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throwaway4837

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throwaway4837
·قبل سنتين·discuss
You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?
throwaway4837
·قبل سنتين·discuss
I tend to think this is a pattern with needless subscription models. They likely have a semi-bimodal distribution of users: full-price payers vs. discount/promo payers, so they probably increase the price for the full-price payers to compensate for the people taking advantage of crazy promos. Making it hard to cancel also compensates for the discounts they offer to rope people in. I hypothesize that a company that offers excessive discounting probably also has a sketchy way of compensating for it, and they are probably fabricating margin that could've been priced out by competition (if sufficient competition exists). Therefore, I would bet that Adobe is an overpriced product.

Reminds me of typical gym memberships. It once took me months to cancel a Crunch subscription. My card expired and they had the audacity to send me a letter stating they will collect unless I enter a new card instead of just cancelling for me. They constantly gave me the runaround in person and over email; eventually I just sent an email to their legal/management team and threatened to escalate with the bank if there's another charge and it worked. Sadly, I was never refunded for the 3-4 months they charged me for during this period.

You'd think these sorts of subscription filibusters would be scrutinized more by the FTC to protect consumers. Glad to see it being looked at in this case, but seriously gym memberships need some attention too.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
Waking up in the mornings helps reset my mental state sometimes. I wonder if it's related. If I have an early morning, I usually find that I'm more productive and have more energy to work out or focus on tasks. There's nothing more depressing than a cycle of waking up at 2pm because you stayed up until 5am. Waking up so late makes me feel like I'm wasting my life.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
> Matchmaking only "works" in places where women are denied autonomy, and it results in them being sold off like cattle. This is not a desirable state of affairs to anyone but the most loathsome, pathetic basement dwellers.

This take sounds out of touch, and reveals a misunderstanding. There's no reason why matchmaking in America has to be one-sided, or treat women like "cattle". Women and men can both hire matchmakers to find their partner. That you can not see this is perhaps more of a projection of your own views on women.

Are you suggesting that all men who have arranged marriages in India are "loathsome, pathetic basement dwellers"? This viewpoint seems entirely indefensible.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
Totally worth it if you think of a family as a multi-million dollar investment over the course of your lifetime. $100k is actually nothing in comparison, and could mean the difference between having a family and not having one.

I think this is why Indian matchmaking is such a successful industry. My prediction is that matchmaking grows in the US and eventually becomes one of the main methods for looking for a serious partner online. It won't be called "arranged marriages" in the US due to some generational stigma around that term, but the base concept will be very similar. Could see this being common within 15 years.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
I agree with people who say fine-tuning and "human AI alignment" is actually what's going to make AI dangerous. The fact that we think we can "align" something taught on historical, fictional, and scientific text -- it's hubris. One way ticket to an ideological bubble. This "search engine that has its own opinions on what you're looking for" is really the wrong path for us to take. Searching data is a matter of truth, not opinion.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
Angstroms are used pretty commonly in molecular/nuclear physics.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
Creating dichotomies is central to mathematics and science. Humans tend to think of things as being either "in" or "out", and apply this distinguishing ability to every facet of life. It is not surprising that pretty much everyone is creating little dichotomies in their head which shapes their worldview. That's kind of what models do too, they draw lines in data and categorize things. It's easier to understand things if you can decompose them into orthogonal vectors in your mind.

I agree that it can be dangerous if you create a false dichotomy, because that can lead to a misunderstanding of how something works.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
You're creating a false dichotomy. Poker is a skill and it is gambling.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
Poker is a skill. It's one of the only casino games where you can consistently make money. You're not playing against the house, you're playing against other people. There's no such thing as a professional lottery player, or a professional slot machine player.

If you're really good at poker, it can be a source of income. You have to be really, really good though.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
Effects are way too easy to use improperly. I used to be a fan of useEffect when it came out because of its concision, but after working with countless devs/agencies, it's clear that most people misuse it. The rules of useEffect are inelegant, and creating readable state machines with useEffect is very hard. You end up with spaghetti code either in your custom hook, or directly in the component. While most components need 2-3 effects rather than 20, useEffect is not a scalable way of managing state IMO.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
The cost of pursuing dead ends in science is NECESSARY and much greater than the cost of pursuing fraudulent results, albeit the latter being unnecessary. Probably 70%+ of time is wasted on paths that lead to nowhere, and that is part of the process. I would guess less than 1% of time is wasted because of manipulation. The process finds fraudsters (bad) well enough, and the process of being wrong (good) will always be central to science, even though it's so expensive.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
How? Peer-review, re-review, journalism, and reproduction of results are the systems the scientific community is built upon. The system does its job of finding the bad apples, as it did here.

Bad things are gonna happen in every single institution ever created. A better measure is how long those things persist.

Science is about getting closer to "the truth". Sometimes science goes further away from the truth, sometimes it gets closer. Sometimes bad actors get us further away from the truth. It gets reconciled eventually.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
Every other frame is "penis" text, a drawing of a penis, or something similar. I believe it's a work of art nonetheless, definitely cool. If they did it "right" the result would just end up looking like someone took the original movie, converted it to 16-color space, then randomly moved around groups of pixels. I agree the way this is was executed was much more interesting than the "right" way. It's a cool experiment!
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
It can work well for restricted inputs, like Twitch Plays Pokemon. The FREE Movie is too open-ended. They should do a simple distance check to throw out frames that don't overlap much with the original frame. They could also have a frame-voting mode where you basically just get a stream of frames and swipe right if it looks good, left if it looks bad, then use the crowdsourced data so that the movie plays with the current highest voted frames.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
Only if they all were competing in the same market. Since they aren't, I like to think of it more as them competing for which one becomes the base meme. When people think of "dog" which variant do they imagine? Lab, husky, french bulldog, or something else? Which dog type "won" and created the strongest meme?
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
Finished in 5 years, 10 months, slacked off for the first two years (prepared for exams twice).
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
The US trends are very telling... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...

It coincides exactly with when Down Detector shows the Reddit report spike... https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/

I'm gonna go ahead and say my theory is probably right.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
That's my point. It's so highly covered that it might actually bring more people to Reddit today than the number of people who fled. Imagine all of the people who don't use Reddit who saw this press, and visited Reddit because of it. That number may possibly outweigh the number of users who decided not to use Reddit because of the "strike" today.
throwaway4837
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
My unpopular theory is that the Reddit blackout increased Reddit usage, having the opposite of the intended effect.