trobertson

> Lore and story wise [Oblivion and Skyrim] have incredible depth.

As you said, you never played Daggerfall or Morrowind. Just about all of the lore in Oblivion and Skyrim comes from Daggerfall, Redguard, and Morrowind.

As for the stories... sorry, but you're on your own there. Oblivion's was okay, but Skyrim's story was a trainwreck from beginning to end. Of all the parts of Bethesda games, it is the character + story writing that has suffered the most over the years.

> unfortunately KQL doesn't seem to have INSERT, UPDATE etc.

(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Microsoft, and I use Kusto basically every day)

This seems to me to be a deliberate design choice. Microsoft doesn't want engineers mutating the databases by hand. There are mechanisms to do that (mostly outside of Kusto, and usually to resolve privacy incidents), but the common case of querying is not supposed to allow for arbitrary changes to the database.

Looking at the Colonial era is looking at slavery ~300 years before it peaked just before the Civil War. Therefore, the numbers you give for the Colonial times don't have anything to do with the conversation.

> Demand grows to meet supply.

Well, that's where you're wrong (with respect to housing in the USA).

Municipal zoning laws mean that houses are not getting built. Apartment growth is not keeping up either. Nor is condo growth. In the places with jobs, there is no available housing.

This lack of housing is what is keeping houses at top dollar in spite of the mortgage rate tripling over the span of a year.

It's due to the Universal Postal Union, which is a UN agreement that governs the costs and subsidies associated with international shipping.

The link below explains it well, but the gist is that China was rated to be a "poor" nation, whereas the USA was rated to be a "rich" nation. This rating essentially means that the USA is subsidizing packages shipped from China to the USA.

Trump (in a rare moment of not being an idiot) threatened to withdraw from the agreement over the subsidies. He didn't, but the agreement did get amended, and packages from China will start becoming less subsidized (more expensive) by 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union#2019_Ex...

> this site is a blast from the past

> I'm frequently asked where people can get such a ridiculously large amount of pi. Be warned that 50 million digits of pi takes up 50 megabytes. This can take up to 4 hours to download with a 28.8k modem!

I love the old internet. Users gave a shit about other users.

> Fortunately it was a granite countertop and not quartz.

Granites are primarily composed of feldspar and quartz, which are both primarily composed of silica. Silica is the thing that causes silicosis, and when that granite was cut it was clouds of silica dust that covered your home.

You were no more safe in that granite dust than you would have been in quartz dust.

> Hard drugs are not pot or alcohol

In point of fact, alcohol causes more deaths per year than all other drugs combined:

CDC [0]: Alcohol causes over 140,000 deaths per year according to data between 2015 and 2019

CDC [1]: All other drugs caused 100,000 deaths in the twelve month ending in April 2021

There's a lot of arguments to be made as to why (different legal status, different cultural norms around use, etc.) but the fact is that, currently, alcohol use is more lethal than all other drug use combined.

---

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...

An adaptation of the "narcissist's prayer" for climate change deniers:

---

Climate Change isn't happening

And if it is, it isn't that bad.

And if it is, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not our fault.

And if it is, we didn't mean it.

And if we did, you should have stopped it.

---

Your comment is on line 3.

> we need to allow ourselves to conceive of such things as human civilization continuing on without much fuss.

There is a large difference between "conceiving of possibilities" and burying our heads in the sand. Climate Change is not a new phenomenon, we've known about it for 50 years (and the oil companies have known for longer). We have decades of research telling us that climate change will drive extreme weather. We have decades of research predicting the effects it will have on human civilization.

None of this is new info. The "alternate possibilities" have been considered and disproved a long time ago. We know, without ambiguity, what's happening.

That's what they're saying. It's spelled "lede": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lede

Which is still a full order of magnitude worse than the German numbers. Blaming nature for our shit infrastructure is only going to harm ourselves.

The original text has a lot more Islam than the movies do. The most recent film deliberately toned down the Islam.

