qrendel

Just take comfort in knowing that female attractiveness usually drops off a cliff far earlier than male attractiveness does. The same girl writing that essay will one day be 40+ and begging for any of those "genetic superiors" to give her five seconds, while the same male "uggo" with a stable income and decent hygiene will be able to take his pick of a bunch of nicer women who didn't view the whole of humanity through the lens of the beautiful people master race.

> I wonder, for instance, how much sooner we'd have discovered the Juniper backdoor --- possibly the most catastrophic backdoor in the history of the Internet --- if a larger collection of experts was somehow allowed to review the cache.

So you're claiming that he should be prosecuted and convicted for the leaks, but simultaneously that he should have allowed more people to have access to the leaks? This position doesn't seem very consistent.

I was a bit shocked, though I probably shouldn't have been, to notice recently that police in the local airport all carry assault rifles now. Assault rifles. I'm not that knowledgeable about guns, so I'm not sure what kind exactly - maybe M-16s?

A few years ago there was something about military personnel being stationed with unloaded rifles in airports as part of the War on Terror(TM). I now imagine that was to desensitize us to this future - everyday cops carrying loaded assault rifles in public all the time.

The U.S. really has become a police state.

That's kind of my point - they could have tested me easily by giving me some problems from a previous final, or anything else, or even talking to me for five minutes, but instead they chose the path of petty legalism by assuming since the syllabus didn't agree with their's 100%, the only way to guarantee I knew the material was to make to pay to retake the entire sequence.

I failed to mention I'd also already spent three years as a physics major and had already taken classical mechanics, electrodynamics, and quantum mechanics - so being told to retake the intro physics sequence was quite silly indeed.

Eh, if you're just auditing the class, maybe. When I was in college they made me retake ridiculous prereqs for the most trivial of reasons every time I transferred, allowed no exceptions to these, and personal requests to professors to get out of them were completely ignored. The prereqs were enforced by the computerized registration system - good luck getting past them without a waiver.

As one anecdote, they once told me I needed to retake intro physics. On the pretest given on the first day of class, I came within one problem of a perfect score. Didn't make a lick of difference - their syllabus differed from the last university in the most minor of ways, and despite the fact that the class never actually covered even 50% of the stuff it claimed to on the syllabus, I was made to retake the entire sequence anyway.

I read a lot and don't have a ton of money. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept, and if I'm concerned about the author, I'd honestly rather donate to them directly than see it siphoned off by whatever deal they may have had with the publisher.

When I said "cheap," I meant in price. I'm averse to low-quality books, and would rather pay a few dollars more or hold out longer for a copy with clean pages and little wear. Especially highlighting is usually an immediate deal-breaker. Finding a fairly nice copy typically isn't a problem, though - low-price hardcover is often a more difficult request to meet.

My personal experience, from having been an e-book aficionado who eventually went back to almost entirely paper (cheap used hardcover when I can find it):

Ebook advantages:

- Cheap, no commitment, try before you buy

- Easy to transport, take 30+ books on vacation with no increase in weight

Dead-tree advantages:

- Higher retention of material (various cues for memory related to the physicality and layout of the book versus an indistinguisable smorgasbord of ebook pages)

- Greater tendency to actually read, since they sit around your house/living room taunting you, rather than being forgotten in some obscure folder of your device

You (along with the immediate parent) actually do have a good point here. If any pollsters ask, I'd probably say I support Johnson for this reason, though overall I'd personally prefer Green policies over Libertarian ones. There's something to be said for Greens/Libs banding together just to help wedge third parties into the process at all. This kind of strategizing is still pretty unfortunate though, and only makes sense for the polling/debate process, not necessarily the electoral one.

Not to mention the CPD would almost certainly change the debate qualifiers immediately to still keep Johnson out, same as the DNC did with Lawrence Lessig.

This is already the first election in which millenials and gen-Xers (terrible name, btw) outnumber them as far as eligible voters. The problem is eligibility isn't enough - old people vote far, far more reliably than young people, so the (often idiotic) preferences of their demographic still win out.

Automatic national voter registration when turning 18 would be a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure it would convince people to actually go to the polls. In certain states just registering to vote in the first place can be a real hassle, and having to do it every time you move punishes the more mobile generations.

