gmane

I think you miss how sophisticated some game server code is. Taking fighting games for example: they have entire processes to have both clients predict what the other client will do, and then have the server arbitrate the different client solutions into a "fair" result based on latency, player inputs, etc. There are problems that game servers solve that could have applications in other areas, and have a lot of value.

Spoken like someone who has never had to deal with business critical production environments.

I have questions here, a lot of lobbying is done by:

a) trade organizations (we're all the onion farmers in Nebraska and want to make sure the Nebraska legislature doesn't pass laws that negatively impact us and promote laws that help us)

and

b) activist organizations (we're a coalition of organizations that protect water usage in the Mississippi delta and want to pass laws that promote conservation in those states)

Those groups often choose to retain professional lobbyists but will also send groups of interested parties to lobby who are not professional lobbyists.

Do you also ban trade organizations and activist organizations in this case? Do you carve out exceptions for them and just ban the "freelance" lobbyists? Most lobbying is meeting with legislators and talking with them about issues, educating them. How do you ban that without making legislators effectively useless (or if you're cynical, even more useless)?

One of my favorite interview questions for senior positions is "Tell me about a decision you made that you would change in hindsight." Junior level people and people who are otherwise unfit for the role will try to give answers that minimize their responsibility or (worst case) have no examples. Senior level people will have an example where they can walk you through exactly how they messed up and what they would have done differently. Good senior level candidates examine their mistakes and are honest about them.

Commenting on my Epic from an LG Fridge.

I disagree with this interpretation of what I said. We HAVE evidence that time and gravity interact. It's actually more of a violation of Occam's Razor to suggest that time travel is somehow exempt from that interaction than to claim that yes, time travel should in someway be subject to the influence of gravity.

I'll give a half-baked counter to this: we know gravity impacts the flow of time through relativity. There is currently no evidence that time travel wouldn't be impacted by gravity in some way. Maybe the way time in time travel interacts with gravity protects you from this problem? Probably not, but it has just as much evidence to support it as your claim of time travel will dump you in empty space.

I would agree with you if this paper was citing... more papers. Since there are so few and one of the citations is a concurrence with the paper with actual data work, then it harms this paper.

Either the author didn't do a literature review before publishing, isn't well versed in the field, or chose not to cite works which may not agree with their results. Neither of which reflects well on the author.

Right, I was criticizing the approach. Edit: specifically the fact that the paper has no discussion of how the meta-analysis data was prepared, processed, or how they made sure it was complete.

Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34079693/

Edit: You can also click on his name in the original post (or the link above) and see all the papers in pubmed authored by him.

Edit 2: These two papers:

Veugelers PJ, Ekwaru JP. A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients. 2014;6(10):4472–4475. - PMC - PubMed Veugelers PJ, Ekwaru JP. A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients. 2014;6(10):4472–4475. - PMC - PubMed

and

Heaney R, Garland C, Baggerly C, French C, Gorham E. Letter to Veugelers, P.J. and Ekwaru, J.P., A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients 2014, 6, 4472-4475; doi:10.3390/nu6104472. Nutrients. 2015;7(3):1688–1690. - PMC - PubMed

This paper cites 10 other papers, two of which are essentially the same paper. The author also has additional papers claiming that Vitamin D helps prevent COVID mortality using a "ecological integrative approach." His papers also all seem to be lacking concrete meta-analysis and discussion of other approaches and clinical data.

Seems... like a quack.

That’s not even my argument though? I was very clear that specifically immediately post birth is a high risk time and that mandatory paternity tests at birth increase those risks with little to no benefit to anyone. I did not say anything about forcing a man to raise a child. You’re deliberately misreading my point to argue against a straw man.

That’s not even my argument though? I was very clear that specifically immediately post birth is a high risk time and that mandatory paternity tests at birth increase those risks with little to no benefit to anyone. I did not say anything about forcing a man to raise a child.

The internet is truly a wild place. You can say something like "We shouldn't do mandatory paternity tests at birth because they bring no benefit to the child" and someone responds with "So you're saying we shouldn't stop wife beaters?"

No bitch, that's a whole different sentence. What the fuck are you talking about.

I disagree here. Blood tests done at birth are done specifically for the benefit of the child (and with minimal risk to the child). A paternity test has no benefit for the child (it doesn't tell you who the father is, simply who the father isn't) and a ~1% risk of harm to the child.

The period immediately after birth is one of the most dangerous times for children, and we (should) specifically take action to protect them in a moment where they are at risk and have no agency. A paternity test would increase the risk of harm to the child (either through violence, deprivation, or neglect). We didn't even get to the subject of possible violence against the mother either, which is likely.

