dustyleary
I am always happy to see them.
They work great for me on desktop Chrome with uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus enabled, and they work great for me on ipad and iphone Safari with no adblocking enabled.
There are only a few "famous mysteries" that became such widespread memes in American culture. The ones I can think of are:
1. What happened to Jimmy Hoffa (who killed him?). "The Irishman" on Netflix is a Scorsese adaptation of a "nonfiction" book that documents an old Mafia hitman claiming to have killed Hoffa. (The book is nonfiction, the guy's claims are somewhat contested.)
2. What happened to Amelia Earhart? (Early female aviator who disappeared attempting to fly around the world).
3. What happened to and who was DB Cooper? (A man hijacked an airplane, traded some hostages for a duffle bag of cash at an airport when such a thing was possible, told the pilots to fly to Canada and then jumped out of the plane with a parachute and the duffle bag somewhere over the pacific northwest).
4. Who shot JFK?
Society suffers, because people do not wish to be subjected to the sight and smells associated with urination.
A cemetery is usually something of a public park, of sorts. Urinating on a random grave is around the same order of shittiness as urinating on any part of a public park meant to be appreciated or contemplated by people.
If the grave of the random person matters a lot to you, ask yourself, would it matter if the headstone were not there? Would it matter if you did not know there was a grave there?
Every time you urinate on the ground, you are urinating on the remains of millions of people.
With every breath you take, you are inhaling the remains of everyone who has ever been cremated longer ago than it took for their burn gases to homogeneously mix in into the atmosphere (which really does not take very long).
It's definitely not _equally_ shitty. It's arguable whether it's shitty at all. For an action to be a shitty thing to do, someone must suffer as a result.
I can see a couple of ways to argue that the author's beneficiaries might suffer, and perhaps even that the author themself might suffer depending on your religious beliefs.
But surely it's not anywhere close to _equally_ shitty.
I am firmly on the side of releasing everything. Great works of art are so incredibly valuable (to the culture) that the chance of finding one that might have been missed trumps these other concerns.
GP mentioned that most of Kafka's best works would have been destroyed if his stated wishes were honored (it is debatable whether these were his actual wishes).
A web search turns up that Monet destroyed a lot of his works before he passed.
How many Aeneid's are we 'missing' because the author was successful in destroying their unfinished work?
It's definitely Art, in that it is making a statement, provoking a response, etc. But, it's just a nearly continuous sound, except for the pitch change every few years.
It's a Sound, but it's not Music.
If you were to argue that it is Music, I would ask, "Which part of the piece is your favorite? Why do you prefer it to the other parts?" Trying to answer these questions with a straight face becomes difficult.
If this is Music, then is it possible to make an art installation which has making Sound as its primary focus, and have it not be Music?
I'm sure everyone on this site knows that it would not be difficult at all to implement this.
Perhaps there is some valid legal concern over remembering minors' data, but if so, you can pretty easily come up with another dozen examples of sites elsewhere having similar issues with non-sensitive data.
The problem is that you usually have to have someone who is actually passionate about the product to drive all these little things home. Maybe this was a bug that was the next item on their backlog, but then someone in the chain of command said "it's good enough now, ship it.", and then everyone got moved on to the next thing.
Almost everyone at most companies, at all levels, is just doing a job. Very few people actually care about the product.
With this setup:
The feature exists if the company wants to support it in certain areas.
It is not supported in RdJ and other dangerous areas.
Expectations are clearly communicated.
The GP described opposition to his argument, before it was presented, as coming from triggered members of a cult.
If this is not poisoning the well, what changes to his argument need to be present for it to cross over the line?
How much more clear does it need to be?
You are using linguistic tricks to make a bad argument.
The fact that the past is immutable doesn’t mean that things can’t be reversed.
If you’re planning your day in the morning and you decide you’re going to have chicken tonight, you can never change the fact that you decided that you’re going to have chicken, but you can choose to not have chicken.
One way to stop yourself from making these sorts of bad linguistic arguments is to ask yourself, “does my argument mean that a word has essentially no use or meaning?”
