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ballmerpoint

Re:The U.S. Is Bullying Europe Like Never Before on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:32AM (#50351225)
> > The only issues that we do still have is a lot of latent racism in small towns and concentrations of crime (across all cultures, including those lily white Dutch) related to drugs and such. The people that want to blow this out of proportion are the ones on the far right...

> The way you phrase it suggests that the crime problem is independent of immigration

Not really. It’s still possible to “blow this out of proportion” even if the distribution does not factor along immigration status.

> The people have every rational reason to oppose immigration if such a rise in criminality is the outcome.

It’s not rational to respond to a 5x prevalence (simply using your figure for the sake of argument) as if it were 10x or 100x, and that seems closer to jacquesm’s point.

Re:The U.S. Is Bullying Europe Like Never Before on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:10AM (#50351003)
You are confidently wrong about the meaning of the quoted sentence. I was going to chalk it up to getting confused about the passive voice, but this deflection makes the misinterpretation seem intentional.
Re:The U.S. Is Bullying Europe Like Never Before on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:04PM (#50347916)
> “Fascist" seems a little over the top to describe these views.

You’re committing a fallacy of association and then attributing that fallacy to the parent comment. Not great.

“Fascists blame everything on immigrants...” is the logical equivalent of what they said. They did not describe that opinion as fascist.

Re:The Duty of a Scholar on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:57PM (#50320150)
> Members of the IEEE commit, for example, "to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public..." without that duty being limited to hazards arising from projects employing the Engineer in question: The duty "to disclose promptly" vests in any Engineer who recognizes that the hazard exists.

As an active member of the IEEE for over a decade now, I have never seen anyone (aside from the author here) take this duty seriously. There are plenty of IEEE members working on things that directly cause such hazards.

Re:The Duty of a Scholar on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:50PM (#50320073)
It varies by state. Many states by now have programs capping it at 35$/mo, but I believe that often entails being insured under their state public insurance or another plan operating in that state (and so may not count as “uninsured cost”).
It’s not heavily moderated. This is the usual link dang/tomhow give when they explain why their moderation is necessarily inconsistent:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

This is not a criticism of their moderation style, this is simply reporting how they describe it.

Even back then, it was partly various three-letter agencies manufacturing their own criminals to justify the budget.
Re:SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:30PM (#50249630)
Yes, of course. It doesn’t seem to recall the specific details very well, or confuses them with x86 or ARM instructions that do similar things. And yes, my AGENTS.md says ONLY USE INSTRUCTIONS IN blah.txt.

I dunno, clearly I need an LLM psychiatrist.

Re:SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller on Monday October 26, 2026 @12:22PM (#50246441)
IME, they’re still pretty bad at getting specific implementation details of SIMD correct. The best I’ve done so far is to harness them to an actual piece of hardware and have them iterate until they see performance improvements but 1) Goodhart’s law, they tend to overfit the benchmark suite and 2) the resulting SIMD often becomes illegible.
It should, I agree, but in practice the enforcement mechanism no longer functions.
> If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.

The OpenAI math dump showed that it’s not worth paying hundreds of PhD-years if a tech bro can do it with an agent.

> If you don't do homework, it is only on you.

The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences (EDIT: that is, doing poorly on the exam) are still in the future, but less so when they become present.

Then they lash out at the instructor, even if it’s really their fault.

Re:It's Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk on Friday October 23, 2026 @10:17AM (#50209479)
> You’re right I don’t value the opinions of economists unless they’ve applied their theories in practice.

I’m glad you finally admitted to some of your feelings on the matter. A limited hangout, as they say.

> I don’t think someone who just thinks about stuff should have the power to “take Starlink away” from someone who does stuff.

Even if you insist Krugman “just thinks about stuff,” he objectively does not have the power you ascribe to him.

Re:It's Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk on Friday October 23, 2026 @08:40AM (#50208070)
Yeah, you simply don’t like the guy, and it’s becoming clear that you probably don’t like economists in general.

I gave you the benefit of doubt earlier, but you can’t get through a comment without dropping a snarky jab.

Not liking people is normal. I don’t see why you thought you had to attempt to conceal your contempt (or that you could, since it’s apparently so strong).

