cmsonger

> Blind trust in science is no different from worshipping a religion or cult.

Let me translate this: "Blind trust in the best recommended knowledge science has at the current moment in time is no different from worshipping a religion or cult."

No. This is wrong.

Science's recommendation at any given time is based on assembly and analysis of evidence. It evolves over time in the presence of additional evidence.

Religion or cults do not.

OTOH, paying attention to what the "my uncle got COVID, spent a week in only pink lighting, and subsequently recovered!" most recent FB post in your feed is wrong. The internet mob is not following the scientific method. They are posting anecdotes. Those anecdotes are filtered by the mediums for ability to create attention in others; and then those are presented.

I am reminded of the somewhat grim "Facebook COVID researcher" joke: https://i.redd.it/ovumfo3f48ca1.jpg

> At some point, I went looking for an officially recommended list of OTC drugs for covid.

I think COVID is perhaps different than other health and medical topics. The key factor about COVID-19 is that 3 years ago we knew pretty much nothing other than: "People are going to the hospital, not thinking they are starved for oxygen, but are posting horrible O2 numbers. Vents keep them alive a while, but lots of them die."

Seems pretty obvious that "the longer medicine has had to explore something, the more medicine can separate the wheat from the chaff." And even then when incidence is low: Are you sure that exposing the patient to the 24 hour healing property of pink light saved them, or were they one of these folks who would pull through anyway.

Maybe worth a listen: https://radiolab.org/episodes/312245-rodney-versus-death

As to the first "citizen medic" hypothesis, I think this already is in place for lots of established conditions. Perhaps not to the degree it should be, but I can certainly know when to use an ice pack or a heating pad, when to take aspirin, and can go get CPR certified.

As to the "holistic view of heath" perhaps there was a mixed messaging opportunity, but at least here in the US it was hardly the worst missed messaging opportunity. They totally whiffed on masking messaging.

The internet is a fine place to exchange information on understood things. The internet is a horrible place to exchange information on poorly understood things that science is focusing on because the internet mob is not science minded and the mediums we use to have these discussions are monetized for attention. "We don't know yet" is not an interesting answer from the "company gets paid for attention" point of view.

I don't think the point is "family video." I think the point is "viral tik tok video." And it seems like we've been here before. Monetized entertainment is monetized entertainment.

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-have-to-sign-a-waiver-or-other-...

There's a reason that appearance releases are a thing.

I wonder how his health is and what life looks like to 94 year old Tom Lehrer. It's sad that people grow old and die. His must surely have been a fascinating life. I hope he's still having fun.

Kurt Vonnegut and Player Piano has a message for you.

Very similar except: :s/40s/50s/ :s/is a horror show best avoided/is fun/ :$ A 8. Really love what I'm doing.

I thought so too. They did not have to be so generous.

"Social media isn't inherently bad, if people across the world can learn how to self-curate." Is equivalent to "Social media is bad" IMO.

There are always going to be "enough" people who can't self-curate that social media will be harmful.

Agreed. The US has some weird priorities in my estimation.

I think there are two issues you don't address. Death is final. There's no later exoneration if you've killed someone and it seems pretty clear that this has happened. State and federal governments have executed innocent people.

The second is that content of this article itself. The author does not sound thrilled to be in solitary; but the author also seems to have found meaning in life. Do you think that the author would choose death over the life he has forged for himself? I don't think so.

Another poster already covered a number of the benefits. I'll add another: Never going to the gas station. If you've got overnight charging, your car is ready to go every morning. My wife and I bought an EV about 5 years ago. I go to the gas station about twice a year for our gas car that we use once in a while.

And to reprise the other poster's point: If you are a car guy (I'm a car guy) you've not lived until you've stomped a Tesla's accelerator while going straight up a mountain. (Not sure about Taycan, think they have multiple gears.) OMGWTF, the direct drive surges the car uphill. No lag. No gear shift. It's like driving a 5 speed manual if you only had to say in one gear for the whole drive but I've never been in a sports car with a 5 speed manual and gotten to use just one gear up a mountain.

EVs might be environmentally conscious. But don't miss the real headline -- they are spectacular cars to own. Best car I've had. (Sadly all their current offerings are moronic. Yoke? WTF. No display behind the wheel? WTF. I'd not buy a Tesla now because of unforced errors on behalf of Tesla.)

Until Meta gives up on the Metaverse, I don't think we will see a cull that's WFH oriented. Surely if Meta can't find a way to work in the Metaverse, no one ever will.

Now other big companies that continue to invest in HQs: I wonder.

I could not agree with this more.

It feels like trust fund babies are pretty much everything that the US is not supposed to be about. Whenever I'm in a mood to discuss politics and someone brings up the "death tax" I say something like: "I agree, the world absolutely needs more people like Paris Hilton." (Not to pick on Paris Hilton, but I think that she's a visible example that people resonate with.)

Ageism is a thing.

Deleted account years ago when the TOS gave them yet more latitude to share my data.

Have never once regretted it. Facebook: doing harm at scale.

Yep. This is exactly me:

> This is just lack of auto renew protections. Consumers are wise to this, and they’re not really canceling. I bet if you could turn off auto-renew they wouldn’t cancel.

In my mind: "If they are going to both make it hard to cancel, and charge me without prompting, then I am going to figure out how to cancel exactly right now and when it stops working, if I notice, then I'll go back and renew."

IMO, this is a byproduct of capitalism. Do you own Brother stock? (Don't even know if Brother is public.) If you own Brother stock, then you care about the stock price. I'm guessing Brother executives compensation is related to Brother stock price. Markets price in profit growth. Printing has long ago progressed to the point that further improvements are not needed for the human eye -- so Brother can hardly make more money by making a better printer.