That applies here, because your argument basically makes “irreversible” a nearly useless word. Any time your argument is effectively making an adjective tautological, there is a problem. Because otherwise, why does the word exist?
> but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?
And now you have moved to making a like kind argument that the death penalty is essentially the same as a slap on the wrist, since the past is immutable.
Here is another opportunity for a sanity check on your argument.
When the state has executed someone, that person can never be apologized to. That person can never receive any sort of restitution. That person went to their death, very often in extreme physical agony. (Both electric chair and lethal injection have horrific failure rates on this. Firing squad, hanging, and guillotine are all much more humane). That person dies while a roomful of people who hate them watch through a pane of glass, sometimes cheering. They die, knowing that most people think of them as an awful person undeserving of pity, sympathy, or love.
“””It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.”””
To make an argument that this is essentially the same as any other punishment, even life in prison, is really kind of gross.
> and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds.
Sometimes more than 2 seconds is good, too.
You are already arguing from a position of strength.
When you add petty jibes, it weakens your perceived position, because it suggests that you think you need them, rather than relying solely on your argument.
(As a corollary, you should never use petty jibes. When you feel like you need to, shore up your argument instead.)
https://grammarist.com/words/ilk/#:~:text=It's%20neutral.,a%....
Also, note that all of the negative examples are politics related. If a politician reads the word 'ilk', it is going to be interpreted negatively. It might be the case that ilk does "always mean" a negative connotation in politics.
You could change 'ilk' to 'friends', and keep the same meaning with very little negative connotation. There is still a slight negative connotation here, in the political arena, but it's a very vague shade, and I like it here.
"Altman and his ilk try to claim that..." is a negative phrase because "ilk" is negative, but also because "try to claim" is invalidating and dismissive. So this has elements or notes of an emotional attack, rather than a purely rational argument. If someone is already leaning towards Altman's side, then this will feel like an attack and like you are the enemy.
"Altman claims that..." removes all connotation and sticks to just the facts.
The study claims that "improved lighting could result in other motorists being able to see motorcycles up to 0.8 seconds sooner."
Even this might be related to the fact that you are seeing something new and strange. If something "surprising" happens when I'm driving, my attention is instantly snapped to it, and my foot is at least on the brake pedal, if not actively braking.
With that in mind, I wonder if the benefit from a new lighting design might fade over time as the novelty wore off.
We usually eat animals that are "children" or "adolescents", because they are more tender or taste better.
The article mentions that Costco's rotissery chickens are 3lbs.
E.g. crypto wallets, hardware signing tokens, etc.
We could imagine an imaging sensor chip made by a big-name company whose reputation matters, where the imaging sensor chip does the signing itself.
So, Sony or Texas Instruments or Canon start manufacturing a CCD chip that crypto signs its output. And this chip "can't" be messed with in the same way that other crypto-signing hardware "can't" be messed with.
That doesn't seem too far-fetched to me.
* edit: As I think about it, I think more likely what happens is that e.g. Apple starts promising that any "iPhoneReality(tm)" image, which is digitally signed in a certain way, cannot have been faked and was certainly taken by the hardware that it 'promises' to be (e.g. the iPhone 25).
Regardless of how they implement it at the hardware level to maintain this guarantee, it is going to be a major target for security researchers to create fake images that carry the signature.
So, we will have some level of trust that the signature "works", because it is always being attacked by security researchers. Just like our crypto methods work today. There will be a cat-and-mouse game between manufacturers and researchers/hackers, and we'll probably know years in advance when a particular implementation is becoming "shaky".
Not “without a doubt”.
Gambling means a game of chance/luck. Court cases over poker, regardless of which way the decision goes, hinge on whether the Court is convinced that poker is a game of skill, rather than luck.
Predictit definitely did not want to issue W-2G, because that is for gambling income, and their position is of course that their platform is not an illegal gambling service.
I think that it’s pretty easy to argue that consistently winning money on a prediction market is a matter of skill. Just like consistently earning money on the stock market.
Of course, both can be used for gambling.
So if prediction markets are not allowed, why are day trading or stock futures allowed? A casual read of a few relevant subreddits will show that there are a lot of people “straight up gambling” with financial markets.
