OkayPhysicist

The fundamental problem with non-profit executive pay is that they earn their keep. Even more directly than CEOs in a for-profit space. The CEO of a non-profit has approximately one job: convince rich people to give the non-profit large amounts of money. It turns out, rich people know other rich people. And rich people who know how to convince other rich people to give them large amounts of money are a scarce resource, that non-profits squabble over.

So you've got a scarce labor pool, with expensive lifestyles, and a very directly obvious ROI. That alone is a recipe for high salaries. Combine that with the inflation that comes from the fact that for-profit executives get to hide a huge portion of their compensation as stock, whereas non-profits pretty much exclusively offer salary, and you end up with apparently bloated non-profit executive salaries.

I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas.

When did that happen? IMO, it's pretty clear the Chompsky school is at least partially correct in that we have biological hardware for grammatical language. So we've probably had language as long as we've been homo sapiens. Neanderthals probably spoke, too. But what about Homo Erectus? Australopithecus?

It's not the entire purpose of the loyalty program. The other reason (possibly the bigger reason) is simple price discrimination. McDonald's found that there are two distinct groups of customers: habitual fast food eaters, who go to their restaurants on a very regular basis, and opportunistic fast food eaters, who grab some fast food once in a blue moon because they want something fast.

They found, perhaps counterintuitively, that the opportunistic customers are vastly less price sensitive than the habitual customers. The solution was a somewhat involved loyalty program, which is deliberately enough effort to set up to weed out the sporadic customers from using it. Now, they can charge the less-price sensitive one price, and their more price sensitive customers a different, lower price. As an added bonus, habitual customers are probably more susceptible to advertising/prompting.

The really cool thing about local politicians is that unlike higher levels of government, they tend to actually live locally. Means you can pretty easily coordinate things like pleasant sit-down conversations, or shouting obscenities at them while they're trying to do their grocery shopping.

Malort improves a lot with a little airing out. Straight out of the bottle and into a shot glass tastes like poison, but if you leave it in a glass, maybe giving it a few swirls for a bit while doing something else (like trying to convince someone to try it for the first time), it tempers out quite a bit, and, while still bitter, becomes a drink that at least sometimes can be enjoyed.

They're copying a policy MIT has had for decades. Last I checked, MIT is still in the running for the best regarded university in the world.

> giving you time to adjust to factors like increased workloads and variations in academic preparation and teaching methods.

> curb a mental health crisis

In this context, both have the exact same meaning, of "stop freshmen who are used to overachieving their entire lives from taking a header off the tallest buildings on campus because they're not used to being less than the top 5% at everything"

I got a couple of these as a kid, handed down from my parents. Quite a bit of fun to play around with. I do remember getting a snap-together circuit which was new, but it just didn't have all the cool bits and the fun little springs of the hand-me-downs.

A core point of the article is that the vast majority of the world is filled with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills, but that you shouldn't inform your opinion of your own correctness based on that fact.

Maybe, being exceptionally generous, you could posit that any given individual only is informed enough about some small subset of things that they hold opinions about. But in my experience, "believing you should have good reasons for the beliefs you hold" is a pretty all-or-nothing affair. Some people will have well-thought out justifications for pretty much any belief they hold, more will have no justification for any belief the hold. It's pretty well-correlated with intelligence, which is backed up by studies that have found that more intelligent people are better at coming up with justifications for their actions. It's not unreasonable to assume that carries over to beliefs.

The core takeaway is to ignore the drooling masses that disagree with you (or agree with you!). Their beliefs have no correlation with truth, and thus do not provide additional evidence for nor against a given belief. You should only adjust your priors based on interactions with people who actually know what they're talking about.

Even better than rolling is a suit fold. I inherited one, and only got around to using it years later when I needed to fly in to a buddy's wedding with a suit. Ever since, it's my go-to piece of luggage. It's small enough to fit in a seat well in a pinch, it's light and portable enough to sling over your shoulder for a multi-leg public transit journey, and your clothes don't need any ironing to look immaculate when you get to your destination.

The US industry players are unconcerned. Mistral wouldn't be stupid enough to use this patent against them, because they know damn well they'd lose, and then have their patent invalidated. No, more likely Mistral is planning on using this patent as a cudgel against small start-ups and open-weight models, who don't have the resources to fight back effectively. Which is good for Anthropic/"Open"AI.

