WillDaSilva

I believe you mean more serialized. Episodic, defined as "containing or consisting of a series of loosely connected parts or events", is the opposite of what you mean.

Companies - specifically large public for-profit companies - are amoral entities solely concerned with maximizing their profits. That Facebook acts seemingly without any morals isn't all that surprising.

> I've never been that big of a hug person...

The graph has a rough average of about 20 distinct people per year. Maybe I'm the odd one out here, but that seems quite high.

If the goal is to increase the productivity of the employees, then what you want is for the employees to be trying harder. To do that you'll want to incentive trying hard, e.g. through bonuses. The main reason bonuses are awarded for achieving good outcomes instead of for trying hard is because the former is easier to measure. Intentionally rewarding the achievement of good outcomes (which is a matter of chance) instead of good efforts will lead to strife, as those who put in just as much work but weren't as lucky will feel cheated.

I think that would be great. If the artists are being paid enough to support them* and their craft, and they're being paid enough to help motivate others to become artists, then they shouldn't get any more money. That money would be better spent elsewhere.

* "support them" would also include leaving them with enough money to retire on after their career, if they live in a country where retirement savings are important to have, or otherwise are a strong motivating factor for those who are considering this as a career.

I find it interesting that the author is only considering optical media, and streaming media from a third party. If the only concern is about owning a copy of the content, then why not ditch the optical disks and go fully digital? If you set up your own cloud storage for them, you'll even get the benefit of being able to stream your media anywhere you have an internet connection. Plus with good data storage practices (e.g. protection from bitrot, off-site backups, etc.) your media will be safer when digitized than it could ever be when stored on optical disks.

Allowing users to assign different levels of trust to different nodes complicates things. If nothing else it requires that the user be able to accurately identify which node is which. This typically requires exchanging keys through a secure external service. I agree it's a worthwhile goal, but more work needs to be done to figure out how to avoid the problems found in systems like the PGP web of trust.

I believe they meant to say "my Dad used to recommend not removing mold from food".

This might be what they were referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...

"Gold can currently be manufactured in a nuclear reactor by the irradiation of either platinum or mercury"

Not much in the way of details, unfortunately. The sources might be a good place to look for more.

The point about minority views no longer being able to take over is a scary one. There has been a great amount of social progress in the past several decades, and that sort of progress wouldn't be possible under the effects of strong social cooling.

Getting a large amount of visual tearing on Firefox on Android on a fairly powerful phone.

Who thought that a countdown would be a good way to induce relaxation?

> no one reading the Bible is settling down for story time

Speak for yourself. Several atheists including myself read some of the Bible for our book club. In particular the wisdom literature has value as a fiction removed from the religious context. Beyond that, the Bible is the earliest work we have which exhibits several tropes, and western art has been heavily influenced by it.

Your comment is rather US centric. I doubt the attack on the WTC is a main factor in the decline of democracies across the world.

Based on the "Personal Life" section of the page it would seem they were non-binary, making "they/them/their" appropriate pronouns. Additional it states they were sometimes regarded as a trans woman, so to answer the grandparent comment's question, they were likely assigned male at birth.

Your suggestion to join a church doesn't really make sense unless you're proselytizing. If they don't believe in any religions, then they wouldn't join a church no matter how good the social benefits might be. If they do believe in some religion, they have probably already joined a church.

I imagine there is a typo, and they meant to say they are distinct. I can't make sense of the comment otherwise.

Our brains have lots of highly specific bits of hardware that corresponds to different parts of the body, or different tasks such as recognizing faces. Most of what our brains do isn't necessary to replicate to produce something which is, at least in some way, generally intelligent. Artificial neural networks are only trying to replicate a small subset of our brain's hardware, and relatively basic (albeit large) architectures like GPT-3 are doing this by becoming skilled at recognizing patterns, and extending them. Pattern recognition is an enormous part of our higher level (generalizable) thinking. It also means that things like our brains and GPT-3 are extremely efficient but lossy compression algorithms.

kdb+ is written in C, but q is (largely) written in k. One of the first things kdb+ does on startup is load the file `q.k`, which is a k file which defines the q language. The interpreter then switches from interpreting k to interpreting q.