Re:This I Believe on Friday October 23, 2026 @08:12AM (#50207730)
Exactly my point. Some conservatives in this thread got wrapped around themselves thinking I was using regressive as a synonym for conservative, but no, I said what I meant; specific words mean specific things.
Re:This I Believe on Friday October 23, 2026 @12:27AM (#50204505)
(1952).

Heinlein was such an odd fellow. Extremely progressive on one hand and extremely regressive on the other, sometimes in the span of a single paragraph.

Re:It's Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk on Thursday October 22, 2026 @11:58PM (#50204369)
But Krugman doesn’t “just study stuff.” That’s the misrepresentation. You’re not performing skepticism; it’s either ignorance or petty dishonesty.

And all the Krugman negging! “Not a real Nobel Prize.” Sick burn, dude.

Re:It's Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk on Thursday October 22, 2026 @03:33PM (#50199947)
You know, I hadn’t noticed that it didn’t.

Must be some vestigial, ancient hacker ethos thing.

Re:It's Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk on Thursday October 22, 2026 @03:25PM (#50199859)
Absolutely. It’s not socialism to nationalize a company that’s gone and made itself instrumental to national security and/or foreign policy. Especially when said company seems to interfere with either on a whim, often against America’s interests.
Re:It's Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk on Thursday October 22, 2026 @03:19PM (#50199820)
> people like Krugman who are smarter than 99% of people, but not smart enough to actually build anything.

You can just say you don’t like his politics. You don’t need to misrepresent his accomplishments.

Re:Archive of Our Own on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:33PM (#50172991)
https://archiveofourown.org/content#II.H

It’s acceptable on AO3 to write a narrative description of a real person’s actual abuse, including their personal information (see II.F.4.a), and it only “may result in a judgment of harassment” if also the author specifically makes it available to the victim.

The policy is unsafe by design.

Re:What shall I teach my son? on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:19PM (#50172077)
For a completely meaningless notion you do seem able to dispute its meaning in the sibling thread.

Not that it matters much to me whether it was or is meaningful or not. Nostalgia is simply a feeling that doesn’t imply much about its object.

Re:Archive of Our Own on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:17PM (#50171310)
I disapprove of how much underage material they host. Free speech absolutism runs head-first into its internal contradictions.
Re:What shall I teach my son? on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:59PM (#50171025)
I don’t really agree. Carl Sagan and other public intellectuals popularized these sorts of memes but no one really stepped in to replace them. The Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the contemporary world are not in the same class. And the culture is so much more anti-intellectual than it was back then...
Re:What shall I teach my son? on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:47PM (#50170013)
> My favorite suggestions of Postman’s are:

> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet

> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be

> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us

These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.

Re:8 in 10 Americans oppose live-streaming execution on Monday October 19, 2026 @09:54AM (#50152549)
> Lethal injection is basically equivalent to some guy going under anesthesia.

The “safe” dose of midazolam used for anesthesia is orders of magnitude smaller than the dose commonly used in lethal injection.

> Would it be fair game for anti-abortion groups to demand "if you support abortion you must watch every abortion"?

This was actually a tactic used by anti-abortion groups back when Roe was settled law.

Re:AI, Crypto and DEI Drove Marc Andreessen to MAGA on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:33AM (#50114463)
I can’t downvote things, but I would have. It seems intended to inflame, and ended up doing so. The guidelines tell us to avoid “fulmination.”
Re:Neural Networks Are Already Clean on Thursday October 15, 2026 @11:36PM (#50113760)
> Did they advance the field of AI alignment at all?

Not directly. Exotic decision theories were a dead end; as far as I know nobody outside of MIRI even cares about them. Certainly they’re not relevant to interpretability in the context of this thread.

Re:AI Safety Is Not a Corporate Plot on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:17PM (#50107882)
> Not a “random blog”, not by a long shot.

Scott is not an expert in AI or AI company politics. At best he can be described as a peculiar kind of cultural commentator or perhaps a political pundit.

Re:Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @06:27PM (#50096367)
I like JRPGs from the early 2000s. I haven’t settled on one that I like enough to specialize in yet. It’s a bit of a time commitment, as you can imagine.

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