OkayPhysicist

You've described all social phenomena. Just because something is socially constructed (i.e., exists only through other's belief in it, e.g., Tinkerbell logic), doesn't mean that the widespread belief in that thing isn't powerful in that it can effect concrete conditions.

Money is socially constructed, in that if everyone decided money was worthless tomorrow then it would be. But today, I still need money to eat, or have housing. The Law and The State are socially constructed, in that if they were not generally accepted by the masses they could not perpetuate, yet if I break the law today I quite likely will be violently thrown in prison.

There is a difference between acknowledging that something exists and granting it power over you. I would be doing myself a disservice if I actively ignored the existence of religion, for example, because even if I reject the notion that God exists, plenty of other people I interact with will not. And their belief in that fixed idea will affect their perception of the world, myself, and my actions.

I used extreme examples because I was challenging the assertion that "culture" was an acceptable excuse for immoral behavior, not because I can't imagine mediocre families. The fact that damn near everyone reading it would agree that the examples I used were abhorrent was, in fact, the point: culture does not excuse abuse.

The second paragraph established that I think subjecting someone to constant surveillance is abuse, and why: it's an attack not just on their current autonomy, which is bad enough, but also their future autonomy, which I hold as categorically evil.

A justification for that belief, that attacking one's autonomy is a an attack on their person, used to be completely unnecessary in the kinds of circles that would happily associate with the label "Hacker". Sadly the libertarian (left and right) ideals that modern tech world were built on have crumbled under the weight of authoritarian influence.

This a lame cop out, and obviously flawed. There are parents that beat their kids for being gay. There are families that kill their kids for marrying the wrong person. There are families that teach their kids open bigotry. Those people are evil, and I will absolutely prescribe that they shouldn't be doing that.

Putting your kids in a panopticon is abusive. It denies them their autonomy, it cripples their social growth, and there simply is no justifying it with "but it's our culture".

An odd exception to that trend is dairy products (thanks to the hard work of various US Dairy Councils). Ice Cream, sold as "Ice Cream" in the United States, is vastly superior to most anything you'll find in the rest of the world.

10% milk fat (more exactly 1.6 lb per pre-mixed gallon, but that's simply a bizarre way of phrasing it), no more than half air by volume. 6-10% other dairy solids (lactose, whey).

Compare with the UK: at least 5% fat (no cows need be involved)

France requires 5% milkfat, Germany at least requires the 10% milk fat, but no further requirements.

Canada pretends to be at 10%, but if you add any flavoring at all that can go down to 8%.

There is no "adding HTML features" to Markdown. Markdown is a superset of HTML. You can simply put HTML tags (including script tags) in your Markdown.

Having your friends refuse to refer you and a professor out-right reject a request for letter of rec reeks of there being more to the story.

(More helpfully: when applying for job's you'd be called over-qualified for, just lie. Especially jobs that don't require a degree anyway, just leave it off the resume. Had to do that for a bit during the pandemic slump).

Where I live, marching band is exclusively a highschool thing, and that's the example that the comment I was replying to gave. So 14-18

Works great until your kid's the one that can't join their friends on, say, grabbing dinner after band practice, because they have no way of telling you "hey, change of plans".

If your kid can only participate in things that are planned well in advance, your kid is going to be missing out on ~80% of gatherings. Because everyone else is in the habit of making spontaneous plans, made possible by interconnectivity.

People can read textbooks on their own, but how many actually do? Even among the subset of the population that does have the drive to educate themselves, most will end up focusing on the immediately applicable, or at least immediately engaging.

You see this with Physics all the time. Even the people who are sufficiently motivated to try and teach themselves tend to neglect foundational knowledge (especially mathematics, but even stuff like Mechanics and E&M), try to jump into the advanced material (Quantum Quantum Strings Quantum Black Holes Quantum), and then fall into two camps: They either complain about how Physics using too much "jargon", or they read a bunch of "qualitative" pop-sci descriptions of the topic and then think they have an understanding of it.

