Empact

> please do not rely on LLMs for medical advice

FWIW, I have successfully addressed a few personal health issues in collaboration with AI: soft plaque reversal as quantified via CIMT testing, and bringing my slightly elevated blood pressure into normal bounds

And I'm making significant progress in optimizing my health. It's not without its flaws, but I find it's a great interface into the broad field of medical research, and better than any doctor I've known at integrating a broad set of medical data from disparate sources.

That's my anecdote, and here's another: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/our-ai-midwife

While this list certainly includes a mix of ideas, the fact that some of them are not in vogue in the current orthodoxy does not make them wrong. https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

There's abundant evidence against this belief:

  * Lottery winners do not commit less crime than those who do not win the lottery: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31962
  * Studies of identical twins adopted and raised apart shows that crime is more correlated with genetics than environment: 45% nature vs 18-27% nurture https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/
  * "While individual study estimates vary, meta-analyses have suggested the level of heritability of antisocial behavior is approximately 40–60%. Shared environmental factors have been estimated to explain approximately 11–14% of the variance in antisocial/criminal behavior and non-shared environmental influences approximately 31–37%" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6640871/
  * “Black men raised in the top 1 percent – by millionaires – were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000.” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-debate/

Leftists ask “why don’t Americans hate capitalism,” while Americans live in one of the most prosperous and advanced societies in the world.

Affordability is a combination of individual productivity and the economy’s productivity. A substantial increase in the economy’s productivity through AI and robotics should result in greater overall production, which should tend to result in abundance, and thus a lower cost of living, which can even overwhelm a decline in your individual productivity.

This website is about what is banned in California, ostensibly for environmental reasons. So pigouvian taxes would enable them to unban those practices while mitigating their harms.

If you’re worried about people evading the tax, you can make a border adjustment for imports across national borders. Note California is simply forcing things to be done elsewhere.

You can also use pigouvian taxation to make polluting expensive. Cost savings is generally the motivation for allowing negative externalities like pollution, so a natural way to reverse it in many cases while allowing flexibility when there is no practical alternative.

I can attest that the Quaker Meeting on 9th street is an earnest reverent bunch. I attended regularly for some time around 2020.

The Old English representation, inclusive of the long S, is consistent with the 1847 source material, as you can see here: https://archive.org/details/firstsixbooksofe00byrn/page/n21/...

The first printed copy, of 1482, was in Latin: https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667076/

The Greek (Ελληνικά) representation is presumably consistent with Euclid's original manuscript, e.g. as represented in this copy, of 888: https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=208

Many people speak Russian, including many who do not live in Russia, e.g. about 30% of Ukranians.

Beyond that, I don't see how we stand to durably reduce military action by making languages mutually unintelligible.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language#/media/Fi...

This is an inaccurate description of what they are doing. For example Renee Good was actively blockading a street, by placing her car perpendicularly across it. Some may be engaged in observation, but that is not broadly the case, and organizationally, their apparent goal is to obstruct.

Is any law enforcement guaranteed to be exactly correct? No, because every person is fallible, and every system is made up of fallible people. This is why we separate arrest (police) from trial (judge) and judgment (jury), to mitigate those risks.

To malign a system because it is imperfect is to be unrealistic. Surely, we should minimize those harms, but they are not a reason to abdicate our laws.

So you claim that all 12,000 arrests in the UK and all 3,500 arrests in Germany for online speech are justifiable? https://x.com/croucher_miles/status/2010716875190161614?s=46

It’s ironic to me that a European such as yourself would sit comfortably in a context where people are being regularly arrested and jailed for statements made online, in the UK and Germany, particularly, and look elsewhere to find oppression.

The deporting of illegal immigrants is not oppression - it’s fundamental to a free society that a people have the right to determine who may enter into and participate in their society.

Deporting illegal immigrants is not oppression.

Their stated purpose and their actual function can be different, and speech that would otherwise be free can be illegal if involved in incitement, bribery, collusion, etc.

If I’m having a conversation with my friend, it’s free speech. If we’re plotting the overthrow of the government, it’s insurrection.

Opportunity is everywhere.

I read it was in the phone book. If you’re too young to have experienced this, it may surprise you that phone numbers were typically publicly listed in books that were mailed out annually, in those times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory

His phone call could have been placed by anyone. The question is, was his success mythological, or was it because he was the sort of a man who was willing and motivated to place such phone calls?

If you want to believe those things are unattainable, you can, but just remember that Steve Jobs got an internship at HP at the age of 12 by calling the founder on the telephone. Literally anyone could have done that.

These opportunities come to those who seek them.

I would argue the prospect of people waiting to stop them is a good deterrent, a beneficial complement to any effective justice system. When seconds count, the police are at best minutes away. For example, concealed carry is demonstrably effective in mass shooting attempts in churches, ending the threat in 6 seconds: https://youtu.be/LflruqEMlVU?si=Q4VeYnClxPGtrI88

Consider too that there are many documented cases of the authorities being incompetent to or unwilling to stop a threat, most recently in Bondi Beach, but also in Uvalde. Maybe they’re just not coming to save you?

In my world, a civilized person is one who upholds peaceable society, and a barbarian is one who uses force to upend that society. They're not hordes, but they are barbarians.

You act like guns some weird anachronism, but from my perch, it seems that the need for civilized people to maintain firearms is increasing, not decreasing.

Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians?

If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order.

In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?

This is about trans identification, so not to do with attraction to a particular sex.

Doesn’t the very rise and fall of trans youth identification contradict your claim? Being queer was novel and cool, and now (for many) it’s cringe. People adopt what is novel and cool and reject what is cringe, particularly as naive children.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/why-are-fewer-young-people-ident...

In many states there’s a carve out for mopeds, for example which have less than 50 ccs of displacement. In Texas you can ride them with just a regular drivers license, but ccs have no meaning in the electric world. Should be straightforward to make the case for equivalent regulation, but would require a new advocacy campaign/org.

This, or a miniaturized version thereof could change the game for light electric vehicles - imagine an electric motorcycle that weighs substantially more like an electric bicycle.

Right now it takes about 10-15lbs of motor to produce a 3KW motor for an electric bike, this motor is about 10 times that in power density afaict.

The Livewire electric motorcycles use something like 100-200 lbs of motor to produce 1/4 as much power, 75kw, so that’s an improvement of 8-16x.

Personally I chose a new over a used Model Y this year because the Juniper release includes a new front bumper camera which could prove crucial in certain unlikely scenarios, and improve overall self-driving. It’s important enough that there are rumors they’ll offer the option of retrofitting it onto earlier versions: https://evannex.com/blogs/news/how-to-identify-your-model-y-...

Also HW4 likely unlocks significant self-driving performance that the earlier hardware stack cannot accommodate, and will support features that are yet to be released for a longer period of time.

Which is all to say: looks to me that the progress is significant.

It's literally not, which casts the rest of the author's conclusions into doubt.

My mantra: trust no inbound communications. If something is in fact urgent, it can be confirmed by reaching out, rather than accepting an inbound call, to a number publicly listed and well known as representative of the company.

These scams will only get better, they will impersonate your loved ones, your best friends, your children, and plead with you to save them by handing over money or information, but it will all be a ruse. The only things that can prevent this outcome are: positive ironclad proof of identity / personhood / company representation, or ongoing rejection of belief in inbound communications.