If what matters to you is actual electoral support, there's no reason to be voting third party anyway. Both Stein and Johnson got less than 1% of the vote in 2012, and even combined only about 1.2%. The most successful third-party/independent Presidential candidate in decades was Ross Perot in 1992, and even winning just under 19% of the popular vote he failed to win any of the electoral college. It's a self-serving double standard to tell people to pass up the major party candidates but then vote based on electoral support for the third parties, ignoring how well their ideological and policy positions actually align with your own.

Regarding size, the official memberships from 2014 were ~411,000 (Libs) vs ~248,000 (Greens). You could look at that as either the Libertarians being 66% larger, or them being practically the same as far as order of magnitude and portion of the total electorate. Johnson/Weld are more experienced candidates than Stein, but on the other hand, Ron and Rand Paul never came as close to winning a nomination as Sanders did, either (him being about 98% in line with Stein's positions - I remember his local campaign staff even defecting to her around the time of the DNC endorsement).

Regarding policies, Greens and Libertarians are also 99% in alignment on this particular issue (war on drugs), as well as some others. I know people have their preferences, just pointing out that there are multiple similarly-sized third parties of yet complete opposite ideological natures that would still be optionable for those wanting to vote on this kind of thing. It's even easier to not support this kind of behavior by the DEA.

Green Party is also an option if you want to protest vote. A problem, for some, with supporting libertarian candidates is that they (voters) may not be as fond of the low-hanging fruit policies most likely to get implemented (e.g. defunding many agencies, removing environmental protections) as the moonshot policies they also promote (e.g. ending the war on drugs and reducing the military-industrial-natsec complex). Even though neither 3rd party will ever win, the votes do send a message about which way policy adjustments should be made, so it's still worth some thought about what message you really want to send.

In general, it allows a better approximation of the solution function for far less hidden neurons. Sure, you could get arbitrarily close using a single hidden layer, but that hidden layer might need to be unfathomably large. Same idea for network topology in multilayer nets - a network could eventually learn to set a lot of the weights to zero, but training is a lot faster and more effective if you know a good problem-specific topology to start with. Deep nets make problems more tractable. Recurrence is the real game-changer, since then you've moved from non-linear function approximators up to Turing completeness (at least over the set of all possible RNNs).

Which r/askhistorians thread are you referring to? A quick search and only found one, not exactly a fisking of his work: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w7ur9/is_sa...

It's not a bad book, but imo it starts off very strong and then quickly goes downhill throughout. This was the general (and unsolicited) criticism from most everyone I've shared it with. The stuff from prehistory, up to the agricultural revolution, seems to cover a lot of recent discoveries and is both fascinating and informative. The rest is, as the parent comment states, a very simplified summary of the author's favorite topics, a few paragraphs spent on each one, and clearly showing certain cultural biases (it honestly felt optimized for appeal to a TED audience). A good assigned read for early high schoolers, less useful to many beyond that point.

By the time you're at part four, on the current era and emerging technologies, it literally reads like a bunch of newspaper clippings from the Science section of the NYT. While I'm hoping his new book will fix those (perceived) problems, it seems unlikely to contain better or more profound commentary regarding trends in changing humanity and emerging technology than books like Superintelligence, Age of Em, etc. At best perhaps a "lite" version of the same concepts sanitized for a broader audience. Of course I look forward to, upon publication, hopefully having been mistaken about it.

> What we really need therefore (IMHO) is to teach ethics to people that work with data

Studies seem to indicate that studying and teaching ethics does not make you more inclined towards ethical behavior.[1] On top of that, from personal experience in business ethics courses, "ethical" has an extremely suspicious equivalence with "the thing which limits the company's exposure to liability."

[1] http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/BehEth-14...

> Ant genomics declare 'checkmate' to red king theory

Interesting stuff, but they've only shown mutualism increased the rate of evolution (compared to non-mutualists) in a few species of ants. It's not unreasonable that the difference also holds for most other species, but having only looked at three species of ants (plus four more in the non-mutualist control group), it seems more like "check" than "checkmate."

I was under the impression that the bigger danger was the expected eventual earthquake of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, potentially leading to tens of thousands killed or injured and millions more displaced.[1][2]

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earth...

> The few people in the Democratic party who believe in homeopathy and UFOs are considered nut cases and marginalized -- it's not official dogma promoted by the leaders of the party

Um... well... actually... https://psmag.com/why-is-hillary-clinton-making-strange-comm...

"Will" in this case, though, is basically a euphemism for "cost of (retro)fitting trucks and loading docks with guardrails" vs "cost of lives lost by failing to do so." I'm not sure how those two numbers would compare.

