cristianpascu

The _conclusion_ that the Universe is expanding is based on the long accepted premise that the Universe is _flat_. And this premise can not be proven or disproved unless we travel great distances to actually _observe_ if the Universe does, in fact, look the same from any point you look.

The Copernican principle is, indeed, attractive to the modern mind because its neutrality. But it's not neutral. It's just as loaded as any other principle, no matter how crazy it may sound today, philosophical, religious, or merely personal.

I reported an ad that was so obviously a deep fake and Facebook said there's nothing wrong with the ad. I guess AI is already favoring AI generated scams. :)

Seems there's a russian brand of chainsaws called Druzhba, that's where we got it.

“A plain .html file” - This made me chuckle. :)

Making music! :) That's something I love so much, I could be drowning in a see of AI generated music and still love music and do my own.

Just realized something while reading the article, about “spaced repetition”.

For a while now I had the impression of not learning anything new and also of loosing the interest of doing so. It sort of came back to me as I am in a sabbatical period now, which gave me some mental clarity and also more space-time to think about things more thoroughly.

But, here’s the thing: I have never stopped learning new things. I have been checking HN for many years, and been reading daily SW news for the past 20 years. Many things come to my attention in different shapes and they build up in abstraction and in my memory/understanding to a wider and wider scale. Flash cards that I’d manage and check regularly would have not had the same effect as constantly checking my existing knowledge against random new areas of reality.

I am happy about realizing this, as it’s somehow difficult for me to understand my actual place in the SW industry.

I believe the word “ordered” in the question caused the confusion for some of us humans and for the machine. It anticipates some information, that the events are ordered by their time stamps, but doesn’t yet provide the order.

I quit my job instead. If the schedule is randomly or unpredictably fragmented by meetings, being expected to also write high quality code is quite simply inhumane. It’s not you that should find tricks to save you from a burnout. It very much looks and sounds and it surely is a mess of a management.

Actually, not quite so. There's structure, otherwise it would be incomprehensible and people would not resonate so much with it.

William James said that philosophy “sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar.” The same is true of standup comedy. Simon Critchley has written that both ask us to “look at things as if you had just landed from another planet”. [1]

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/

One of most miserable type of mixed discourse. So many people a tricked into believing this because 1) they have empathy for sick people, relatives and friends. 2) it sounds reasonable that big companies are only after profits at any cost.

When in fact it's one unjustified statement that pretends to support another unjustified statement, with no direct connection between them. Example: Cancer (what type?) has a cure (What's the evidence for this?), BUT, and here's the misleading justification, BigPharma doesn't want you to know about it (What's the evidence for this?).

I can't even imagine how many people would have to be paid or killed to keep such a cure secret.

Life is not 'self replicating proteins', but rather self-replicating processes. And in those processes, hundreds of chemical components are involved in a dynamical manner, which requires both spacial (chemical formula) and time synchronization.

And as life complexity increases, so does the the complexity of the processes that make it possible. Humans are the result of a huge number of individual, albeit not all independent, events, each with a very low probability. Multiplying those probabilities, as it's required when determining the probability of occurrence of a sequence of independent events, yields numbers that are hard to event write down without special notations.

As I see it, the only way out is to postulate evolution based on other non-probabilistic evidence, and then to conclude that in spite of the low probability those events still happened.

I didn't say anything about proteins being random. But words of hundreds of letters, out of 23 possible letters, come in many, many, many combinations. All governed by laws of physics. Not to mention the many ways a protein could fold, not all ways being useful, but are still possible. The search space, as I said, is huge.

A billion years is a very long time if you wait in a railway station. But in milliseconds, for instance, as powers of 10 is a blink of an eye compared to the magnitude of the search space of configurations of a single protein.

If you assume that a storm put together a Boeing 707 randomly, and there are many storms in the Universe, then yes there will be a good chance for there being Boeings all over.

Not to creatroll the discussion, but the probability of occurrence for each individual independent event that led up to what is life on Earth, in each branch of the tree of life, on each evolutionary path, is so low that number of planets in the Universe multiplied by all the milliseconds in the history of the Universe will not get very far toward reasonable chances. Take, for instance, a protein of 100 aminoacids. 23^100 possibilities, to put it naively, yields a quite low probability. And there a many types of proteins needed for life.

IF one knows of any study that touches seriously on this topic, I'd happily want to know and be corrected!

All I can think about when reading post-modernists, with their critique narrative of western science and rational authority, is that they just want more sex. No surprise, since the most prominent post modernists are French. Kidding here and sort of not. What are you left with if you critique the West as a phallocracy, patriarchal oppression of women, and ALSO objective knowledge? Something like: "Let's get together and feel alright!"

But there's certainly hope that someday we'll be able to explain through physics how come we hope to explain hope and understanding through physics.

The 'scientific method' is mostly a pop-culture myth. Mostly used to discrediting whatever views one does not like. There is value in predictability, but one must understand its limits. It's one thing to work with electrons and planetary systems. It's easy to be cocky about how successful physics is. But that is far from covering the whole of reality. Our minds, whether you believe that means your brain or soul or both, are much more complex than the hydrogen atom.

