OkayPhysicist

> Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside.

The converse is also true: Most groups look more heterogeneous from the inside than the outside. Again, to use the Christianity example: it takes a fair bit of inside baseball to figure out how various different sects and denominations are any different, but if you ask one of their priests, they'll be sure to tell you how Baptists and Episcopalians couldn't be more different.

It's a symptom of normalizing to an Overton window. From inside a church the belief that Jesus was just a guy who talked to God might seem an extreme fringe belief to someone who believes that Jesus is fully God, but from the outside we can lump them together as axiomatically holding that God Exists, because we have an Overton window ranging from "God doesn't exist" to "Allah talks to me everyday, and she gave me my promotion".

The writers for Star Trek spent a lot more time thinking about interstellar travel than I do, but I'm not going to go to them for advice about building a rocket ship.

The Rationalists are a philosophical/pseudo-religious organization in the same way the Daoists are. Just spending a lot time thinking about something doesn't make them right, it just makes them internally consistent with their chosen axioms. That is useful: if you agree with the axiomatic beliefs of such a movement, you can probably defer a lot of reasoning about the conclusions of those beliefs to the authority figures within that movement. But it doesn't change the probability of the axioms themselves being true, any moreso than the Pope saying so affects the probability of God existing.

AI Is Important And Potentially Dangerous is an axiomatic belief in the rationalist circles that are relevant to AI safety, in the same way that God Exists is axiomatic to Catholicism.

Running a business on that basis would look like the white(ish)-hat version of ransomware. "Oh, your data is gone? How much is it really worth to you?"

map() and reduce() are equivalent in terms of jargon, IMO. Map also suffers from name collision with dictionaries/objects/whatever your language wants to call a key-value pairing.

CJD develops in about 1/1,000,000 people per year globally, and the Fore people have a population of ~20,000. In theory, that suggests there should be an outbreak within 50 years of the society regularly consuming brain matter. Perhaps that number could be reduced somewhat by the infection rate, but the infection rate seems pretty high, to reach the level it did as fast as it did each person with Kuru needed to infect 1.6 people. Perhaps sporadic CJD isn't as sporadic as we assume, and it's tied to being in environments where others have had CJD? Another possibility is tied to the seeming link between genetics and the infection rate of Mad Cow Disease. Perhaps the population regularly went through boom-bust cycles, where everybody with 2 copies of the recessive gene that makes one more susceptible to transmission gets killed off, then the disease dies off for a long enough time for the carriers to re-introduce their recessive trait back into the gene pool.

That actually supports the point that people aren't acting under purely financial motivations. If the guy was purely following financial motivations, surely he would have chosen to sell the vulnerabilities to the shadier side of things. Instead, he dumped them publicly, burning their value while amplifying the "fuck you" factor to Microsoft.

Ignoring reports, or just fixing the vulnerability without acknowledging the work put in by a researcher, is rude and invites rudeness in return.

There's a pretty heavy survivorship bias on that, so you probably shouldn't extrapolate to all pre-civilization humans. For a group to remain largely uncontacted, it means they have to be remarkably insular, living somewhere other people don't want to be particularly bad (implying resource scarcity), and it definitely helps if they respond to attempts at contact with extreme violence.

Hunter-gatherers who survived to adulthood (and childbirth!) could expect to live to their mid 60's to early 70's. The big wins that modern medicine have gotten us are drastically decreasing infant/child mortality and deaths during childbirth. Compared to our ancestors, we've only really added 5-10 years to the life expectancy of elderly life. Largely unrelated to modern medicine, deaths by misadventure are reduced living in civilization, and then even moreso when you've got a large portion of the population not working in dangerous manual labor roles.

Level 5 is a pretty massive difficulty spike. Not sure if there's tech that I'm missing (it seems like 3 and 4 pretty strongly encourage double hits), or if I'm just bad.

You can do E2E encryption for organizations, you just establish all conversations as at least 3-way conversations: the two members of the org, and the org itself. You let the server refuse to host any conversation it isn't privy to, and then apps that support organization mode automatically add the org listener, and users using third-party clients can add it manually.

