importance to humanity
- Living a life devoted to God
- Giving life to your children and descendants
- Planting lupines in your neighborhood
In some sense pursuing a life of purpose is just subjective experience. But I don't think this is what people mean when they talk about 'subjective life' as in the essay. One quote that rubbed me the wrong way was
Most directly, we should not waste children’s time. The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.
This suggests that the feeling of boredom is bad in itself. But that's not right. Boredom is a useful feeling, in the same way that hunger or anger are useful for motivating useful behavior (not starving, and protecting one's place in the social hierarchy, respectively). Boredom is useful to motivate one to learn new things. But these feelings are only useful on average; there are circumstances where indulging one's boredom or hunger or anger would be counterproductive. Treating the feeling as bad or good in itself, and the cessation or increase in the feeling as one's goal, in the extreme means a life of hedonism. It doesn't matter whether one is focused on one's children or oneself; the hedonism is what's mistaken.
I'm not saying anything new here that philosophers haven't been talking about for hundreds of years, but this is bound to be a common objection to the essay.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
Not at all.
This is a beautiful essay. But ultimately consciousness and subjective experience don't matter. Outcomes matter. If your life was pure suffering but you achieved a great purpose, then that's a better life than one full of subjective joy. Giving children a great childhood can be good, but only insofar as it causes them to live a purposeful life.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
An engineering organization doesn't have to accept the default compiler behavior for a language. They can use linters and other tools to restrict (or expand!) the kind of code that's acceptable. And they can have a culture that values thoroughness or that values moving fast and breaking things.
I think the best argument for something like Rust is that it makes it easier to guarantee quality where it matters to the organization. If quality doesn't matter to the organization, whether explicitly through tooling and coding standards or implicitly through seeing what gets people promoted or fired, then people will circumvent safeguards whatever language it is.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
This is a really interesting point. I really like the proposal to require showing after-tax prices. But this means that businesses have to know what the after-tax price actually is for each customer before purchasing, which is much harder and more ambiguous than doing it after purchase. For example, if customers who live in a certain city have to pay an extra tax, how would the business learn this about customers it's showing ads to? Not to mention the much larger number of ad targets than actual customers.
I think one thing that would happen is businesses would show some price based on predicted taxes, and just eat the tax difference if they predicted wrong. Or an even richer industry of fine print would spring up around price displays.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
I would appreciate an in-depth defense of this claim. I'm a big proponent of following the law as it is, but working to change bad laws. If changing the law requires violating it then I would have to rethink my stance.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
Freedom of speech is a mistake theory idea. You won't get conflict theorists to accept it, because it doesn't' advance their goals. The only way to convert people to mistake theorists and get them to adopt freedom of speech as a shared principle with you is to get together with them on the same team against a larger common enemy. As long as they consider you a rival/threat/enemy, they'll treat your words as enemy soldiers.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
I don't think you can separate the things that were grandfathered in from the current good state we find ourselves in. Alcohol is useful for proving trustworthiness within a group. We might never have gotten out of small-scale tribalism without its influence. Guns were a necessary tool for breaking the old social order of kings and nobility. The countries where guns are rare have at least a vibe that no one could ever upset the established order. In America there are times when states, and even smaller groups, defy the federal government using force. The threat of such defiance limits the extent to which the establishment boot can stomp on human faces before it is stopped by force.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
In the US it's a current event: T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree. One might be able to opt out.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
I'm very skeptical, on Hansonian grounds.
MBTI (or you could say more generally, "Jungian typology") is a language for talking about internal phenomenological experience; it's not a tool for making behavioral predictions
I'm skeptical that there's a rigorous way to show a difference between really experiencing something vs. claiming to experience it for the evolutionary advantage.
MBTI makes additional predictions about Fe and Fi being correlated with other (rather specific) psychological and personality traits, instead of simply treating it as an isolated and free-floating random variable.
What are those predictions? And how are they validated or falsified? If not by behavior, then what? I would expect that any correlation with other psychological and personality traits would fall out of the analysis that produced OCEAN.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
Why use MBTI when OCEAN is available and makes better predictions? And how is the Fi/Fe dichotomy different from just Agreeableness?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
Not OP but his reputation was destroyed, and for someone like him what does he have left?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
The "can't remember the name of their medication" test is a frustratingly close mirror to the Obama administration's 'fiduciary' test, which was quite broadly applied to people whose sole sin was having difficultly dealing with a checkbook.
Could you give some more context on what this is, for those unfamiliar? All I can find is a rule about financial professionals having to act in their clients' best interests.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
- Yes
- Yes
- No, mainly because speed limits are inappropriately low in most cases.
- Left lane is for passing only, but cutting drivers off and tailgating are wrong too.
- No, it's not okay to break the law. However, see 7.
- No, everyone follows the same rules.
- There should be a new law on merging: if another vehicle ahead is signaling to change into your lane, you must slow down to let them in. This would encourage drivers to use the whole roadway instead of lining up a mile back to get into a specific lane. In most cases this would lead to more efficient use of road space, and it would make driving a lot less stressful for people who are not assertive. It's painful to ride with a driver who has no guts and can't assertively merge.
Yes; I bought paper that's supposed to have at least a 5-year lifespan before fading, and I'm keeping a skeptical eye on how the printouts actually fade. I'll probably get a USB laser printer eventually but the shopping is such a chore.
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