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fsckboy

8,170 karmajoined 7 years ago

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The ISO 216 "A4" paper system is broken (rounding errors) [video]

youtube.com
3 points·by fsckboy·2 months ago·1 comments

Michio Kaku "number of dead/missing American scientists "cause for natl concern"

newsweek.com
8 points·by fsckboy·3 months ago·2 comments

Noperthedron is not Rupert (can't fit through itself) [video]

youtube.com
2 points·by fsckboy·7 months ago·1 comments

comments

fsckboy
·10 hours ago·discuss
how about a version that shows all the words at once and you can work on them in the order you want, skip and go back. (for a phone show one and a person can click "later" to move a difficult word to the end of the queue)

and the whole thing is timed counting up, and how long it took is the score.

the way it is now with a countdown timer for each word, the player doesn't get a reward for solving something quickly
fsckboy
·yesterday·discuss
>That's not a knock, it's a design philosophy of OpenBSD (which is to do the minimal needed, and no more, in the most simplistic way)

you mean the most simple way. "simplistic" would mean they went too far.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/simplistic

simplistic

1. Overly simple.

2. In a manner that simplifies a concept or issue so that its nuances and complexities are lost or important details are overlooked.
fsckboy
·yesterday·discuss
>That's not a knock, it's a design philosophy of OpenBSD (which is to do the minimal needed, and no more, in the most simplistic way)

you mean the most simple way. "simplistic" would mean they went too far.
fsckboy
·2 days ago·discuss
Did you find a word that wasn't accepted you thought should be?

EARLS was not accepted, and I had already decided not to try REALS. (is there a rule against plurals?) what it was looking for was LASER which has a more tenuous claim on being a word than those two.
fsckboy
·5 days ago·discuss
it annoys me how eager people are to hurl the word stochastic as pejorative. Statistics are a great tool for gleaning information from stochastic processes; statistics don't contribute randomness. Random sampling is necessary in order not to bias a sample, it's not used to contribute randomness to the sample but to preserve/measure the underlying distribution. (not meant to imply that training is random sampling)
fsckboy
·7 days ago·discuss
>Human barbarism is not new...

to be fair, without humans there would be nobody to declare "barbarism". At one time, all humans were barbarians, it took a certain level of cultural development before the word "barbarism" was necessary, so at that point it was "new". It remains be be shown whether cultures that call other cultures "barbaric" are actually "better".
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/

"Cochran and Harpending also cite studies claiming that Ashkenazim have the highest IQ of any ethnic group for which there’s reliable data, perhaps as much as a full standard deviation above the general European average, which means, at the far end of the spectrum, that 23 per thousand Ashkenazim have an IQ over 140, as opposed to 4 per thousand Northern Europeans."
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
>You don't need genetic inheritance to explain Jewish over-performance, cultural inheritance is enough.

but it is known, independently of Jewish population studies, that genetic inheritance is a strong factor in IQ performance, and such data also demands explanation; there is no point in leaving it out of population studies.

It is much more frustrating to perform tasks that are more difficult for you than things that are easy. So if a task requires intellect, you are more likely to engage in that task if you are intelligent, and more likely to progress in that field if other people note and reward your performance. Such a process carried out on a particular gene pool might reinforce tendencies that lead to part of what we call culture.

>Looking at national IQ averages currently Hong Kong seems to score highest with an average of 107.73 while Israel is below average at 98.57, below most European countries as well as below the USA.

Ashkenazi Jews as a population average scores above 107. The IQ mean of 100 has a standard deviation of about 15. Also, Ashkenazi Jews are less than half of Israel.
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
64 Fields Medals have been awarded, 15 went to Jews, just over 23%.

Jews are 2.5% of the US but less than 0.2% of Europe (10% of all Jews live in Europe; in 1933, it was 60%)
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
ride defensively, don't travel at high speed when you can see that there are pedestrians ahead who might very well turn and take a step into your lane. slowing down is not going to kill you, speed up when the way is clear.
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
[flagged]
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
I think—no
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
>It's not a conspiracy or anti-Semitic

it is if you think the reason is something that's not benign, or if you are keeping track of it and spreading it hoping to foment anger.

A hugely disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews (22% vs 0.2% of total population) and that's with 6 million killed in the holocaust. By Occam's razor, that's a lot of really smart people, and I prefer having smart leaders.

Do you think the President of Mexico and Ukraine are Jewish because Mossad?

Let me guess, you think all the above is because they cheated?
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
in what you quoted, nothing says "U.S. officials believed..." as the headline states
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
>my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes

at the time patents were debated, a key part of the proposal was to encourage the transfer "trade secret knowledge" to the public good while still protecting the inventor. this is not an "encourage innovation" argument, it's to stop knowledge from dying with a secretive inventor, knowledge such as glass or metallurgical techniques, formulas, etc.

the inventor also benefited from this patent protection because they could expand their business unlimited by maintaining a small inner circle who knew the secret.
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
I don't see how that solves this problem. there is a string in memory that gets saved on suspend. that string when read by the CPU has the same properties it had before. if the CPU is using rot-13, the string is still rot-13 and the attacker doesn't need to spend the compute needed to crack rot-13, the CPU will simply do that as normal.
fsckboy
·8 days ago·discuss
marginal effects are small, but it's where the integration and feedback add up or even multiply. the claim here is that the mitchondria are paying attention to their own marginal quantities which are quite small; the outsized effects if they are someplace will lie elsewhere. For example, sendentary life will lead to less muscle mass, which means fewer mitochondria overall, but that's not the individual mitochondria "noticing" anything.
fsckboy
·9 days ago·discuss
Our mitochondria process the total of our energy needs every day, while exercise adds, percentagewise, only fractional additional energy need.

do you think mitochondria notice the difference? I don't.

If I cut my caloric intake, I drop weight like nobody's business, and that's all thanks to my mitochondria at their place in the chain. It's the same thing my mitochondria are doing when I overeat and put on weight.
fsckboy
·9 days ago·discuss
you want to try Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, sorry, you need to accept cookies!
fsckboy
·9 days ago·discuss
it is Lawrence Watt-Evans, he has a page there

https://escapepod.org/people/lawrence-watt-evans/