In the US, the patent office almost always grants patents as long as the correct process is followed. They don't really concern themselves with whether a patent could be successfully challenged, they just care about whether the the application is shaped like a patent. They leave it to the courts to invalidate all the bad patents they approve. It's pretty terrible: the very least they could do is ask a random dude in the relevant industry whether there's anything novel there at all, and they don't even do that.

A healthy social life consists of having people at various degrees of familiarity, who can move up and down closeness spectrum.

You start with setting specific relationships. Your gym buddies, your work buddies, that guy who's always at the bar you go to. For most people, their longest lived friendships started as school friends, or their parents' friends' kids. IMO, most people are able to figure this type of socializing out.

The next step up in familiarity involves building a relationship that is not fixed to a particular setting. You take a setting-specific friend, and invite them to something else. The easy way is the sort of thing where the place/timing is adjacent. You go, "Hey, gym-buddy, want to grab dinner after our workout? I've heard about this new Ethopian-Italian fusion place and I've been meaning to go". Once you reach that level of repoire, you start inviting them to things that are not immediately adjacent, like "yo, ACDC is going to be in town on the 20th, want to see 'em?". IMO, this is the step people fail at. They never make the step of inviting people to shit, and then end up with a bunch of work friends that they never see again after job hopping.

Then you make sure to see them in social settings at least every other month or so, and bam, friends. Then you start introducing your friends to each other, so that you end up nucleating a friend group. That makes it much easier to plan things, because you don't need to say "when is everyone free", you just make plans and some subset of people show up. Ideally you keep this up by establishing some sort of regular gathering, where inviting your other friends is encouraged. This lets you meet your friends' friends, which will expand your social life further. Sometimes multiple friend groups will merge, which again adds a bunch of people to your 1 degree and 2 degrees of removal set.

Beyond that basic process, the only key tips are 1) alcohol helps, there's a reason it's been the social lubricant of choice since the foundation of civilization. 2) It's okay that not everybody you ever interact with ends up a close friend. Knowing people helps you get to know more people. 3) Relationships are built on mutual utility. Most friendships exist because the people involved find spending time with the others more enjoyable than spending time alone. You can tip the scales in your favor on that by being enjoyable to spend time with. You tip the scales even further by being likely to say "yes" when invited to stuff. People don't like the feeling of being rejected, so someone who will routinely be down to hang when invited will get invited to hang a lot more than someone who is more picky. Don't agree to stuff where you'll be miserable, but if the options are a quiet night at home and a mediocre night of bowling with your friends, go with the bowling.

Why is this so, so common? They're subdomains. They're free. It's not hitting anybody's budget to publish a new DNS entry. If someone has permission to publish anything in your name, they probably should be able to go make themselves a subdomain.

None of this required Javascript. At all. The same potential attack could have been done with good ol' forms. Sure, you think you're signing into "BigBensSuperStore.com", but you're actually handing your credentials right over to "BigBensSuperStore.net".

Whenever the "tens of millions killed by communism" number gets trotted out, it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism. Which is fine, but it means you need to go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means (not to mention making per-capita adjustments) as well for a fair point of comparison.

Every person who died of preventable illness because they couldn't afford healthcare? Death by capitalism. Every dude who puts a bullet in their head because of financial strain? Death by capitalism. Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food (the U.K., large swathes of Africa).

Numbers are meaningless when you don't put them in context.

A nuclear armed Iran would be fantastic for global stability. Right now, the only nuclear power in the Middle East is Israel, and they act like it, doing their warmongering and genocidal tendencies and all that.

A nuclear Iran and nuclear Israel would be in a mutually assured destruction stalemate, which would drastically increase Israel's perceived cost of fucking around with their neighbors.

You can do CRISPR in your kitchen. It's been possible practically as long as CRISPR has been a thing. It's not particularly difficult, to the point that my biggest counterpoint to the whole AI doomerism argument on the subject is that nobodies done it yet.

You don't need some genius AI to design a bioweapon, you need to do a bit of light reading on bioengineering. The fact that some mad scientist hasn't ended civilization is evidence of the fact that it's not some existential threat that justifies wild levels of government control.

Unfortunately, AI development is dominated by an even mix of 1) Machine God Cultists, 2) Morally Bankrupt Mercenaries. All three agree on the fact that "thou shalt have no gods before me", because it'll make them richer than sin, and allow them to shape the AI landscape in their image.

