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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • As far as I’ve ever been paying attention, conservatives only argue in bad faith. It’s always been about elevating their own speech and suppressing speech that counters theirs. They just couch it in terms that sound vaguely reasonable or logical in the moment if you don’t know their history and don’t think about it more deeply than very surface-level.

    Before, platforms were suppressing their speech, so they were promoters of free speech. Now platforms are not suppressing speech counter to them, so it’s all about content moderation to protect the children, or whatever. But their policies always belie their true motive: they never implement what research shows supports their claimed position of the moment. They always create policies that hurt their out-groups and may sometimes help their in-groups (helping people is optional).


  • My understanding of why digital computers rose to dominance was not any superiority in capability but basically just error tolerance. When the intended values can only be “on” or “off,” your circuit can be really poor due to age, wear, or other factors, but if it’s within 40% of the expected “on” or “off” state, it will function basically the same as perfect. Analog computers don’t have anywhere near tolerances like that, which makes them more fragile, expensive, and harder to scale production.

    I’m really curious if the researchers address any of those considerations.


  • Several years ago I created a Slack bot that ran something like Jupyter notebook in a container, and it would execute Python code that you sent to it and respond with the results. It worked in channels you invited it to as well as private messages, and if you edited your message with your code, it would edit its response to always match the latest input. It was a fun exercise to learn the Slack API, as well as create something non-trivial and marginally useful in that Slack environment. I knew the horrible security implications of such a bot, even with the Python environment containerized, and never considered opening it up outside of my own personal use.

    Looks like the AI companies have decided that exact architecture is perfectly safe and secure as long as you obfuscate the input pathway by having to go through a chat-bot. Brilliant.



  • I’m sorry, I mostly agree with the sentiment of the article in a feel-good kind of way, but it’s really written like how people claim bullies will get their comeuppance later in life, but then you actually look them up later and they have high paying jobs and wonderful families. There’s no substance here, just a rant.

    The author hints at analogous cases in the past of companies firing all of their engineers and then having to scramble to hire them back, but doesn’t actually get into any specifics. Be specific! Talk through those details. Prove to me the historical cases are sufficiently similar to what we’re starting to see now that justifies the claims of the rest of the article.




  • I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think their point is that the bars don’t scale linearly. The red bar (2014 price) for the McChicken is supposed to represent $1 and the yellow bar (2024 price) ~$3, but the yellow bar is not 3 times the length of the red bar. This means the relative differences between the bar lengths doesn’t match the percent increase number printed above then. This is most egregious comparing relative differences between the McChicken and the Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal: why does a 122% increase look so much worse than the 199% increase?

    I suspect the cause of problem is that the small bars were stretched a bit to fit printing the dollar value within then, but if it throws off the visual accuracy of the bars, what’s the point of using bars at all?



  • I don’t think that follows, because those are temporary conditions, and consuming the drug is a choice made by an individual not currently under the influence. So it’s the person’s responsibility before they consume the drug to prepare their environment for when they are under the influence. If they’re so destructive under the influence that they can’t not commit a crime, it is their responsibility not to take the drug at all.


  • Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.

    Put it on my 10-year-old son’s desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.

    Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she’s getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.


  • Democratic candidates have raised far more than Republicans and can purchase ads at the cheaper rate offered to candidates. Republicans rely more heavily on independent expenditures from their campaign arm and allied super PACs, which have to pay much more per ad.

    Gee, it’s almost like Republicans aren’t favored by a large proportion of the population who can donate up to the ~$3,300 federal limit directly to campaigns and have to rely on their wealthy benefactors donating much, much more per capita through side channels that shouldn’t even exist in a functional democracy.



  • Before my comment I want to make clear I agree with the conclusion that abortion bans are clearly killing women at statistically significant rates.

    That said, the stats reporting here doesn’t make sense:

    Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5% in 2019 to 18.9% in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20% to 39.1%. And Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6% to 43.6%.

    There’s no way 14.5% of Hispanic women in Texas who got pregnant died some time during pregnancy, during child birth, or soon after. That would be unprecedented for any time since the advent of modern medicine. And the chart above this paragraph does not agree with it either. It’s a chart of deaths per hundred THOUSAND live births, and the numbers for all racial groups are all under 100, so less than 0.1%.

    The way it’s stated also doesn’t suggest it’s a percent increase because it says it rose from 14.5% to 18.9%. I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say, but they should definitely have been more careful with presenting the numbers.