It's why industries need to be regulated. A company run for shareholder value is going to maximize profits and externalize costs. This class of behavior is not at all unique to this product segment or this industry. You think this is annoying? Gonna be somewhere between interesting to horrifying to see what big tech does if the profit growth flags.

This seems right to me, though I will observe that if you joined an Elon Musk company 5 years ago, then you were joining a company whose head presented a very different public persona than he does now. It's an understandable situation that some folks ended up loving a company but finding the CEO's 2022 public persona objectionable and diminishing of the company.

Given the choice between "just leave" or "state my concerns about the company I believed in", I might do the latter. What does one have to lose in that case?

I have no opinion whether or not it's cheating. Feels like a definitional issue more than anything.

I work and interview for one of the FAANG's. I had a candidate tell me just the other day: "Oh, I've done this in another form." We went on, talked about some details that are not a part of the core algorithm but that I think are interesting to suss out things like: "Do they understand concurrency", "Do they understand good API design", etc and then we moved on.

As I was doing the writeup, I scored the person high on a measure that I rarely get a read from in technical interviews. I guess my point: I don't know if it's cheating and in no way shape or form feel judgy towards people who do what the author did. But when I've encountered people disclosing this, I have noted that.

Assuming for a second that the question was asked with legitimate intent: That's the line of reasoning that gets a lot of innocent people treated very very badly based on their socioeconomic status, color of their skin, religion, you name it.

Think of it this way: In 1,000,000 people of race blue, the crime rate is 0.01%. So of those million people: 10 are criminals. In 1,000,000 people of race purple, the crime rate is 0.03%. So 30 are criminals.

All kinds of horrible sounding statistics here: purple people are 3x more likely to be criminal. Purple people neighborhoods have 3x more crime. Purple people 3x more likely to be murderer, drug user, etc.

All of that misleads about the situation: for the most part both purple and blue people are law abiding and any given person you talk to is likely not a criminal.

Now there is a second order problem. (The one that the article is referencing). The truth is that among blue and purple the rate of criminals is much higher. Pretend it's +0.3 for each. So 0.04 and 0.06. But the enforcement of laws at each point in the system are subject to discretion of the enforcer. Does the cop pull you over? Does the cop let you off? Does the prosecutor indict? Does the system give you bail?

Because of focus on "where would they find the most amount of criminal activity?" we are now creating a self fulfilling prophecy where laws are selectively more greatly enforced against purple.

Given your aspirations, the choice is MIT. The connections and pedigree will matter when you go to try to start a company. Also clear that you are entering a field where the cost of eduction is not really going to matter that much. You are going to make plenty of money to pay back student loans.

The one proviso: you gotta love the field. A worst case pass is to get the expensive education and to learn that you don't love it. That's a bad outcome. But assuming that you've had enough experience with open source that you feel the calling: MIT.

Count me with the "more healthy" crowd. Work from home has made it much easier to keep a healthy lifestyle. Eating at home with food I cook. No time commuting to work. No temptation to go out to some restaurant for tasty, but horrible for me, food and a couple of cocktails.

I have a good deal of empathy for those who don't get to work from home, but I'm the opposite of "healthy habits got worse."

Due to past behavior and FB's justification of that behavior, I quit using the company's services and products years ago. I remain unwilling to be a FB user of any kind.

Good. Keep going. Facebook, doing harm at scale.

> on a VLAN with other white goods, outbound connections to certain domains only

...

That probably says what needs to be said about smart appliances. There's a reason that's the right choice. This same reason is the reason smart appliances are a bad idea.

Am curious: When the washer is past security updates, are you going to leave it on the VLAN? Would you do that if the washer had a camera or microphone?

Cool! Next time I'm opening up excel, I'll give it a look.

Well, I'm not a VBA / excel expert -- but my neophyte view is that VBA is used to add code to excel, which is great -- but it's not the same as every single spread sheet is automatically creating a "this VBA is the equivalent of your spread sheet."

Again, not an expert. I'd expect I've never written one line of VBA. (Yay for me!)

IMO this really asks the question: Why is there not a code view for an excel spreadsheet?

I get that some of the basic operations probably create expressions that are too wordy / very "specific data" intensive. That is, if you took the first step and just did your best to create that code view it would have a lot of stuff conditional on specific things.

But it's the next step that gets interesting. Now that you've got it, in what ways can the visual UI change to have the code view create tighter expressions. Now that you've got this view, how can it become super handy for doing things that today are clunky?

IMO there's an interesting "no-code" path in there somewhere and there's also an interesting "make spreadsheet re-use more powerful." Or maybe not, what do I look like, an Excel engineer? Ha!

This is a thoughtful and insightful reply. Thank you.

100% that's the most important claim in the article. A few times a month I open the browser and see some "world changing battery technology" being talked about. Here we are however many years later and the world has not changed. The phones I can buy have LI batteries, the EVs I can buy have LI batteries, the few utility scale battery packs are LI batteries.

Seems like having a technology that crosses the "publish revolutionary battery tech in the press" hurdle is dramatically lower than the "actually make a battery at product scale for a profit" hurdle, and not all of the former will make the latter. Here's hoping these folks do what they say on their production part, because I'm pretty desensitized to the first part of their claim.

> Unfortunately it is also used by all presidents to pardon their buddies.

I agree, but that's the boolean. There's probably a reasonable float or int description that allows a more nuanced comparison of exactly how much any president did this.