Interestingly enough you can fairly easily program your own language (written in q/k) on top of that, and set the interpreter to evaluate that language by default. Kx offers a Python integration layer called EmbedPy which (among other things) exposes a Python evaluator as the "p" language in kdb+.

I'm not claiming that this is something that GPT-3 could ever accomplish, but I do believe there exists a middle ground between GPT-3 and full AGI that can produce creative works such as fiction novels.

This is exciting to see. In the start AIs will be used as assistants to human writers, but I imagine that in the future they'll progress to the point where they're able to write on their own with little to no human intervention. If programs can author books/screenplays/etc. for free, that's going to revolutionize the world of fiction. I don't think we need to get to the point of AGI to see bots that can hold their own against human authors.

The idea that we were "born this way" has never sat right with me for a number of reasons, so I'm glad to see this article call some attention to it. In particular, the insistence that we were "born this way" and thus our gender or sexual orientation cannot be changed is underlined by the idea that being queer is a negative thing. I see no inherent reason for that to be the case, and would prefer to live in a society that didn't really care what gender people identified as, nor what genders/sexes they're attracted to. What does it matter whether we were "born this way" or not? What's wrong with choosing to be this way?

n.b. as the article noted, we obviously can't change our gender and sexual orientation at will; I want to be clear that that's not what I'm claiming.

Plus a clear replacement exists: electric lawnmowers. People may argue that they're not as good, but they're certainly good enough for almost every case.

Don't get me wrong - I don't believe that the US "justice system" is at all concerned with rehabilitation. Giving 2 life sentences to a non violent drug offender is ridiculous.

I'd argue that if the intention is entirely to rehabilitate (and incapacitate if necessary) then a prison sentence would only incidentally be a punishment.

That is one of they many ways in which you can add money to a Mullvad account. You should try creating an account; it only takes one click.

This way of thinking presupposes that not being (highly) competent at whatever it is you're doing is losing (or will lead to losing) in some form. Maybe this is true in some environments, but I don't think it's generally true, or particularly valuable life advice.

Pretty fantastically. Despite not having a separate office I've found working from home to be a blessing. I feel less stressed when in the comfort of my home, and I can work on my own schedule. This results in me working when I feel like working, rather than when I happen to be at the office (which I don't have a great deal of control over because I carpool). I can exercise all throughout the day, which leads to me being more awake while working. No longer do I have to stress over what others will think of my lunches, or what I should wear to work that day. The time saved by not commuting is massive. Not having to leave my social cats home alone every work day is nice too. I hope I always have the option to work from home from now on.

I think you're confused about the meaning of "nutrient". Oils, or more generally fats/lipids, are macronutrients[1], as is the case with sugar and "highly processed flour". A diet with a variety of different foods (whether they come in boxes or are "processed" is irrelevant in general) and a good balance of macronutrients and micronutrients is healthy.

I'd say the largest public health issue related to this is that most people eat an overabundance of carbs. The next most important is that people don't eat a large enough variety of foods (or supplements) to get sufficient micronutrients.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrient

"Of course, as Gillham pointed out, negotiating and managing a protest can’t really work if the protest wasn’t organized ahead of time. That goes double, he said, if the topic of the protest is police brutality. It’s hard to negotiate with someone about the best way to demand they be fired."

This point is important. The police can't police themselves, and for a lasting solution to this problem to emerge there'll have to be major structural changes to the way police oversight and review is carried out.

I hope these protests are a turning point that'll lead to such reforms, but I suspect no significant changes will occur. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong.

This is a good overview of something that took me an annoyingly long time to learn. My personal preference is to keep things simple with pyenv, venv, and pip.

Tangentially related is the tool tox [1], which is often used to run a test suite inside of virtual environments created by venv, on multiple versions of Python managed by pyenv.

Now if only setuptools could work well without hackery...

[1]: https://tox.readthedocs.io/en/latest/