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jfengel

18,299 karmajoined 8 lat temu

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jfengel
·14 godzin temu·discuss
For the most part, shooting wars avoid taking out leadership. You need somebody capable of surrendering, and with clear authority to order the troops to cease fire.

That said, the US has already broken that with Iran, so all bets are off.
jfengel
·14 godzin temu·discuss
People routinely spend many hours indoors, with CO2 levels several times the overall global CO2. I'd expect that effect to swamp the fraction of a percent that global CO2 levels rise.

Rising CO2 isn't going to be great for any of us, but I'd expect that the climactic consequences are going to be far more than the consequences of our breathing gas.
jfengel
·14 godzin temu·discuss
The thermodynamic arrow of time is very old news. I'm having a hard time figuring out what's new here.
jfengel
·15 godzin temu·discuss
That sounds like a horrific idea.

Polymarket isn't a stock or commodities market. There is no underlying value to it. It's zero-sum: the only money coming in comes from the other players. (Minus their overhead.) It's gambling.

It's bad enough that desperate people can lose everything gambling. Leverage allows them to lose more than everything, and that seems like a recipe for disaster.

I don't want to just waggle my finger at prediction market gambling. If that's how people want to spend their money, it's not up to me to protect them. But having the market itself encourage people to spend more than they have seems more like greed than like a serious consideration of market dynamics.
jfengel
·wczoraj·discuss
Because we like property.
jfengel
·3 dni temu·discuss
According to my contact at Nike: several years. (She cautioned me against buying too many pairs at once.) Foams break down.

As with food "best by" dates, you can get away with rather a lot more than they recommend. But a quarter-century seems like too much to ask.
jfengel
·4 dni temu·discuss
Nobody has ever asked me that. I'm having a hard time imagining how that conversation goes. Anybody interested in it would just find out.

I wonder if you were telegraphing it, which caused them to ask. I'm reasonably confident about mine, so perhaps that conveys sufficiently well that they're willing to risk finding out.
jfengel
·4 dni temu·discuss
> There are US parties that support open borders, DEI/wokeism,

There really aren't. Nobody supports "open borders". That's just a Fox News lie.

People do support diversity, equity, and inclusion, but Fox News' version of "wokeism" is similarly a deranged right-wing nightmare.
jfengel
·8 dni temu·discuss
The $10 gauge is of dubious accuracy. Especially if I bought it at a convenience store that happens to sell gas.
jfengel
·8 dni temu·discuss
Not quite sure what you're suggesting here; perhaps it's satire?

If P!=NP then it is arbitrarily smaller, for the same reason that e^x > Cx^N for any constants C and N, as long as x grows big enough. There is no epsilon in that can overcome that, no matter how big you make it, because x will eventually dominate the equation.

There are a lot of cases where pragmatically x remains small enough that it doesn't matter, and a P algorithm will give you an answer more quickly. (For the same reason I only ever write bubble sorts: I would only write my own at all if I knew that the list would never be bigger than 10. Even then it's only when using the library is too much trouble for some reason.)

But we care about P and NP when the number can potentially be very, very large.
jfengel
·8 dni temu·discuss
I had noted a few weeks ago that Hacker News used a font without serifs, causing confusion. I'm not sure when they changed that, but there are now serifs on the capital I and lower case "l".

This headline is much less confusing for the change. Thanks.
jfengel
·8 dni temu·discuss
Headline is a bit over-dramatic, given that it's already 9 years late. "A decade late" means that it will finally be certified next year.

The news, such as it is, is that it might actually get certified next year.
jfengel
·8 dni temu·discuss
That article was written in January 2017. I think that even the article writer would be shocked by how bad the reality of it actually is.
jfengel
·9 dni temu·discuss
They do show it folding shirts, which I'd think are harder than blankets.

Is your doubt caused by blankets being bigger than shirts?

(I didn't see it folding a button-up shirt, only tee-shirts. That's an extra degree of difficult and I do doubt that it can do that.)
jfengel
·9 dni temu·discuss
Why?

Corporations already owe the government part of their earnings, via taxation. What does the government need, or want, with actual ownership of the company?

They can't sell it; the government isn't any good at managing stock portfolios. They don't have enough votes to matter in the direction of the company. If they do want to control the direction of the company, they should do so via a law regulating it, not as one voice on a large board.

If the government feels that the corporation isn't paying its share of taxation, they should pass laws to alter the tax rules -- for every company. Why should AI companies be special?

The US is getting a national windfall. During the dotcom boom, we used that to nudge the deficit to near zero, by taxing profits on capital gains. That's sufficient. We don't need a meaningless ownership stake, which grants us neither cash nor control.
jfengel
·9 dni temu·discuss
It's a common enough expression. It has an entry in Wiktionary (sense 2):

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

A random example from 1991:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Object_oriented_Program...

Of course Claude picked it up from usage; it didn't invent the phrase. But I don't see any indication that it's uniquely Claude-y. I use the phrase on occasion myself.
jfengel
·9 dni temu·discuss
I don't really believe that egg prices could have made that big a difference. It was an easy thing for media reports to grab onto, but overall inflation was just not that high. I don't see people getting that bent out of shape over it.

It seems more likely that it made an easy thing to tell pollsters, rather than admit their real reasons. Exactly what those real reasons are, I have only dark suspicions, without evidence.
jfengel
·10 dni temu·discuss
I think you're making a mistake in assuming that they're stupid.

Maybe they like that other people are suffering because they wouldn't make the least conceivable effort to help them. Maybe their goal is to make the world so much worse that there will be a revolution.
jfengel
·10 dni temu·discuss
A whole story about how they screwed up. Kudos, for real.
jfengel
·10 dni temu·discuss
In what sense do they not understand it? What could we teach them that they don't already know?