At least with software, you can get pretty far just learning whatever tool is immediately useful to you, but fully self-taught developers still often end up with random holes in their knowledge.

The university I went to basically eliminated "B"s for pre-med and pre-law students, which made most courses effectively pass-fail: If you get an A, you move on, if you get a "C", you're encouraged to find a different career path. IMO, it's a reasonable response to an unreasonable system.

Likewise, they had a system where disciplinary records could be appealed at any time while you were at school, but they only held evidence for a year. So if you get caught drinking underage as a Sophomore, you could appeal as a Senior, argue that since there's no evidence that you committed the act it should be removed from your record, and win. Like the obfuscated pass-fail system, this was basically only for the students trying to get into Med/Law school, and IMO was a kind of underhanded way to working around an unreasonable standard.

The fact that they have an online unsubscribe option that's only available for California users is seriously scummy.

> (people writing dynamically typed languages eventually resort to type comments)

This has never been an issue in Elixir, because instead of a comment, you'd just improve the pattern matching in the function definition.

    def blah(%{students: [%{firstname: firstname, lastname: lastname}|[]], count: cnt}) when is_int(cnt):
      fullname = firstname <> lastname

Is a valid function declaration, which specifies that blah takes a dictionary that contains at least 2 keys, :count, who's value is an integer, and :students, who's value is a length-1 list who's first element is a dictionary that contains the keys :firstname and :lastname

In most other HTTP handlers I've ever used, event handling would be handled by API endpoints, which are trivial for the user to target directly just by going to the Network tab in their browser's developer console.

To clarify, when you say "random functions", do you mean arbitrary event handlers like "handle_event("my_event")", despite the intended UI not presenting a way to call that event at the moment? Or do you mean any function in the LiveView module?

The latter doesn't seem to be the case, and if it is would be alarming. The former is absolutely the intended behavior. The client can send events to the server, that's how the whole thing works. If certain events shouldn't be available at certain times, you need to check that server side, and that's going to be true in any http handler.

[1] https://phoenix-live-view.hexdocs.pm/security-model.html

There's a guide in the LiveView docs that walks you through the security model. To be clear, you need to always assume that the user can send you anything. That's a fact of any networked system: Clients need to be assumed to be completely under the control of an evil user, because at the end of the day it is impossible to know whether you're talking to the client you wrote, or some evil program written by an adversary. Any function that acts as a handler for an event/message can be called by the user, at any time. You have to use session/socket state to handle authorization.

How did it take a year to diagnose diabetes? Are there symptoms of Type 1 that aren't downstream of blood sugar? I, some chucklefuck with some first aid experience, can figure out if someone is hypo/hyperglycemic by smell.

Turkish isn't pronounced "Turkey-ish". It's just "turk-ish" as in, "of or relating to the ethnic group the 'Turks'". "Turkiyesh" (Turkish is perfectly phonetic, they don't play games with vowels combining to make all sorts of sounds like English) would be a different thing, being of or related to the country Turkiye.

IMO, the interconnection of the internet is heavily to blame for how divisive politics have gotten, but I offer a different method of action: Prior to the internet, most people only regularly interacted with people in a relatively limited cultural band. When venturing out of that cultural band, you largely came across people interacting on heightened levels of good behavior, because of in-person hospitality norms. We might have had assumptions based on stereotypes of other groups, where a Bay Area city slicker might think of the average Kentuckian as a bit backward perhaps a bit bigoted, and the Kentuckian might have imagined the Bay Area type as a bit pretentious, but any individual of the other group you happened to meet probably seemed fine.

The internet blew that illusion up. Rather than dispelling stereotypes, transparency confirmed them, to an even greater extent than everyone thought. Urban people got to see first hand that rural areas were full of deranged bigots who are perfectly primed to believe wild lies about foreigners eating people's pets, and the rural people saw that the urbanites really dismissed them out of hand as speed bumps on the path of progress. Paradoxically, both sides had been imagining that the political divide was smaller than it really was.

