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dleary

Re:The U.S. Is Bullying Europe Like Never Before on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:20AM (#50351641)
When has this ever occurred?
Re:I Became a Citizen of Japan on Sunday October 18, 2026 @02:08AM (#50138341)
Which specific culture/country does America hate and consider the villain?

It seems to me like the conservatives change the targets of their culture wars often enough that I’m honestly not sure what your answer is going to be.

Re:We are entering a period of overlapping crises on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:13PM (#50111672)
> has basically always been true at every point in time across history.

The Late Bronze Age collapse in 1200 BC.

The Dark Ages, 500-1500 AD. Ended with the Renaissance (literally, “Rebirth”).

Both of these times saw significant ‘backward motion’ in the amount of technical capability people could wield.

Re:Submarine Cable Resilience on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:36AM (#50101748)
I was curious and went to look up how low it was, and the references I can find online say that the ISS, the Space Shuttle, and the Crew Dragon are all at 1 atm.

It does say that the pressure in the Space Shuttle was decreased to about 70% atm for 24h before EVA.

Apollo was 1/3 atm 100% oxygen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5690/why-is-the-br...

https://www.google.com/search?q=pressure+inside+the+space+sh...

https://www.google.com/search?q=pressure+inside+the+apollo+c...

Re:Thinking will become a hobby on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @11:13AM (#50072997)
It doesn't seem difficult at all to me.

First of all, the target is not 'below the maintenance cost of the human body'.

The target is 'below the minimum wage that we can pay a human to work for', and that is a very different metric.

Also, as for uptime... The average human performs work at roughly 60% duty cycle. (8 hours sleep, plus meals, bathroom breaks, etc). That is a pitiful number compared to robotics.

Also, when you pay humans at bottom-of-the-barrel prices, they don't have high morale. They are rude to customers. They steal from their employer if they can get away with it. None of these apply to robots.

> but the original joke circa 1999 was this.

No, the original joke, which GP is referring to, is “There are only two hard things in computer science. Naming things and cache invalidation.”

It predates 1999 and the Y2K bug by a fair amount. I first saw it on Usenet in the early 90s, around 1994 I think.

>> Due to her experience as a man during the making of Self-Made Man she ultimately had a depressive breakdown

> That sounds very different from "being a man was so difficult that it caused a breakdown."

It doesn’t sound very different to me…

Re:The end of Star Trek is now official on Saturday April 11, 2026 @04:59PM (#47733973)
> [I Love Lucy, Bewitched]

These are good examples of TV pushing the envelope on societal norms, but if you are discussing "pushing a political view", they rank far below "Trek's first interracial kiss".

> A key difference here is you are citing one episode.

That's true, but...

> These shows we are discussing are entirely centered around modern IDPol issues. It's rammed down our throats through every episode.

I have not seen the new shows. I liked reconnecting with old characters in the first few episodes of Picard S1, but didn't even finish the first season.

So I can't comment on those specifically.

But, I can comment on this:

> I know when I can no longer enjoy a show because it's creators are ripping me out of the experience and away from the fictional setting

This is the EXACT SAME COMPLAINT that the people who were upset about Star Trek in the 60s had.

And it extended a lot farther than the interracial kiss. That's just a very easy and obvious landmark example to point out.

Star Trek first aired in 1966. Less than 10 years after crowds of people were held back by the National Guard, but still managed to throw rocks at and spit on little girls because of forced integration in schools.

Star Trek had a multiracial and flamboyant cast, and was frequently communicating messaging about being non-prejudiced, when the Civil Rights Act had just passed.

Trek also frequently communicated messaging about being non-interventionist and only using violence as a last resort, while the Vietnam War was ongoing and a hot-button political issue.

These were ABSOLUTELY complained about as "woke propaganda" (though not in those terms) by the conservatives of the time.

Re:The end of Star Trek is now official on Saturday April 11, 2026 @02:52PM (#47733041)
> Again, I never said anything about race or gender.

I never said that you did. But you did propose, and you continue to double down on, the idea that the original Star Trek was not very political.

> They had politics, yes. But not anywhere to the point to breaking the audience out of escapism and mapping their politics to the politics of the time.

Yes, the interracial kiss was VERY MUCH the politics of the time. That's why it was the FIRST interracial kiss on network television, nearly 40 years after TV networks came about. That's why it was protested/banned and the episode not shown in Southern markets.

Can you give any examples of network TV that were more political than Trek?

Re:The end of Star Trek is now official on Saturday April 11, 2026 @01:51PM (#47732555)
> Current Earth politics do not belong in shows

You’re really displaying some ignorance here. Star Trek has always has a political slant.