It’s a real shame that prediction markets aren’t allowed to operate in the US. Markets (of any sort) are incredibly useful.
Disallowing them because you can use them for gambling is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Is it, though?
My belief is that voter fraud is basically a non-issue, that it doesn't really happen very much at all, and that it is a bogus argument put forth by the Republicans to give an excuse for why they are so consistently fighting to not allow people to vote.
Google search "does voter fraud really happen", and "how bad is voter fraud":
https://www.google.com/search?q=does+voter+fraud+really+happ...
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+bad+is+voter+fraud
I can't find any results that don't back up my belief. Can you?
The Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank, has a page on voter fraud: https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
But, in my opinion, it's kind of amazing that they leave the page up. The purpose of this page is to document and expose how bad voter fraud is, and they provide a searchable database on all the cases they have found and confirmed. Their database goes back to 1982, and they have found... 1340 cases of voter fraud.
This is an embarrassingly low number, isn't it? A few thousand fraudulent votes over the last 40 years?
Also, it's not like these cases are cases of people manufacturing thousands of votes. You can check for yourself, the entire list is here:
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud-print/search
These are overwhelmingly on the order of "a single extra vote was cast" because someone voted in two districts, or mailed in an absentee ballot for a deceased relative.
Meanwhile, do Republicans work to suppress votes? I think it's hard to argue otherwise in good faith:
https://www.google.com/search?q=do+republicans+suppress+vote...
Why does Mitch McConnell say that the idea of making election day a national holiday is a "naked power grab" for Democrats? Shouldn't making it easier for people to vote be a "good idea that strengthens our democracy"?
https://www.google.com/search?q=mitch+mcconnell+election+day...
Another belief of mine is that it's common knowledge in politics that the more people who vote, the worse Republicans fare in elections.
The Republican professional politicians are usually better at not openly admitting such things, but Trump gave us another example of "saying the quiet part out loud" with his usual eloquence: "They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again"
https://www.google.com/search?q=They+had+levels+of+voting%2C...
Why would Trump say that?
The Republicans are trying to reduce democracy. They lost the support of the people. They have only won the popular vote once in the past 30 years. Rather than changing their platform to try to appeal to more voters, they've decided that the people are their enemy.
/s
For a local minimum to exist, that means that the function we're looking at has to have a local minimum when sliced in every dimension.
In our intuition, this is relatively common, because we usually imagine 2d manifolds embedded in 3-space (ie, "hill climbing"). And when there's only 2 dimensions, it's not hard to have a "bowl", where the function curves upward in both dimensions.
In fact, a "saddle point", where one of the dimensions curves up and the other curves down, feels "unlikely" to most peoples' intuition, because we don't often run into physical objects with that shape.
But, saddle points in higher dimensions "should be" far more common than local minima. You only need one dimension to curve downward to have a "hole" where the "water" can escape and continue flowing downhill.
Gradient descent easily gets stuck in 2 dimensions, and so we are often surprised by how well it performs in higher dimensions.
And this is poetry, where specific word choice is incredibly important to the work. I would feel uncomfortable even adding missing filler words like "the" and "and" to the output of a respected poet. "Vandalism" is a good name for what John Martin did.
On top of that, I'm not really a "literature person"... I'm wholly unqualified to defend my opinions of why one work is good and another is bad... And my opinion was primed by the author's negative opinion of Martin...
But the Martin version of this poem, in addition to not being faithful to the original material, is really awful.
[0] https://a902e479034e684a62a7-1e94d668f4cdc59b83cfdb5f186933f...
What purpose does Goat Simulator http://www.goat-simulator.com/ serve to solve/understand issues in our universe?
How do you know our universe is not a child's toy for a race of deity-like beings? Or an art project?
Maybe the outer universe is populated by immortal godlike entities and has the equivalent of the guys who made Dwarf Fortress saying, "hmm, I wonder what would happen if there were a race of pseudo-intelligent creatures that just arbitrarily died after just a few million seconds?" Or, "I wonder what would happen if the fundamental building blocks of the universe did not behave predictably, but instead made a random choice to determine the outcome of every interaction?"