If sci-fi Pascal's wager applies, so does the original. Anybody who believes Pascal's wager should be dedicating themselves wildly to religion, in the chance that it saves from from eternal damnation. Hence, becoming a monk.

That's just Pascal's wager with a secular/cyberpunk reskin, and has all the same trappings. Why aren't you a monk?

Building off that idea, if the offset between the two spectrograms was based on the relative distance between the two mics (ideally 3), you could eliminate noises not coming from a certain point in space, e.g., the birdcage.

> "Literal CTRL+C, CTRL+V" is the only thing copyright has ever applied to

This is extremely false. Copyright additionally grants you exclusive control over the production and distribution of derivative works.

A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work".

A training set is just an anthology, and the training process is condensation. That makes the weights a derivative work of every work in the training set.

Now, there's a separate discussion to be had about whether that derivative work meets the criteria for fair use, but that's it's own tangent.

The way I phrase it: If you can't be assed to write it, there is zero reason for anyone to want to read it.

Businesses don't pay extra tax because they chose to met their needs at a greater-than-minimum cost. If my boss buys some reagents from Dave for $300 bucks instead of Bill's $200 offer, the company's not paying taxes based on a hypothetical $200 cost basis.

If we want to tax "luxury" expenses, we have excise taxes for that.

Their take on inheritance taxes is insane, but I tend to agree that income taxes are immoral. Corporations get taxed on profits: If OkayPhysicist, Inc. spends $200 to make $300, it would be taxed some fraction of $100. Individuals, on the other hand, get taxed on revenue. It doesn't matter if it costs me $4000 in rent, groceries, transportation, etc., to make $6000, I'm getting taxed on that full $6000.

Capital gains taxes, on the other hand, are completely moral, and should be much, much higher. Capital investment benefits enormously from the State protecting their property "rights" (you don't need to hire a private army to prevent the workers from just deciding to run your factory for their own benefit, that's what the cops are for), and at a minimum the state would be justified in collecting that dividend for itself. Bootlickers and profession bootlickers (i.e., economists) would complain that a high capital gains tax disincentives investment, but as long as the value of investment is positive, that is, outpacing inflation, it makes zero sense to let your money languish in a Scrooge McDuck pile rather than get some value out of it.

You missed the option to "lobby the government to tell Microsoft to straighten up and fly right". Microsoft is a corporation, a legal entity only created with the permission and grace of the State of Washington.

More companies need to make, for lack of a better term, "oaths" of what they won't do as a company. My pitch on it is to tie it to financial penalties the company agrees to pay, somewhere in the "enough to incentivize a significant portion of our user base to sue us" territory, such that it would be financial suicide to violate them.

They are either shockingly busy, or complete ghost towns, depending on how much power the anchor stores had. A lot of malls were kept afloat by the big department stores, and those are doing bad now that those stores are on the ropes. Like, really bad, think "less than 50% occupancy of stores, air conditioning being run at a bare minimum because it's too expensive" bad. Others (notably the ones that Westfield bought after their success with Valley Fair in San Jose) focused more on the "affordable luxuries" segment, with small stores selling specialized stuff, and are doing fine.

It's Texas. Being reasonable is not a prerequisite for winning elections. If anything, it's a handicap.

For the kinds of "public and infamous" crimes I'm talking about, the answer is almost always greed, either for fortune, power, or fame. There's no need to ask "Why did Nestle decide to kill a bunch of African children by giving away just enough formula stop mothers from being able to breastfeed?" or "Why did tobacco companies stand in front of congress and lie through their teeth about how non-addictive nicotine is?" or "Why did Nixon decide to pursue the war on drugs in order to disproportionately target his political opponents and minorities?". The answer is that in order to end up in the C-suite or board of directors of a megacorp, or the White House, you have to be one of the most madly greedy, power-lusting parasites in the world.

My compassion for my fellow man is why I suggest we wait for them to commit a crime before punishing such behavior.