This.

BJJ is probably the most useful for self-defense (personal opinion), but it's also the most complicated to learn. It covers ground fighting better than wrestling or judo, which is where many situations will eventually end up. If I had to pick one, excluding MMA (which is basically a combination of everything listed), I would make it this.

Wrestling and judo for takedowns and takedown defense. Judo is more complicated and difficult to learn than wrestling (imo), but, depending on your age and physique, wrestling may be of limited use to you (a 50+ year old will likely have trouble applying many of the wrestling takedowns). A lot of what you'd need from these two would be covered in a BJJ school anyway, just with less time and focus spent on those areas.

Boxing and kickboxing to learn how to defend yourself from strikes. Again, depending on age and phyisque they may otherwise be of limited use, since an older or smaller person is unlikely to be punching with knockout power, and would run a higher risk of breaking bones in their hands when striking.

An MMA school would tend to cover all of that, but they may be more focused on competition than self-defense, which will affect what they teach you and how you train. Same problem with BJJ schools - a lot are more concerned with tournaments than self-defense, which can change the focus of your practice considerably.

The techniques aren't fake, they're just unreliable outside of training.

It's one thing to pull it off against a training partner who is using a known subset of attacks and when you know they're coming. Different when you're in a chaotic self-defense situation and facing a fully-resisting opponent who will try anything to win.

You need a much higher level of skill to deal with the latter than the former. It's the same as how a really good boxer can (against a less skilled opponent) just drop his hands and bob-and-weave to avoid strikes, but an average or unskilled boxer can't afford to try fancy, high-risk techniques, when simpler tactics are a much safer way to win the fight.

That's the biggest problem with stuff like aikido for self-defense. Taking an average person and giving them six months or so of aikido training will NOT make them able to effortlessly toss around men 3x their size who are seriously trying to hurt them, and telling them that it will is selling them a dangerous lie. Even if they put in decades of training, they're still relying on relatively high-risk techniques when there are other more reliable ones.

I don't mean to crap on anyone's favorite styles. Aikido is an art form with some self-defense applications, and it's great for that. But a lot of people don't understand how hard it is to beat someone who is massively bigger and stronger than you, and it's doing them a dangerous disservice to market it to them as more than that.

(~5 years previous experience in tae kwon do, muay thai, BJJ, and hapkido, among others.)

Specifically, Vonnegut was present at and survived the bombing of Dresden, which became part of (the main?) the inspiration for Slaughterhouse-Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut#World_War_II

The book makes a lot more sense once you understand Vonnegut's history with the bombing.

There are also allegedly numerous people who voted leave just to troll the system and now regret it: http://www.vox.com/2016/6/24/12024634/brexit-supporters-regr...

Game Maker's Toolkit had a really good video on DOOM and enemy types not long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q

The entire channel is golden, especially for those interested in game design or criticism.

I think it's more that the intent of games has been diverging for a long time, to the point where they are really several different art forms all getting lumped together under the category "games." The most obvious that come to mind:

- interactive fiction, both movies (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls) and novels (To The Moon, MUDs)

- simulators of various kinds (most FPSes are basically war simulators, or at least laser tag simulators, but also stuff like racing and flight sims)

- pure gameplay (platformers, 4X games)

- puzzles (Tetris, Bejeweled, The Witness)

- others...

Then those get combined in every imaginable way by the developers, yielding a huge spectrum of games so that it's very difficult to put most of them into a single category. At the edges they're still fundamentally different things. They're never going to evolve into a single Platonic ideal that can be called "games" (that was closest to being true back in the Atari days, where everything was fairly similar to Pitfall or Donkey Kong) - just keep diverging into different experiences (especially with VR coming around now), while still maintaining a continuous spectrum of different types that borrow from the best (and worst) parts of the purest genre forms.

The extreme focus on high-end graphics and realism is mostly due to the influence of a few of those genres - simulators and interactive fiction. That's a huge portion of the market, so it seems like all games are just about graphics now, when that really isn't true.

> not try to promote one candidate over another, set-up more people to applause for a particulate candidate in the debates

The GOP already did this to Trump at one of their debates[1], and no one threw a big fit about it then. Not a Trump supporter or claiming that it's justified, just saying it's not unheard of.

[1] http://www.vox.com/2016/2/13/10987776/republican-debate-audi...

Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, also seems to qualify. (The novel, not the movies.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)