There's no goalpost to move. Psychologists have been saying that IQ tests are of limited scope and utility for decades. Specifically, it is widely agreed that an IQ test is not a valid way "to assess intelligence in a broader sense".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity...

It's not abandoned. Access still has an engineering team working on it, and that team still goes to conferences to talk with their users. Source: I work in the same org as them, and ate lunch daily with a few of them before the pandemic hit.

"Full Self Driving"

HoloISO is what you're looking for: https://old.reddit.com/r/holoiso/

It's important to mention that Schmidhuber is usually correct, in that his lab has been decades ahead in both theory and proofs-of-concept. The reason his lab is so under-cited is that his lab made these advances before the hardware to practically do it was available. Now that the techniques can be run, it's the people running them that tend to get all the credit for being "first".

> I still think it could have the potential be a really interesting TV show.

It's already a movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)

I've been working at Microsoft (in the Office org) for a bit over three years now and this managerial attitude is very common. I'd go so far as to say that managers making sure their reports have a good work life balance is standard.

It comes with the age of the company. Unlike start-up land, loads of people in Microsoft have families and kids, and value their family more than they value work. It's normal to leave work on time, and it's concerning if someone stays late.

It's plenty plausible. Every civilization collapses eventually, sometimes totally and sometimes partially. The western Great Depression wasn't all that long ago, historically speaking. The USSR wasn't that long ago, at all. Etc., etc.

> twitter community

This is where the disconnect is coming from. Twitter 'communities' are a tiny minority of persons. They do not represent the everyday person. This is particularly so with autism, as autism frequently entails social difficulties that get people ostracized from the communities they attempt to join. Twitter, in particular, is quick to ostracize, and you should therefore consider that "Autism Twitter" contains only the subset of autistic persons who can socially pass as conversant, and who choose to be vocal on social networks.

From the GP:

> Two people having breakthrough infections for any variant is not at all unlikely

The point is that this fact isn't newsworthy... unless Reuters is running an agenda. This article is blatant fearmongering.

All the non-Apple software that people needed to spend months fixing. There's a variety of posts on HN about being "M1 ready".

> How do you deal with shy students, or ones who don't like to participate?

With students who aren't participating in the current model? They will (have the opportunity to) do better than they are now, as when they watch prerecorded lectures they can skip back to parts they didn't understand. As opposed to their current behavior of not speaking up and, therefore, not being able to go over the content again.

Org mode is great because it does 2 things extremely well:

1. Document structure. Folding, tree structures, linking, etc. are done very well in org-mode. But that's not unique to org-mode, several other solutions do that well.

2. org-mode lets you use all of the other Emacs major and minor modes in your document - restricted to sections. This is amazing, as it basically gives you an entire application layer in your text documents.

Where by entire layer, I mean having your calendar, email, programming environments, etc. all within your notes. org-mode used this way is not merely a document editor. It is the best plain-text workflow enabler the world has ever seen.

And you can't do this outside of Emacs without essentially rewriting Emacs. Emacs _is_ the strength that org-mode leverages. org-mode is a unification of the many and varied Emacs major modes into a simple plain-text environment.

And the best part is, you only need to use the particular modes you want. Your org-mode experience is tailored around your use case. You bring in the mode you want in that section and you're done. It just works.

The classic (multi-decade problem repeated again, and again, and again...) is face detection. Face detection models continue to get trained by primarily white developers/researches who continue to use primarily white people as their training set. And then they're shocked when their model performs terribly for everyone who isn't of European decent.

This case is so pervasive that it gets taught in basically every university that teaches ML - and yet those students go on to repeat the exact problem they were educated against.

If your flour is unbleached it'll already have yeast in it. You can turn it into a starter with a bit of easy regular work: https://www.alieward.com/ologies/gastroegyptology

> Honestly, who has the best track record of tackling this issue and taking it seriously.

Taiwan, who the WHO regularly denies exists.

South Korea, whose success and strategies have been ignored.

This crisis has shown us the true face of the WHO: a primarily political organization with occasional work in medicine.