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wisty

Re:The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:58AM (#50333566)
What do you want to ban?

There's a free speech issue to saying "you can't advertise your own opinions". Where is the line? Should every charity that "raises awareness" be banned? Should every sponsored Youtuber be forced out of political commentary? (I mean, I don't hate the idea completely ....)

There's the skeezy links behind organisations that support a political stance, and claim no real links to politicians. But we know that it's all kinda bs with strong links between the "nonaffiliated" "Political Action Committees" that claim to just represent causes and ideas, and the politicians who just happen to be close friends with the organisers. But it's rarely totally black and white.

Re:Richest 0.1% (8M) produce more carbon pollution than 3.5B on Thursday October 29, 2026 @12:22AM (#50284546)
Nitpick, the top 10% are probably not 100x worse than the 0.1% (they are only 100x more numerous). But yeah it's rage bait to ignore basically 99% of the people in 1st world countries.
So if I'm reading you right, the question is, is the context that matters a consumer, a government, or a business?

If a CEO just needs to write "optimise profits" ...

Hot take - the criminal should pay the jury if they're clearly guilty and wasting everyone's time. And the judge. And if they resisted arrest, the cost of the extra police work.
Re:Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans on Thursday October 22, 2026 @05:59PM (#50201648)
The philospher Adam Smith(before he invented economics) had a similar argument, but added an "invisible hand" in which our group belief evolves to be adaptive for the group. Clever guy.
Original articles says it was likely a comprimised maintainer machine?
Re:Voxtral 3 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @11:27PM (#50175715)
How dare you suggest we reduce the quality of doctors to the top 1% rather than top 0.2% of academic performers! Quality will fall through the floor if they aren't in such high demand!
Re:DeepSeek just open-sourced its inference engine on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @08:17PM (#50174483)
A high margin luxury good with huge r&d costs is a death spiral.

A high per-user r&d means high costs per user. So then users leave to save a buck, qnd the price goes up again for the remaining users.

Maybe it works out OK if you want to signal wealth - the high price is the selling point. But luxury pure utility is a hard sell to consumers, and for luxury B2B it's about high touch sales (e.g. Oracle).

When a lawyer says "reckless" it's an extremely strong word. It doesn't mean "negligent", IANAL (and it depends on the state etc) but it's more like if you knowingly run over a pedestrian in your way, and you aren't trying to hurt them but don't care if they get hurt. And often criminal law will treat it as just a little less bad than intent.
I haven't seen it, but my opinion is she likely was what lawyers call "reckless", as in she should have known but didn't care (blinded by the upside and a "we'll figure it once we scale" tech attitude that works a lot better for db performance than healthcare).
Mostly no, but the people who ARE pro free speech (e.g. libertarians) have mostly found the right to be slightly more tolerant.
Why would pro free speech people be right wing?
Re:Computers Cannot Make Decisions on Saturday October 10, 2026 @04:32AM (#50030892)
Unless they are burning through funding. It's "blitzscaling" and is followed by "enshittification" when yhe free money dries up.
Franklin and Wilkins weren't bad, they just didn't get on very well. Wilkins was a bit sensitive and Franklin was arrogant; but neither were really bad people. Wilkins later gave Franklin a lot more credit, he was just a bit peeved off at the time.

People do look a bit funny at Watson though ... he apparently became a bit of a crackpot in later years.

It kind of was a Wilkins discovery though.

Wilkins produced the initial samples, trained Gosling (who took photo 51) and then had his samples and assistant (Gosling) taken when the high flying Franklin was hired.

Wilkins took lower quality photos before Franklin was even in the lab, and showed them to Watson at a conference.

Yes, Franklin built a way better x-ray camera.

But she was also allegedly pretty horrid to Wilkins. She mocked Wilkins as a "middle class" idiot and refused to share her data with him (Gosling did show Wilkins photo 51 when ordered by higher ups, which Gosling had taken, we don't talk about Gosling because PhD students don't get credit right?).

Franklin held a funeral for the double helix, because I guess she thought Wilkins was an idiot to suggest DNA was a double helix.

Yeah, Wilkins was a little bit rude, giving as little credit to her as possible. But if some privileged upper-class rockstar moves into your lab, tries to freeze you out, mocks you for your theory, then you figure out you can prove your theory is correct (using a photo your former assistant took using the rockstar's camera, and some help from a couple of other researchers) then yeah ... are you really going out of your way to praise them, even if maybe they could have eventually figured it out?

Re:Is Mathematics Over, or Just Graduating? on Monday October 05, 2026 @08:17PM (#49972551)
Or that chess is over because stockfish can easily beat any human player. Or that warehouses don't need workers now that we have forklifts.

Maaaybe.

On the other hand, proofs was the main thing that distinguished good mathemeticians. It was the way of sorting out who should be a math professor.

It's probably a bit of a blow for math professors. For almost everyone down the "food chain" though - who cares? I'd argue that mathematical thinking is still very useful, even if you offload the heavy lifting to power tools. Math teachers still need to exist. Math tests probably still make sense - you want to incentivise learning, and test to see who the brightest or most studious students are. Math will still be used for physics, economics, etc - no one actually cared about most of the new proofs anyway, it was just a fun tournament to pick math professors with a side effect of generating a bit new knowledge.

At some point, maybe humans don't need to make decisions. We can just sit in VR racks being fed and entertained by AI like we're in The Matrix or Wall-E, as they fill some age-old instruction to make the humans happy and healthy. But until then, humans still need to make decisions, and mathematical thinking makes us better at that.