Users are habituated to clicking links (mostly from their email) as verification, too. QR codes get a weird amount of hate for something that basically amounts to a hyperlink you can transmit through meatspace.

Terseness is a significant advantage in pattern recognition. If you write a long, detailed breakdown of every step, not only are you spending a bunch of time writing, you're also obscuring the natural symmetries of the statement.

It's like saying "I never understood people who prefer to use functions instead of inlining everything". Adding a bunch of visual noise to a statement doesn't improve comprehension.

50% is a bit much. People do expect their hardware to just work. That means installing drivers and the like. And the act here is so egregious that I can't imagine being an LG engineer and living with the shame of being so incredibly despicable.

I'm disappointed with Microsoft, I'm incensed at LG.

And they suck. Everyone who's ever worn one knows they suck. If they're too big they completely kill all sensation, if they're too small they cut off circulation, leading to, you guessed it, total loss of sensation. Topped off with the fact that they fail during higher friction activities (you know, exactly the kind that drastically increase HIV transmission risk), they're never going to be an adequate solution, because there will always be people who'll risk it, because what's the point in having sex if you're not going to feel it anyway?

Most STDs we don't have vaccines for, and the ones that have survived to the modern day are the ones that can be good at hiding. Syphilis, for example, has the nasty habit of seemingly going away by itself, only to pop up again years later. Chlamydia and Gonorrhea can be asymptomatic.

The only reason we haven't eradicated TB is because we've failed massively in getting the vaccine to people in the poorer parts of the world. We could eliminate it just like we did smallpox, the only barrier is actually doing the damn thing. It is made more difficult by the fact that it has a rather long latent infection time, but again, could be solved by vaccinating everyone.

And the solution already exists, one that doesn't empower the government to do some truly heinous shit.

Every power you grant the government is another knife they'll eventually stab you in the back with. Maybe you like your current government, but what about the next one, and the one after that?

Instead, just use the tools you already have access to. I was not opposed when California mandated that applications add parental controls, that's fine. If parents want to restrict their children's internet access, there's a continium there ranging from "prudent parenting" to "child abuse", but that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis. I am, however, rabidly against the state requiring you to dox yourself every time you log into a website, because inconceivably lazy parents can't figure out how to use the parental tools that they already have.

There are also fascists screaming at the government to do other wildly illegal stuff. The lousy parents begging the government to "tread on me" would get wildly better results by spending less time trying to create an authoritarian state and more time with their kids they claim to care so much about.

They're children. They have the internet access you give them. This isn't some unsolveable problem that needs government intervention, my parents were setting up filters so long ago that they're grandparents now.

The same thing you'd do with a doctor with a penchant for harming their patients. Strip their license.

Couldn't any exploit possible via that pathway also be executed based on a link? I don't see how a QR code makes the situation any worse.

There isn't really a direct point of comparison in the US, because by and large the US is much more loosely attached to the concept of having a specific "Our culture" that others are expected to assimilate to. Rather, US culture is more of an admixture of whoever happens to be in an area. That isn't to say that it's all peaches and roses, but our racism tends towards "this group is intrinsically worse than mine" rather than "this group is trying to conquer our homeland".

This plays out with things like US culture being pretty well tolerant of ethnic enclaves (Chinatowns, Little Italies, Solvang, etc) compared to what I've seen in my travels abroad, while preferring to bulldoze those enclaves when a new freeway needs to be built, and foods emblematic of certain areas being Flanderized versions of various foreign cuisines (Take a look at California's burritos, or a Chicago style pizza, or a New York style pizza).

Post-crypto, the GPU manufacturers took the proactive move to use VRAM to segment the market for the purpose of price discrimination. Sure, data centers will pay vastly more for GPUs, but Nvidia knows that the PC market is steady and reliable. They could get the best of both worlds by kneecapping their consumer cards to tiny amounts of RAM, to dissuade the cloud providers from scooping up all the consumer cards, and then charging the two segments wildly different amounts for what amounts to the same hardware (back when the cost of RAM was negligible)

They basically are. Waymo's basically spreading as fast as they can 1) verify they can drive safely in the local conditions (SF has fog, but no snow or ice), 2) work with local governments to set up a "what happens when a cop pulls over a Waymo" procedure.