The basic premise is about a bunch of people living in a progressive sci-fi utopia with UBI. The show is constantly preaching unity and openness. It is explicitly anti-Fascist in many episodes.

It has a multiracial cast with a flamboyant “closeted” gay actor.

And most importantly, it famously had the first interracial kiss on television. The show was banned (or, more minorly, the specific episode was banned) in several places in the South because of that.

> Melodramatic slop from the original edgy school shooter.

This is a very arrogant, judgemental, dismissive comment that adds nothing to the conversation. It is also a textbook example of ad hominem. “Why are you paying attention to what that guy said?”

> There are plenty of technologies that increase freedom. […For example. Smallpox vaccine…]

If you think that Kacynski or OP were talking about all technologies then you lack reading comprehension. Since they’re not making the assertion about all technologies, holding up a specific technology as being good does not address the point that was being made.

> from the original edgy school shooter.

Regardless of your views on Kacynski, he is a philosopher of note. His work is regularly quoted and referred to 30 years later. As opposed to, say, Bin Laden’s manifesto.

> Melodramatic slop

It’s ironic that you chose this phrasing, when “slop” has come to mean “low effort, low quality content pushed out without much thought”.

How humiliating for you, to put your foot in the mouth in front of everyone in this distinguished forum. This isn’t Digg, or even Reddit. Put some thought into what you write.

Re:COM Like a Bomb: Rust Outlook Add-in on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @02:03PM (#46222011)
> Virtual dispatch absolutely has an overhead, but absolutely nobody in their right mind should be using COM interfaces in a critical section of code.

I could definitely be wrong, but I think C++ style "virtual dispatch" (ie, following two pointers instead of one to get to your function) doesn't really cost anything anymore, except for the extra pointers taking up cache space.

Don't all of the Windows DirectX gaming interfaces use COM? And isn't AAA gaming performance critical?

Re:Racket v9.0 on Sunday November 23, 2025 @11:25AM (#46024701)
Everyone gets to choose which language they use for their personal projects.

Where are all the Racket personal projects?

N.B. I say this as someone who personally contributed small fixes to Racket in the 90s (when it was called mzscheme) and 00s (when it was called PLT-Scheme).

Re:The New AI Consciousness Paper – By Scott Alexander on Friday November 21, 2025 @03:37PM (#46008692)
> Opinion

The single word "opinion" is not an answer to the question I asked.

> Another example: ... "Yanny or Laurel"

This is not remotely the same thing.

> I can understand how someone hears "Yanny">

So can everybody else. Everyone I have heard speak on this topic has the same exact experience. Everyone "hears" one of the words 'naturally', but can easily understand how someone else could hear the other word, because the audio clip is so ambiguous.

An ambiguous audio recording, which basically everyone agrees can be interpreted multiple ways, which wikipedia explicitly documents as being ambiguous, is very different from meanings of the words "yes", "no", and "believe".

These words have concrete meanings.

You wouldn't say that "you believe the recording says Laurel". You say "I hear Laurel, but I can understand how someone else hears Yanny".

Re:The New AI Consciousness Paper – By Scott Alexander on Friday November 21, 2025 @02:39PM (#46008099)
> Is AI conscious? I believe "yes" [...] and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong.

What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong?

Do "believe", "yes", and "no" have definitions?

...

This rhetorical device sucks and gets used WAY too often.

"Does Foo have the Bar quality?"

"Yes, but first understand that when everyone else talks about Bar, I am actually talking about Baz, or maybe I'm talking about something else entirely that even I can't nail down. Oh, and also, when I say Yes, it does not mean the opposite of No. So, good luck figuring out whatever I'm trying to say."

Re:Optimism associated with exceptional longevity on Wednesday November 05, 2025 @04:47PM (#45828501)
This sounds like it should be true, but from life experience, I don't really think it is.

It would be rational for things to work that way, but personalities and emotions are not very rational.

There are some people who seem like they have everything in life going for them, and they're still pessimists, their narrative of the world is petty and ugly, or cruel.

Conversely, there are other people who have suffered tragedies that I might consider literally unbearable (i.e. suicide-worthy), and they are still optimists.

I think these are more fundamental personality traits. You can see it in siblings that grow up in essentially identical conditions, but one has a "sunny disposition" and another is anxious and worried.

Re:2,400 HP FDNY Super Pumper could extinguish hell itself on Monday November 03, 2025 @06:33PM (#45805778)
The article mentions that the main pumping unit could draw water from 8 hydrants at once. So 7000 ft of total hose to get to 8 hydrants sounds like it makes sense.