Re:When did Google get so f-ing weird? on Sunday September 27, 2026 @04:36PM (#49870559)
Haha, had almost the exact thing trying to find a quote from Steins; Gate ("I keep seeing it, I keep seeing it"). Google AI was very "worried" about me.
Re:Douglas Adams and the exterminated Doctor Who adventure on Friday September 18, 2026 @08:38PM (#49762151)
A new hope had lots of effect that are basically cgi in impact. Muppets, painted backgrounds, lightsabres, the death star wireframe plans was cgi. The method of making fake pixels isn't the issue, good taste is, and modern cgi is just easy to make slop effects with.

Also compare lotr gollum (cgi but with a good actor and good script, with the actor in a motion suit on stage for actors to interact with) to Jar Jar (a tennis ball who actors couldn't interact with). Gollum is arguavly more cgi (both removing the actor and replacing them) but better.

Re:Douglas Adams and the exterminated Doctor Who adventure on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @01:01PM (#49729864)
Nah, politics in shows is great. It's like CGI. It can really make a show pop if it's well thought out, subtle, and feels realistic.

People complain about it when it seems to be used as an excuse for a lack other aspects of the show, or it makes everything seem unrealistic because they were more keen on putting it in than actually caring about whether it was realistic or at least made things feel realistic to the viewer.

The OG Jurassic Park had lots of politics and lots of CGI. No-one complained about it, because it was well done. If they had a jerkily animated raptor judo flipping a t-rex for no other reason than the director thought it would be cool to include then people would be saying the CGI was awful.

Re:Douglas Adams and the exterminated Doctor Who adventure on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @12:54PM (#49729779)
Implying it hadn't already fell apart in the Matt Smith era, where there was a season finale that made less sense than the end of Neo Genesis Evangelion (I think I'm talking about The Pandorica Opens, but it's honestly all a blur, and was at the time I watched it too). Moffat hyped up future episodes but could rarely deliver, RTD just hit you with a massive sucker punch on the 2nd or 3rd last episode and WOW.

Also implying that the wheels weren't kinda getting loose when 10ant said his final farewell at that (otherwise fairly underrated IMO) episode where the Master was hungry.

> Sometimes outsiders notice what's happening but over time academia has built up a complex web of lore that protects them psychologically

The word you're looking for is "triangulation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(social_science)

As long as you can find [1] a few [2] citations [3] that kind of all point in the same kind of direction then you're good!

They're more like the winners of a pyramid scheme / MLM. You want everyone to see there's a winner so they all keep up the grind.
Re:C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @06:31PM (#49441578)
I can break it with zero skills. Tripod, camera, clear monitor in a dark room ... just take a real photo of a fake photo.
Re:How Universities Should Prepare Founders on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @02:31AM (#49429822)
> I will suggest that trying to change someone's mind by presenting them with rational arguments is never going to work to persuade them they're wrong.

Were you persuaded of this by rational arguments?

Going from your size to 27 means putting on 10kg of muscle. That's a beef brisket. Half the guys in the gym don't have that much more musle than you.

Yeah really well muscled guy being BMI 27 is probably ok but by 30 it's not natural muscles that are making the scales go up.

Re:Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI on Saturday August 15, 2026 @07:12PM (#49315168)
> Many active gym people have pretty high BMIs but fairly low fat

I think this is greatly exhaggerated.

Yeah you can put on as much muscle as Arnold and have a FFMI of about 27 then maybe have a BMI of 34 if you have 20% body fat.

But a very gifted natty might cap out at maybe 24 with a BMI of 30 at 20% bodyfat. But let's be realistic. This is not "many active gym people". This is the guy winning the local strongman meet.

Yes a couple of years training for most people can add a couple of points to BMI but I think people exaggerate how much this is. Go look at a 20lb brisket at costco - you don't see people with that much extra muscle all that often.

Re:Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @03:12AM (#49254437)
I guess they use their chatlogs to fine tune.

Maybe users engage more with the flowery text? An accidental (or intentional) dark pattern would be that more tokens get used if you have to summarise. Or maybe it's just that many AI users like it (they like the AI to sound smart, or like to feel smart puzzling it out).

You can google "CPI price change graph by type good" to find which things have undergone real inflation vs real deflation. TVs, phones, toys, clothes, furniture, cars.

Everyone likes to say Homer Simpson lived like a king. He had a car that was so bad it would be illegal to sell new today, no cell phone, no netflix, no Uber eats, clothes were so expensive it was worth the SAHM fix them, pizza or Chinese takeaway were a luxury, not a lot of furniture.

People today eat so well that broke 30 year olds will order haute cuisine and say it's basically the same price as home cooking (OK it's roughly as big a rip off as maccas in Australia but still ... home cooking can be dirt cheap).

Re:Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's on Monday August 10, 2026 @02:08AM (#49239789)
A better low effort contrarian comment - isn't it that early symptoms appear less often with people with a "reserve"?

Being mentally active (or physically active?) IIRC makes actual plaques both less likely, but also less detectable - a taxi driver can forget 90% of what they know and still not get diagnosed because they don't get lost on the way to the shops. Also they are often masters of small talk.

Re:How not to turn ideologically crazy on Sunday August 09, 2026 @06:47PM (#49236998)
Freedom of association is kind of a mistake, as it encourages these bubbles to form.

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