WhompingWindows

vor 13 Tagendiscuss

Do you eat meat? Do you use a car and create carbon emissions? That's destroying ecosystems all around the world, and yet here we are doing nothing about it. Ticks aren't even the base of the pyramid, as others have stated, they're one of many choices for those creatures. Can you name a single creature who relies solely on disease-carrying ticks for food?

WhompingWindows

letzten Monatdiscuss

Reading a dozen comments here, the AI seems to blow peoples mind most often in domains they're less familiar with. Repairing furnaces, HVAC, towing hitches, camper van interfaces, printer debugging. It wasn't the user's career to do these things, it gave them a bump from very novice to intermediate level.

WhompingWindows

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Silver bulletin is like it - probably a lot of similar methods given it's also Nate Silver making the models.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Your revisionist history isn't on point for US slavery.

Industrialization actually increased slavery in the South. Demand for cheap cotton came from English and then American industrialization. A machine, a product of industrialization, the cotton gin, shackled the chains of slavery ever tighter in the South, as it increased the processing speed of raw cotton. Combine that with acquisition of huge swathes of Mexican territory via unjust conquest, and you had industry demanding cotton and lots of new territory for slavery to potentially move into.

What ended slavery in the USA was the military necessity to free the slaves to save the Union in 1863. Lincoln would've ended slavery earlier or later if it could've saved the Union, he explicitly writes this in a public letter.

The government needed to destroy the rebellion, and slavery was the backwards un-economic stultifying institution enforced by a different culture, a different people: Southern Aristocrats. They used the psychology of emergency and fear to propagandize Southern nationhood and militarism, motivated their anti-democratic notions of "freedom" and "property rights".

This system needed to be torn down militarily and culturally, economically and politically it was probably stuck in place, because it was held in place by corrupt aristocracy.

Does the US have a corrupt aristocracy now holding other things in place that ought to be abolished?

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Parent didn't mention either capacity or utilization? The article itself is mentioning generation. Not sure where you're getting what you're responding to?

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

The author seems more about authenticity than boring-ness. And using the label boring vs bored, it comes to a similar outcome.

If I say, that guy is boring, he's inauthentic/poser/wanna-be, in my opinion I've failed that interaction. I am not engaging with him, I label him too mundane.

Yet, every person has genuine authenticity and need for connection, if you're attentive and patient enough to see it.

If you go around being frank and blasting your true opinions and true passions at everyone, you may miss a chance to learn more about them themselves, and move past the "boring" label you're putting, to see the real, struggling, suffering, but inherently interesting person underneath.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Boredom is actually a good thing to experience. Modern life seeks to devour every morsel of our attention.

Are you able to sit motionless looking at a tree for 3 minutes? Can you read a book for an hour? Can you focus intensely on a work project for 2-3 hours?

If not, you may need more boredom to enhance your connection with "mundane" things. Trying to be interesting/authentic/not boring may lead to cheap thrills and provocative experiences moment by moment, which de-train your focus and attention for those very hard tasks you need/want to do in life.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

You said it yourself: he was primarily a professor, not an artist. His position being a "luxury" is another argument. Anyway, He taught languages to brilliant students and created a highly respected translation of Beowulf. LoTR, Silmarillion, Hobbit, and all of it, were his hobby, a secondary but burning passion.

I'm sure many on this forum have secondary passions, be it music, visual art, writing, or anything else. Yet most of us realized we need to make money, and that those pursuits can be done at a fairly high level in our leisure time.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

If everyone chose to eat veggie burgers and seitan steaks instead of using beef, the climate's trajectory would immediately improve. For all the responsibility of industry, many individual world citizens could, and many have, changed their lifestyle due to the moral issue of climate-changing emissions.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Whether or not the posts are fake on this particular project, the mere concept that we could have thousands of AI bots using climate-changing energy to have bot conversations is mind blowing. AI is an insanely interesting area, and things like GasTown and Moltbook come in and use tons of tokens as a lark. Maybe they can spawn more useful projects in their wake?

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

It's not just numbers or speed. It's the shape of the population pyramid. Around the world except Africa, populations are aging. This means less taxes will come in, less workers of prime age, much more healthcare and elder care will be needed, and thus less of the valuable workers in other sectors.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

It's actually not a good trade at all, you need a balanced population pyramid if you want a functional economy in the future. The housing stock is behind due to financial crisis in 2007, as well as lots of other factors, and population decrease won't solve most of those.

In fact, declining population could make the housing problem worse, if there's far fewer workers to make the new housing.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

If someone sees the world around them getting worse, I think it's pretty logical to not bring a child into that society.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

What a bizarre comment. Who cares about their genetic line? Are you evolution itself? Do you have stakes in making sure your genes make it to the future?

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends...unless they also have kids, in which case we play DnD together when the kids go to bed.

Going out to eat? Going on vacations? Sleeping? Your own health? Your finances? Say goodbye to all of that for 5+ years if you have kids, even more if you have a special needs child.

And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them, and probably the vast majority would do so again. And we will have our children to keep us young-at-heart, learning, active, and to help us in old age. Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old, while we'll have the vibrancy of a family life.

WhompingWindows

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Massive kudos to you. I am forwarding to all NYers I know. It gives me chills to relive specific places, though I'm far from the city now.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Juniors are beginners, learners, apprentices, and are bound to make mistakes and design things poorly. The issue is there are so few high-quality engineers relative to the demand, and it's hard to prove who is high-quality before they're onboard for a few months. So, if someone is high-quality, you really don't want to lose them, so you promote them, pay them more, try your best to keep them on-board. There's a benefit to elevating them out of the weeds, because often they can glance at the weeds and tell someone else how to clean it up easily, without spending their effort to actually do it.

Furthermore, they can glance at 10 patches of weeds, 10 junior engineers, and find the couple that need more guidance than the others. They can leverage their knowledge through others, assessing their strengths/weaknesses as coders in ways juniors never could.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

To add meat to these bones, I've played piano on average 20 minutes a day for 22 years. That means ~2700 hours of piano practice. Probably an underestimate but it does match my intuition of thousands of hours.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

How can Jobs go to Japanese Zen temples which teach the exact opposite of being a total asshole and yelling at everyone? It's incongruous, he just comes across as entitled and unnecessarily mean in these stories. He could've gotten the same amount out of people by sternly asking, not screaming and demeaning.

WhompingWindows

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

While I agree that race has been discussed a lot in the past few years, especially on places like NPR or Sam Harris's podcast or in politics, the reality is: poor people are often minorities, and poor people have to do more of their own car repairs than rich people. In general, if laws are related to socioeconomic status, they are also related to race indirectly.