And maybe that programmer is just about to come back from his coffee break, look at what happened, and say, "hmm, that was boring", kill the process, and move on to other things.
When you're talking about something that could be powerful enough to simulate our entire universe, assuming that our sense of scale matters at all to it is pretty much the definition of hubris.
Yes, it does!
That is precisely the problem. My grandmother was born in 1939. Apple tells her that she can "buy" her copy of the Andrews Sisters Greatest Hits, and after she "buys" it she can play it on her iPhone whenever she wants.
If Apple was truthful and said, "you can sort of rent a copy of this album, unless someone you never meet makes a decision you'll never hear about, and then it might disappear. Oh, and also, you're really rolling the dice if you travel to another country," then they wouldn't have gotten my grandmother's money.
Apple is taking advantage of misleading language, telling my grandmother she can "buy" this music, when for the first 70 years of her life "buy" meant "it's yours forever unless you decide to get rid of it".
When you "buy" your music from Apple, you don't choose where to download your single copy of it, make sure you have storage, and back it up to tape for safe-keeping. Apple explicitly tells you that you can "buy" your music and "it's stored in the cloud (ooohh aaaahh it's magic). Instantly available on all your devices."
Yes, I understand that this abuse is industry-wide. That doesn't make it right. If they had tried this shit 40 years ago they'd have been on the losing end of several lawsuits. Trying to tell my 80 year old grandmother, "Ackshually, you didn't buy this music, you bought a license to this music, and we decided to revoke it because reasons. Would you like to buy the 2018 remastered edition and hope that we don't decide to do this again?" should make them liable for bait-and-switch and truth-in-advertising lawsuits.
I didn't expect my argument to take this turn, but I think this is a good example for why 80 year olds vote for Trump. Our "greed is good" hyper-capitalist society has practically weaponized taking advantage of people. They don't really understand what's going on, but they do understand that they're getting screwed, and they're angry about it, so they follow the people on TV who seem to be as angry as they are.
For me, it was a complete success. Healing took about a week (PRK takes longer than Lasik). It was painful during the healing, but afterwards there have been no issues at all. No night halos, no dry eyes. Everything has been great.
I "couldn't" wear contacts, which affected my decision to get the procedure done. I had astigmatism in my left eye that was "half and half" right across my cornea. Spherical astigmatism on one side, cylindrical on the other. Given this description, I'm still kind of surprised that glasses worked well for me, but they did. Because of this strange shape, even though contacts worked to correct my vision, I just couldn't stand to have one in my left eye. It always felt like I had something stuck in my eye.
What about a 16 year old born in a country where the age of consent is 14 and the US’s views on sexuality are considered overbearing and puritanical?
As a rational investor/gambler, when I hear that someone is willing to make a “ludicrous bet”, I’m happy to book their action.
Imagine you’re a gay man, happily married. You work at Mozilla.
Don’t you think it would be difficult to go into work, and report to your CEO, knowing that he had donated against gay marriage? That he feels your way of life has no place in America?
Mozilla is an outspoken champion of net neutrality, anonymity, free speech, open standards, and several other ideologies that emphasize freedom. How can you clap at an all-hands meeting when your CEO stands in front of the company and talks about the importance of these freedoms, while knowing that he also feels so strongly that your private relationship with your husband is so abhorrent that he thought it was a good use of $1000 to try to ban it?
If the liberals “win”, and guns are banned tomorrow, like they are in Australia, are you so committed to your firearm rights that you’ll consider moving to another country, or suicide because life just isn’t worth living? Do you think it’s ludicrous that gay people might consider those options?
Firearms are a choice. Being gay is not. Judgement against gay marriage is judgement against who you are. Judgement against firearms is judgement against a hobby.
Take the argument back 50 years. Do you think a white boss who donated money against equal rights could/would treat black employees fairly?
Imagine that you’re a gay employee at Mozilla. You’ve been gunning for a promotion into upper management, and someone else wins the position. Are you never going to wonder, “Does his skin crawl when we shake hands? Would I have won the position if my Facebook didn’t have pictures of me and my husband on it?”
Have you ever wondered if your love of firearms has impacted your professional career?