Definitely my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies. I've got a special place for the wild tone shift between the murder and the comic relief scene that follows in particular, as the rather temporary release of the tension that had been building for the prior act is incredible. In my AP Literature class, we had to perform a scene or so from a Shakespeare play of our choosing, but thankfully the only injury during our performance was somewhat intentional. After two weeks of trying and failing to get the girl playing Lady Macbeth to pull off a convincing stage slap, I told her to just give me her best shot the day of. Turns out this 4'10", 90 lb soaking wet fury had a heck of an arm, and thus I ended up finishing up my lines scrubbing my hands while seeing stars.

Surely at any point after "Make the "Add to Cart" button blue", it'd be faster to just do it yourself: "grep -r "Add to Cart", insert "addToCart" as a class to the html element, then crack open style.css to stick "button.addToCart {background-color: blue}"

I'm counting maybe 80 keystrokes? That's shorter than your second prompt.

This idea generalizes. Large Language Models are poorly suited for tasks that we have already purpose-built systems to be easy for humans to use. The easiest way to tell your website that you want a button to look a certain way is to update the code. If you know exactly how you want something done, we have developed an incredibly efficient way to tell computers how something should be done: it's called source code.

LLMs work best when they're handed tasks that you don't want to figure out how to do.

That's not why East Germany's universal child care was dismantled at all. East Germany's universal child care was dismantled after unification because West Germany didn't want to pay for it, and former East Germany couldn't. It was one of the most popular programs East Germany had, and was a source of quite a bit of consternation when it was taken away.

IMO, the bigger issue is all the things copyright covers. I don't think there's a particularly damning public interest in being able to publish an author's book without paying them. For art preservation reasons, the copyright limit shouldn't be indefinite, but IMO as long as somebody's around to claim ownership, and offer a legitimate means of obtaining access to a work of art, it's not a big deal for them to have a monopoly on such.

But copyright covers a lot more than just the right to produce copies of a specific work. The monopoly on derivative works serves the public significantly less. IMO, this one should taper off pretty rapidly. Maybe 20 years as is, then another 20 where you lose the ability decide who can or can't use your work, but they still owe you royalties.

Then there's the clusterfuck that is software. With how rapidly the world around software changes, its protections should be substantially shorter. For derivative works of source code, I'd pitch skipping the complete monopoly step entirely. You get a decade or two where people using your software owe you royalties unless you say otherwise, then nothing.

"Oh nooooo, my boring, ugly alleyway isn't ugly anymore".

IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay.

The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot.

In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.

It's not an excuse, but we hanged the guys giving the orders, too.

IMO, this whole case has a smell of politically motivated prosecution. The fact that the mom worked for Senator Jill Holtzman Vogel that pushed Virginia's free-range child law, which the judge allowed the prosecution to present a wild legal theory in direct contradiction to is just rather convenient.

It's far from improbable that a family court judge would have a bone to pick. Law enforcement gets a weird lens about public safety because of selection bias.

You can waive your right to a jury trial, and it's sometimes a good idea in cases where either A) you're definitely guilty, and the trial is mostly going to be about sentencing or B) your defense is more complicated than "I didn't do the thing", because jurors are not good at making decisions based on complexities of the law.

Additionally, you don't have the right to a jury trial for minor offenses that carry a maximum sentence of less than 6 months in prison. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor in Virginia carries a maximum 12 months, but to my understanding it is possible for the prosecution to waive any greater sentencing in order to avoid a jury trial.

I recall going to a carpet/tapestry shop in Turkey where, as we enjoyed the ever-present sales-pitch tea, the owner showed us his wares. After the 5 grand mark, he just stopped listing prices. For the final assortment, he brought out some exquisite silk tapestries about the size of welcome mats. He joking clarified that these were tapestries, to be hung on walls. If you bought one without having a wall to hang one on, he'd be happy to fly out and build you one.

So, this kind of thing happens all the time, and there's the Public Suffix List for exactly this problem.

