darby_nine

You'd think if intelligence were that interesting we'd be able to agree on, like, any attribute of it. The best we can do is IQ and let me assure you there's enough high iq morons that intelligence not a difficult myth to dispel.

Now stupidity—that's something that really sets us apart from animals.

> You simplify it too much.

So does western media.

> There was a million people on maidan in Kyiv. Nation voted for EU - they were done with Russian kleptocrats meddling with Ukrainian politics and influencing country all the time.

That doesn't mean this was smart, nor that it would work. It didn't. Kleptocrats still run the country. (I wonder why we don't call our own rich kleptocrats? Weird. I suppose people don't view cops as paramilitary stooges for capital, even though that's de facto what they are)

> Looks to me you’re thinking about all of this like it’s some tabletop or RTS game.

Better than blithely trusting the state department and american intelligence.

Ah. Well ukraine could have simply committed to not joining nato or the eu and russia would have been happy to continue puppeting them. Is that unjust? Absolutely. Does it increase russian power? Probably not more than their converting to a war machine did. Would it have saved an entire generation? Yes.

Regardless, it's best not to fight an empire unless a stronger empire buys in with their troops.

Even now ukraine can sue for peace. No amount of patriotism is worth this amount of destruction. Human lives are always worth more than ephemeral states.

This is the worst possible outcome for ukraine (the region and people, the state is disposable and of extremely dubious value).

Sure. That doesn't contradict what I said. Certainly the massive loss of life has been entirely avoidable. Just because you lack the imagination or historical understanding to see how else this could have played out doesn't exclude these counterfactuals from possibility.

> the wolves came regardless.

War was avoidable. Ukraine only entered into armed conflict because they were promised support that never showed up. Territorial loss is of little value compared to the destruction of human life that has ensued since then.

> trying to frame it as some sort of american conspiracy to power grab

Retain power. Which won't work, btw.

> either you propogating mis/disinformation/propaganda, or just utterly stupid to the point of an own goal (assuming you're aligned with the west).

Cuz western media is so honest and reliable and immune to propaganda itself, right? I'm sure they'd never, say, take the word of a vice president that there's evidence of weapons of mass destruction to endorse the invasion of a country.

I don't endorse any ideology, nation, or power bloc. That's just dumb. States endorse themselves. That's the whole point of sovereignity.

I tend to think that destroying the nazis and the empire of japan was worth the extremely high cost. I'd hazard a guess that most ukrainians and russians and koreans and chinese and a whole swath of southeast asian peoples would agree.

Anyway, it's not a valid comparison when we're actively refusing to get involved in the conflict in any way that would risk our imperial interests.

> So OSS aside (which has its own complicated economics)

Assuming you're actually referring to free software and not open source software, it really doesn't, though. It's straight up better in every way than service-oriented software and commercial software in every way... except actually compensating developers. I'd work for a pittance writing free software if there were any institutional support for it. But who wants to kill the golden goose, even if it means our lives would all be greatly improved?

That's not "complicated", this is the opportunity to make a shit ton of money by charging people for software despite insignificant marginal costs. Even if it means humanity writes the same goddamn software over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, mostly shittier than the last iteration.

You can be critical of russian imperialism without viewing the us as ukraine's friend. This is pretty obviously another proxy war at this point where ukraine will end up being fed to the wolves. Why? Who knows, but there's no shortage of incentives. Propping up a defense industry that's feeling the lack of demand; forcing europe to coalesce around the us instead of china; restricting european access to cheap russian gas to fund our all-time high of energy exports (which seems suicidal to the western project as opposed to the american one, but whatever); trying to recall the distant moral victory of world war ii for domestic political gain; etc etc. hell, it's likely all these reasons and more that aren't readily visible in western media.

All of this can coexist with the likely reality that russia has imperial motives again. Sucks to be ukraine.

I highly recommend this movie if only because it's a hilarious combination of excellent production value, terrible acting, and some of the most boring and openly delusional film you'll ever witness.

The term end-user does not refer to advertisers by definition. Typically most people use the term "user" to refer to humans.

You're not wrong, but advertisers are a cancer on society that not only do not contribute any value but actively destroy the world around us. it's difficult to assign anything but deeply negative value to their needs and concerns.

