larnmar

In classic “Innovator’s Dilemma” style, Tesla spotted an opportunity to sell a technology slightly before it was ready for the mass market, by focusing on a small and undemanding (in price-performance terms) group of consumers that the big players couldn’t be bothered with.

Despite this, it’s (judging by cars) lower income people who tend to be the idiots driving recklessly on the streets. Being passed by a shitty Honda doing 120mph is common, being passed by a new luxury car doing the same is much rarer.

Why? Probably because rich people statistically tend to have better long term thinking and lower impulsivity, which is why they’re rich in the first place.

Why not “quantum privilege”?

For statistical purposes, the number of people whose sex and “gender” are not the same is negligible.

> Here’s the good news: you’re not an impostor

Some people are, though. Sometimes, “impostor syndrome” isn’t really a syndrome, but an appropriate way to feel when you’ve been Peter-Principled your way into a position that you’re not competent in.

I really just look forward to the day when my kid can be unsupervised in another part of the house without an appreciable probability of some stupid coin-swallowing, furniture-toppling or power plug licking death.

Sounds reasonable in cases of rape.

While I can see why someone might think that way, the problem is this: simulating quantum mechanical systems is much, much harder than simulating classical physics. From a simulator’s point of view, throwing in QM isn’t a simplification, it changes your simulation from basically linear scaling to a horrendous exponentially scaling nightmare.

Furthermore, quantum mechanics isn’t really an “optional extra” for our universe, it’s too important, eg none of the materials or chemicals you see around you make any sense without quantum mechanics.

I think a better social norm would be: don’t share candid video of strangers.

If your device happens to capture a video of someone doing something funny, and you don’t know the person so you can’t ask them for permission to post it ... just keep it to yourself.

Of course, but it’s also getting lost in the noise of what the parties themselves are doing.

For the benefit of anyone who expected that the article might actually answer the question posed in the headline, you can skip ahead to the final paragraph:

> So, really, how does he do it? As Richards said in an interview posted on YouTube, “I’m not sure there is a secret. It’s just a matter of learning the words.” All 178,691 of them.

It’s a reasonably interesting article otherwise, though, and worth the few minutes it takes to read if you’re interested in Scrabble.

As for how one man can stand so far above the competition, though, I’d suggest it’s mostly due to the sparsity of serious professional Scrabble players. And if it’s possible to be the world’s dominant Scrabble player and have lifetime earnings of only $210,000 in your late forties, it’s understandable why there aren’t that many people devoting their lives to professional Scrabble.

I suspect it’s going to become a massive shakedown racket over the next decade; groups will go to tech companies and allege their algorithms are racist/sexist/whatever, and keep complaining until paid to go away.

“Brut” (fr) and “Brute” (en) share the same Latin-via-Old-French etymology though, they’re related concepts demoting being untamed and simple (compare: “raw strength” vs “brute strength”)

Furthermore, “brutal” is also a word in French, meaning the same thing as it does in English.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that the Frenchmen who coined the phrase intended it to refer both to the rawness or the concrete and the brutality of the design, they can’t have been unaware of the associations.

Shadowbanning is reasonable and appropriate against bots, but a massive dick move when applied to humans.

I’ve also heard that this is a deliberate propaganda message being spread by the CCP though — claiming that the protests are really about economics rather than democracy.

That’s the great thing about democracy, though — you don’t have to march in the streets to effect change, you can simply vote for it.

A fairly silly article with a fairly silly thesis. There’s always protest movements going on somewhere; it would take a lot of statistics to convince me that 2019 is any kind of outlier.

And there’s nothing global about the current grab-bag of movements, they’re very much local issues.

You think $44K is a middle-class income?

Even when there’s nothing to suggest an election will be close, you predictably get a “polls tightening, anything could happen now!” narrative in the days before the election. I assume those stories get a lot more clicks.

It already did, in 2016.

Under what circumstances, apart from where you or a close relative has committed a crime, are you concerned that someone might identify you from your DNA?

Your DNA is 99.9% known anyway, because you’re a human. Only the remaining 0.1% varies between individuals.

Truck driving is not and has never been a middle-class occupation.

An infra-red sensor, as implemented in many public toilets, seems like a less error-prone solution to that problem.

Or a pedal.

Speaking as someone who has spent his fair share of both time and money going through the correct legal process to reside in the US, I am fully in favour of the vigorous enforcement of US immigration law, but... if they’re so often present there and have only managed to arrest 77 people in an entire year, it seems like the same law enforcement effort would be better spent elsewhere.

It would be trivially easy to arrest 77 illegals in a single day with a single raid on a single sketchy farm, or by trolling outside a couple of Home Depots.

It’s not even a population density issue, it’s just a bad planning issue. Where I live (in the middle ring of a large Australian city) we have density comparable to an American suburb, but I have several mini-downtowns within walking distance.

I did the maths a while ago; even if every house has a quarter-acre block (subtract actual street space from that to get a slightly smaller block) you can fit 4000 houses, about twelve thousand people, within a 1km radius of a mini-downtown point. Twelve thousand people is certainly enough to support a supermarket, a bunch of restaurants, cafes, specialty stores etc (think of what a town of twelve thousand people looks like). The only trick is actually zoning rows of shops in appropriate places.

Of course I still drive to the supermarket anyway, unless I’m only buying a couple of items. This isn’t an argument against cars, it’s just an argument that low(ish) density housing and walkability aren’t incompatible.

More broadly I think that Americans looking for solutions to their city-planning problems should look less at Europe (or god forbid, Asia) and more at Australia, since I think we’ve done a decent (though as always imperfect in implementation) job of combining European and American city planning virtues.

Is gab really a “cesspool”? I just looked at it for the first time. The way people talk about it I was expecting /pol/ squared, but the parts I could see without making an account seemed surprisingly normie, more reminiscent of instapundit than Stormfront.

I think censorship is no longer censorship when it happens purely on the client side, it’s just filtering. As long as the tweets all continue to exist out there somewhere, someone can write a client to display them.

This will, I predict, make a lot of people unhappy because “omg there are Nazi tweets on my blockchain” but personally I’m happy with it.

That’s the thing, I’m not really sure it does. Never-ending social media political flamewars increase engagement for a few people but drive others away.

Personally I deleted my twitter account and barely use Facebook any more for this reason. If there was a fun happy version of these networks that showed me stuff I wanted to see rather than stuff that annoys me, I’d use it.

Good move. Holding a conference in San Francisco these days is a pointless waste of money for attendees.

I also know that a certain large scientific society moved its annual west coast meeting from San Francisco to Phoenix about a decade ago, after a union dispute. Apparently a presenter plugged his own laptop in (or something similar) instead of waiting for Moscone staff to become available to do it for him — the union started a huge stink about it and the society decided San Francisco was no longer worth the trouble.