There would be no issue at all if Verisign, or maybe Global Name Registry, decided to stick to the 3rd level registrations exclusively. Problem is, the chucklefucks over there decided it was a good idea to also hand out 2nd level registrations. Those 2nd level registrations outnumber the 3rd level registrations by an order of magnitude, so the PSL decided to just let joe.smith.name and john.smith.name share cookies. Which, IMO, was not a good decision, but it is what it is.

Capitalism only functions when you have people willing and able to buy your stuff, a state that protects fair dealings, and maintains a peaceful public order. It a luxury maintained by having a safe, stable society. Imagine trying to run a business in a world where the workers can just decide to cut you out of your investments, and then you have to hire PMCs to retake your factory, but then the PMCs renege on your contract and decide to run the business themselves. A society where you need to build your own roads, spread your own pro-business propaganda, and lack any recourse when your suppliers decide to take your money and run.

Fascism is Capitalism's immune response. Under stress, whether real or imagined, the rich and thus powerful begin dismantling the very systems that made them that way, gambling that their existing positions of influence will ensure their own survival (whether economic or literal).

Congrats on rediscovering Anarchism from first principles. Hierarchy begets hierarchy. As long you have a society where some people can coerce others into acting for the master's benefit and against their own, you end up on a ratchet. Power accumulates, leading to more coercion, leading to more power. Such systems select for individuals who are the most feverishly driven to amass power at any cost and put them in the position to seize more.

KeypassXC was threatened with blacklisting for deigning to let users access their private keys. Passkey Consortium lackeys will try and reassure you that you have control over your keys, but they are lying through their teeth.

The elevator pitch for passkeys is okay. A bit more complexity than we should be pushing non-technical users, but fine. A deeper dive into the the actual implementation reveals that the whole thing is a massive vendor lock-in hell-hole, pushed by megacorps who want nothing short of complete domination of your life.

First off, sites are extremely pushy about replacing your perfectly good password with a passkey, but then they hide the process for adding additional passkeys, if they offer it all, deep in the settings somewhere. Guess what? That means people locking themselves out of their accounts. All the time. Sites should not be able to choose to only accept 1 passkey. The process of making multiple keys should have been entirely client side. It's nothing short of malpractice to coerce users into setting up exactly 1 passkey.

Second off, the villains in the consortium decided that sites should be able to discriminate about what vaults they want to accept. This is a massive recipe for vendor lock in, and it's already been wielded as cudgel against KeypassXC for having the audacity to let users access their own keys, by threatening to add them to a blacklist. Sites ought to have ZERO say over what vault I use. If I want my vault to be a powershell script with a bunch of hard-coded values, that should have been my prerogative. Instead, you're trusting a bunch of oligopolic assholes to deign your vault acceptable.

It is much, much, much easier for non-technical people to understand the concept of "don't give strangers your passwords" than it is to get them to understand that by giving into the nagging prompts that their email is showing them every single time they log in, they've effectively locked themselves into only ever logging into their email on this computer.

Don't use passkeys, make sure your less-technical peers understand the danger of passkeys, and don't let the holier-than-thou, patronizing ghouls of the consortium spread their propaganda unopposed.

The California version of "age verification" IS parental controls. There is no actual verification happening. The OS is required to have an age associated with a user, declared, but not proven in any way, at setup. That value is then accessible to handle age gating.

Don't try to deflect blame from the irredeemably evil fucks over at the Chrome team, who are sitting in their dark lair rubbing their hands together, scheming about how they can fuck the user over today. They are always to blame.

gorhill made the reasonable move of not updating in-place because the new version is strictly inferior and you don't just make a massive downgrade like that without the opportunity to explain it to people.

The free version got it's entire UI changed, matching the Steam version, just with ASCII graphics. Obviously you can still play old versions, but if you want to play with all the new features, you can't go full keyboard anymore.

You might really enjoy Caravaneer 2 (the original was a flash game, RIP, but the sequel requires no knowledge of the original). Whole game is traveling around a wasteland, hauling trade goods between towns that have their own industries, and thus varying supply and demand for various goods.