Eh, it depends on the situation in question. Social acceptance (if this is even possible) will cost some people far more than it can benefit them. Any behavior, principle, or value will inherently make some portion of the population not want to be around you. This is why I recommend always starting with values and building up social acceptance from there.

This might be the first positive thing I've ever heard someone say about at&t. Mad props for distributing phones though! If you wrote up even a brief guide as to how to do this and common pitfalls I'd do the same in my area.

My god the future sucks far more than we could have ever imagined. Imagine being sold a chatbot and being told it's an android!

A metaphor with another physical object will always fall short. Why not just state the number of bits a particle represents? It's much easier to describe going through each dimension (colloqiual, I hate string theory for the same reason of unnecessarily using a physical analogy) and describing how it interacts with other particles. Sure you'll lose a lot of your audience but those that remain will have a much clearer picture than via a comparison to a billiard ball. This also makes the more advanced topics like singularities, entanglement, teleportation, the lack of true vacuum, etc much easier to manage.

(I'm aware we don't have an understanding of how quantum physics interacts with singularities, but the whole billiard ball metaphor certainly is incoherent with it)

> 2 vs 3

Is this really still relevant? I've been using only python3 for well over a decade now and I can't remember the last time anyone even suggested I use python2. the rest of your critiques ring true though.

> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.

It's been more than a decade since google results were distinguishable from bing results. Both spam you with commercial crap.

> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.

Kagi is much better than google. I have no clue what their baseline search quality is like, but I don't care because I can customize it enough to far outstrip quality that google can provide as google refuses to provide (or has actively disabled) the tools necessary to make search useful, like allowing the user to blacklist domains against all their searches or prioritize certain domains. Which is dumb, because how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?

What we really need is an engine that excludes all commercial results, and an option to exclude sites with ads. That'd be a goldmine.

It's clear google wants to be a dumb pipe rather than a business that's responsive to end-user needs.

Unfortunately, they're also notoriously unreliable as a dumb pipe.

Surely this refers to decomposition and not living plants. Your link doesn't appear to finger plants as the culprit at all.

> i am having trouble wrapping my head around the sense in which entanglement is a physical phenomenon as opposed to a semantical byproduct of the bookkeeping involved in modern quantum theory.

Is there any indication that all reality is not just "quantum bookkeeping" (at a quantum and not gravitational scale, which is also consistent and coherent)? It seems like splitting hairs to differentiate outside of referring to literal discourse, ie referring to the signifier rather than the signified. Otherwise we would not be able to consistently and precisely measure the quantifiable (un)certainty that forms our models.

Of course all our models could be wildly inaccurate and I look like a fool. But that's just looping back to the concept that it's simpler to assume that the world is consistent than to assume the world is conspiring to deceive you.

I think it's interesting that the trolley problem is so useless you could interpret this as a statement for or against virtually any ideology or moral framework. Hence my rejection of any moral implication to bare analysis.

I expect spamassin will work as well as it always did. The difference now is that we're not allowed fine-grained control over whats spammed at us.

> People of integrity with utilitarian leaning are often labeled amoral or unemotional.

Utilitarianism is a moral concept. I think you just mean analytical.

Make's clear benefit is laying out a process as a series of dependencies.

Shell scripts are additional complexity? I'm not sure what you mean. Adding structure reduces complexity.

What's the distinction? What do just do better than make?

I don't think that really matters. Sometimes even basic shell scripts are better modeled with a makefile.

I expect people will just ship with their own model where the built-in one isn't sufficient.

When people describe it as a "critical tool" i feel like I'm missing basic information about how people use computers and interact with the world. In what way is it critical for anything? It's still just a toy at this point.

You're comparing an a priori concept with a posteriori one. It's like claiming the number five doesn't "acshually" exist. Like yea, it's a concept, concepts don't exist.

A universe isn't a turing machine because it can't run all the programs that can run on a turing machine. This isn't exactly controversial.

Not really, it's antisocial behavior either way. This is just splitting hairs anywhere but a courtroom.

Anyway, a mall is a public space in the context of recording without consent. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. The law needs to be updated to reflect the vastly more invasive technology we have now compared to when these statutes were written to reflect actual social mores.

I'm ok with this if it's also banned for everyone else. Otherwise this will just be laundered through private enterprise, the only party less trustworthy than the government.