It's one thing to appreciate what Richard Feynman contributed to physics, an another to understand his behaviour in striptease clubs. It's one thing to explain black holes and stuff, and another to analyze the correlation between IQ and success, BIG FIVE personality traits, disgust, political views and biases and what not.

And also "uncontrolled and unsustainable" living standards growth. When you have huge portions of world population wanting to live like in the west, and not only for basic stuff like hygiene and schooling. And meanwhile people are decrying that we're too many, too many people are born. Which basically translates to more women should take more pills. Children of men, the movie, comes to mind.

If they discuss ideas, they are intellectuals. A group, if there's a common idea that unites them, at least for now.

I think it's telling the fact that atheists and religious intellectuals are coming together for something.

Misrepresentation is another way to silence someone, since you're not making that real person viewes visible, but some fictional, and obviously bad views. Happens a lot with Peterson, being called alt-right and all that. So many people believe this and take it from media misrepresentation.

It's slightly harder to fill a whole newspaper page with non-nuanced text than it is to fill a tweet.

It's not only these that have learned to keep their mouth shut. I'm even skeptical that they do. Extreme positions are uncontrollable, they demand to be heard. The more moderate, the more nuanced a position is, harder it is to put it on card board and hide your face behind it. And by moderate, nowadays, we should understand anything that is not extreme left or right. There's a deep commonality, unconscious most of the time if not always, between those extremes. That's why they only think and act and hate as if only they exist. They and their enemies.

Have you ever considered things that men have to deal with and are not being able to put them in terms of 'being male in the X industry/community/field"?

This is not to minimize anything a woman has to go through, but let's, at least, not compare as if it's on equal terms. If we're able to talk about women issues at all, isn't that because women and men are different? Why compare it so easily and uni-dimensionally?

BTW, what about cases where a woman approaches a man about a technical matter, but with a _romantinc_ interest? Where's the real danger in that? We, as grown ups, should have the tools to dismiss politely romantic interests. It's the same case between men and men/women, as it is between women and women/men. It's part of life. The expression 'unwanted advances' is by far the craziest accusation one could make to a person. Man or woman.

I don't have the feeling I am a man. I am a man by the definition we all(used to) work with. It's not a word encompassing a set of feelings or doings. If one wishes to use the word "man" for something else, question is: why the same word? If someone with a vagina and breasts says she is a man, I have to ask: how do you know? I don't know what the man next to me feels like or thinks. I could not possibly identify as his way of being. Let alone a biological woman.

And seems that no one really cares about the theoretical issues we, transphobic people, have in accepting such views. We're just that. And problem is if our daughters or sons will come one day saying they're transgender, they will have no arguments, but just hurt feelings and the requirement to accept them as they are, or believe to be. We, as parents, may do so out of love. But others will not. And we, as parents, will have to accept the high risk of suicide for a view that has no sane arguments behind.

It's philosophically related. Very much related and of much more interest these days. Specially since transgender people have such high risk of mental illness and suicide, they and close ones need to be made aware and informed about theoretical issues regarding their beliefs. If they are served only the one-sided ideological views so not to hurt them emotionally, they are not really protected, but only encouraged to risk their lives in the hope the world will change by force and not by argument and debate.

I have once robbed by a Gypsy guy, right after I thought to myself "I should judge him". It was late in the night. He was backed up by an obviously non-gypsy guy. Needless to say, I've been more skeptical since then about interactions like these. BUT, it was not only he was gypsy. The whole situation screamed danger. That's where stereotypes are powerful and useful, for your own safety.

On the other hand, whenever people are casually talking about 'darker skinned faces', in Romania meaning gypsy, then we're talking about something else. These are the situations where people are just promoting a gratuitous sense of pride and superiority for its own sake.

He, and his wife, were executed so they don't talk. It was not the will of the people, but rather the ones surrounding him in the former regime, who subsequently took the power. Romania, I believe, is the only ex-communist country where the former ruler was executed.

Whatever the Holy Wikipedia says about the distinction, isn't it funny, not to say something else, that we use the same words for two/three concepts that are, supposedly, completely different and vary independently? I'm a male identifying as female expressing as male, aka sex:gender:gender-expression.

Because, you know, people were so dumb until social-constructivism landed on Earth like the Messiah no-one expected. And we need to be re-educated. Or else.

What baffles me most is the insistence that one can build any kind of objective distinction based on subjective experiences, that is, what one feels. We're all capable of sadness, joy, excitement, and what not. But we can not build any kind of categorization (read diversity) of people based on these concepts/states of mind. I don't identify as sad, although I'm sad from time to time. No one does. Companies can not be forced to hire more sad people, for the sake of diversity. Yet, now, it's compulsory to have more people hired because they report some sort of internal and inaccessible state of mind which they express using words used for categorizing people based on the shape of their genitalia.

There's this book, Aristotle at the Mountain of Saint-Michele, that has caused some controversy around the idea that only muslim scholars have preserved ancient greek knowledge.

https://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3732

It was funny to me to read about the people at fifty, at the peak of their carrier and with teenagers in their house. I am 36 and have both. The first one is debatable, but the second one is 15 years old. :) I hope it'll get better from now on.