I wonder if maybe it can't even use hydrants that are too near each other in the plumbing graph.

> no, you need to explain why you thought

What kind of purity test bullshit rhetoric are you using here? Whenever you find yourself saying, “you need to explain yourself”, step back and question things.

Have you tried reading the thread instead of jumping on a guy for wrongspeak?

The Soviet connection is really not that hard to follow. They were discussing development cycles. Whether China, which is a communist country with a “5 year economic plan”, is successful due to that 5 year plan.

So it’s very relevant to mention the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a communist country, it “invented” the 5 year economic plan, and it failed spectacularly.

That’s a separate concern.

Every command that you issue to the ssd returns a response. It would be nice to have a bunch of performance counters that tell us where the time went with each of the commands we give it.

GPUs have this already.

You're using hydrogen in a balloon. Where its very low density is a boon.

Hydrogen gas also has very low energy density. To store enough of it to be useful, it has to be pressurized/liquified, which requires the expensive storage solutions.

Re:Automatic Differentiation Can Be Incorrect on Thursday September 18, 2025 @01:03PM (#45292122)
Thank you for this good description.
Re:Sam Altman on Tucker Carlson [video] on Friday September 12, 2025 @02:41AM (#45219289)
But we know, with absolute certainty, from the Dominion lawsuit subpoenas, that Tucker Carlson was privately telling people that Trump was awful, while publicly saying the opposite.

His private texts include, "We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can't wait.”

And

"I hate him passionately. ... I can't handle much more of this”.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tucker-carlson-endorses-donald-...

He was sending these texts while publicly repeating the standard Fox News lines about how great Trump is, etc.

How can you ever consider him honest, after this?

Re:Electromechanical Reshaping Offers Safer Eye Surgery on Thursday September 04, 2025 @10:47AM (#45127913)
I had PRK done at Stanford in 2007 or 2008.

Now it's nearly 20 years later, and I just turned 48.

My vision has deteriorated from "old age" enough now that I might have considered getting the procedure done again. Touch-ups are/were free at the Stanford clinic.

My vision has not deteriorated in the past 5 years or so, I am farsighted enough now that it is more comfortable to hold fine print things at arms length to read. And things far away are a bit blurry again.

But, I now think that getting eye surgery now to fix your vision is a bad move if glasses can correct it.

It's really just a strategy decision in the 'game of life'.

"Pretty soon", we are going to have wearable AR goggles that actually work.

When that threshold is crossed, "everyone" is going to have AR glasses, just like "everyone" has a smart phone right now.

Since you're going to be wearing glasses in a few years anyway, why risk the surgery?

Are you sure? My Bosch dishwasher has wifi connectivity and a companion app.
That headline is a stunning achievement. I honestly wish there were some way to better call attention to it.

I would have missed it if it weren't for your comment.

Re:My DIY modular charging station on Saturday August 09, 2025 @07:04PM (#44851190)
The retractable cable is overkill. I remodeled my house a couple of years ago and replace most of the wall outlets with the kind that have 2 AC outlets and 2 usb ports, a USB-A and a USB-C.
Re:The story behind Caesar salad on Saturday July 05, 2025 @12:25PM (#44473771)
How much dressing do you make at once, and for how many single-person large salads? Can you tell us the size/weight of the tube of paste and the anchovy tin?

I agree that anchovy is the secret, but I don’t use nearly this much for two salads, for me and my wife. I use half a jar of filets, which I more or less mince/mash. Do you leave big chunks in the dressing from the chopped filets? If so, I would guess that they are maybe a quarter the size of a caper, do you go bigger?

Do you make a lot of dressing and save it? We make it fresh every time, which also makes the batch size smaller.

Re:No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air (2020) on Saturday May 17, 2025 @04:19PM (#44016712)
I think it's far from useless... Because it helps to focus on what could possibly be happening. It's not "true enough for an 8 year old's purposes", it is the actual truth.

The air is being accelerated downwards by the airplane. Newton's third law. To stay aloft, the airplane has to manufacture a counteracting force to gravity. And the only way to do that is by accelerating something downwards.

So, we can discuss whether or not the curvature of the airfoil matters, or the angle of attack matters, but the simple fact is that a lot of air has to be accelerated downwards somehow for the plane to stay up.

And the more magical descriptions of lift, including the broken Bernoulli airfoil model that was accepted for so long, are easy to discount once you focus on this important fact.

If a work is older than 200 years and worth reading, then original editions are going to be valuable.

But it will also be out of copyright so the cost of getting a “new” copy is basically just the cost of printing.

You misremember… That episode is about helping someone move, not giving them a ride to the airport.

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