Sorry, the conclusion in the paper really underlies how poorly the results fit the evidence: "The resulting almost doubling in the age of the Universe and increasing the formation times by 1 order of magnitude has been a subject of concern and requires that the new model also explain some critical cosmological and astrophysical observations" [0]

Call me skeptical of the claims made.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1bc6#...

It feels like it might have been written by AI. The cadence of the text is really unnatural.

Hedging risk. This is often a hard concept for people to grasp: there is value to hedging risk. It (generally) cannot be turned into money. There is extrinsic value to reducing risk.

It can also be survivorship bias: "we never used seat belts and we were fine" can only be said by someone alive.

Not OP, but I had a boss who specifically bought ambidextrous mice and would switch hands every hour (or so).

I'm of the opinion that there's a reason why a subset (myself included) of people who when initially exposed to infinitesimals, and specifically the part where you start just disregarding terms, reject them (it's one of the oldest arguments related to calculus! [0]). Those geometric arguments are essentially less rigorous versions of limits! And that lack of rigor hurts those arguments until you have a rigorous justification for them (that didn't appear until the 1960's if my memory is right).

I've come around to infinitesimals, but mostly through exposure to the large hyper-reals. (for context for someone who doesn't know, the idea is to define a number, k which is greater than all real numbers. If you take 1/k, you have a very small number and you can fit an infinite number of 1/k's between 0 and the "next" real number. This concept is what sold me on infinitesimals.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Analyst

I'll add on to your point: moving up the IC ladder is often slow because it takes more to both become an expert in a field and to prove it to your leadership. Each step up the IC ladder is harder to actually obtain those skills, and harder to prove that you have obtained those skills to management.

On the flip side, the management ladder is more delivery focused (though not exclusively): are you getting your team to get their work done? It's somewhat easier to demonstrate success on the management side, and because you're leading a team, it's possible (though not necessarily true in most cases) for a manager to get promoted on the strength of their team and not their ability as a manager.

I thought this as well, but I did a little research before responding, and it looks like even though this is broadly true, people still weren't living particularly long before the modern era. For example, in Ancient Greece, a man who lived to 15 would expect to live to 37-41 years, in Rome if a man made it to 20 they could expect to live to 60, in the late medieval if you made it to 25 you could expect to live to ~48 [0]. You still need to make it to 60 to be a great grandparent, assuming you and your kids are having kids at ~15 years of age (edit: and that might be a friendly assumption given how high infant mortality was).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

I feel this, during the shortage, we had an otherwise healthy baby but were advised to go on formula for a week to test for something. The process of finding formula and discovering that the formula we had was unsafe and was recalled was a nightmare. All the shelves were empty. I can only imagine how hard it was for people who couldn't "just" go back to breast milk.

You pretty much answered your own question: compared to the size of the coast, the amount of energy these wind farms capture is negligible. You might see a reduction of power if you built a dense farm up and down an entire coast, but even then, the ocean is big compared to these farms.

Edit to add: the Hornsea wind farm featured in this article is 2.5 GW and about 400 sq miles. [0]. The total energy capacity of existing generation assets is on the order of 7,500 GW [1]. Let's double that, so 15,000 GW, which would be about 2,400,000 sq miles. There's 1,015,756 linear miles of coast [2]. We know Hornsea is roughly square, so a 20 mile deep set of turbines doesn't interfere with each other, so that gives us ~20,000,000 sq miles of usable coast for wind, and again, if we double the existing electrical generation for the earth, we'd cover 2,400,000 sq miles. (obviously not all of that is usable, but we're talking orders of magnitude here) There's really no conceivable situation where we'd build enough wind farms to interfere with each other.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267358/world-installed-p...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean

I think a better way to think of this is breaking habits. While some people do an innate struggle staying on task, there's also a large portion of people who have built the habit of task switching and just need a tool to help them break that habit.

This isn't even the first time Cummins has been hit with the largest settlement for emissions controls defeat devices![0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20151002043823/http://www2.epa.g...

Then automakers can’t sell your information for fat stacks of cash.

I think that one is a direct result of people being pedants about the difference between effect and affect which made a lot of people try to avoid them completely.

On the contrary: I think you actually make a good argument for why we SHOULD have a Department of Butt Wiping with tenured professors who have spent their whole life time studying techniques of butt wiping.

If everyone does it (and often multiple times a day to boot) then there's actual material improvements to the human condition that could be identified and implemented. That improvement requires study, rigor, and people who stand to materially benefit for conducting that study. You'd generally end up in a university-like framework for that study (even private research is structured similar to university research, with some key differences).