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milesrout

185 karma · joined December 11, 2016

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milesrout··on Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans
It is also the consensus position for a lot of bad reasons though.

There is an assumption that belief in, or even reasonable agnosticism towards, any other theory can only be motivated by racism.

There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it, because they want to believe we are all more similar than we are different, etc.

Multiregional hypotheses are perfectly plausible. We have very limited information one way or another. Out of Africa may be more likely but it is far from certain.

milesrout··on BYD builds fastest car
In what sense are domestic car manufacturers "important"? They're inefficient if they're being outcompeted by China.
milesrout··on The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh
Yes it says this in the article.
milesrout··on LandChad, a site dedicated to turning internet peasants into Internet Landlords
Landlords are an excellent thing, as anyone that cannot afford, or does not want, to simply buy a house could tell you.

Set up is a phrasal verb and omitting the space is incorrect, yes, but only an annoying pedant would point it out.

It recommends Debian and says:

>I make my guides on this site for Debian 11. If you use another OS, just know that your [mileage] may vary in terms of you might need to change some instructions here minorly.

If you were going to complain about bad grammar, that sentence is a much better target, and yet it is still quite easily understandable.

milesrout··on Treasury Announces Federal Govt Will Phase Out Paper Checks on September 30th
Don't be ridiculous. You don't need to be computer savvy to use electronic banking. Cheques haven't been used in most countries for over a decade and the only actual difference is that you get transferred the money immediately instead of banking a cheque.
milesrout··on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU
Great, now every operation has 300ms of latency. Kill me
milesrout··on Japan city drafts ordinance to cap smartphone use at 2 hours per day
School shootings are extremely rare. If you want to protect kids you will be much more effective if you work on pedestrian safety, or anything related to driving at all really.
milesrout··on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
None of what you said is true. The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court and moved to a different building (but otherwise essentially unchanged) in 2005 under Tony Blair's Labour government.
milesrout··on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?
There is a huge difference in the quality of workers in fast food. Some people are slow. They are inefficient. They let things burn, they count change slowly, they are clumsy. They can't multi-task.

It is cognitively simple for you, because you aren't thick. But for people of well-below average intelligence, flipping burgers and doing something else at the time is just not possible.

milesrout··on 2,500-year-old Siberian 'ice mummy' had intricate tattoos, imaging reveals
This is incredibly ignorant. The Church didn't kill anyone for being good at art, and in fact did more for the development of fine art than any other institution in human history.
milesrout··on .gitignore Is Inherently Sisyphean
No. IDE-specific ignore lists should go in $CONFIG/git or .git/info/exclude (or whatever the path is).

(git config --global core.excludesfile "$CONFIG/git/ignore")

.gitignore is committed to the repository and should be for files created by the repository that shouldn't appear in 'git status' like build/, etc.

milesrout··on Cars Are Caught in an Endless Cycle of Bigger Screens Nobody Likes
They are safer, more fuel-efficient, less polluting and quieter.
milesrout··on The $25k car is going extinct?
Nobody said it isn't debt. The difference is that it is debt that makes sense: you can't realistically buy land without it, and houses tend to appreciate so the interest costs are less of a problem - they just represent the time value of money.

Most other debts people incur personally are to buy things they could save for, which go down in value. Like cars.

milesrout··on What does the end of mathematics look like?
Writing like a wanker isn't funny.
milesrout··on I just want to code (2023)
I'm not sure that is actually true about tailors. My understanding is that most clothing was homemade. I assume people didnt generally make their own shoes but they made their own textiles and basic garments and most people didnt have many garments.

Maybe there is a specific time period you are referring to where this was common but as I understand it, pre-industrially there were very few artisans selling products for money. Clothes were made largely by women and girls for their families.

milesrout··on CSS Zen Garden
The structure of the markup is dependent on the semantic structure of the content that is marked up. The CSS is styling that structure.

The markup shouldn't need to change over time in a way that makes the CSS layouts not work because it just reflects the semantic structure of the document, which shouldn't really need to change. If it does you have quite a different document and so of course it will need CSS changes too.

I was always much more afraid of touching ad-hoc CSS that was written alongside HTML, because it ends up having all these classes and elements that have no semantics and it becomes very unclear what anything actually means. The very worst is the "tailwind" styling where classes etc mean nothing, just styling.

milesrout··on Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
Do you have any evidence?
milesrout··on Netflix introduces a new kind of subtitles for the non-hearing impaired
I think they mix movies differently than they used to, maybe because people all seem to have soundbars today?
milesrout··on Mistaking Mary Magdalene
Also it makes no sense to say there is no evidence of them existing, given that we are discussing precisely that: evidence of them existing.

Why would the sources that were put together to form the Bible be discounted when the whole point of putting it together was to collect the best evidence into one source?

milesrout··on Mistaking Mary Magdalene
How is it misogynistic for more than one woman to have the same name? They aren't made up characters that people decided to all call Mary in some fit of misogyny.
milesrout··on Mistaking Mary Magdalene
There is no question that Jesus existed and was crucified. Nobody seriously questions that. If we can't accept that happened then we can't accept most of history. It is one of the best-documented events of history and nobody has any reason or means to make it up.
milesrout··on The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet
I find it very effective.
milesrout··on Commit signing in 2023 is kinda wack
Why is this written so poorly?
milesrout··on Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over
I agree. It also means you likely need some way of sorting replies. And that means upvoting, which is a horrid system.
milesrout··on The hidden cost of AI coding
Plenty of incorrect code compiles. It is a very bad sign that people are making comments like "Then the code won't compile".

As for my editor saying it is invalid..? That is just as untrustworthy as an LLM.

>I "trust" LLM's more than tutorials, there's so much garbage out there.

Yes, rubbish generated by AI. That is the rubbish out there. The stuff written by people is largely good.

milesrout··on Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
So not sold. Also not your data. It is Facebook's data. It belongs to Facebook. You don't own it just because it happens to be about you.

Does someone own the Wikipedia page about them?! No, Wikipedia does.

milesrout··on Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
"iPhone users" isn't a market. Otherwise every company would be a monopoly. That is absurd.
milesrout··on I should have loved biology too
No you don't. There is a narrow range of abilities at each level if students are properly held back when they haven't mastered the material.

Their interests are built by what they are taught. "Socioeconomic background" is a tautology. Their backgrounds are irrelevant.

milesrout··on I should have loved biology too
The history of English is taught in English classes. Historical context is important and interesting. You don't really understand a subject without knowing a bit of its history.

My favourite classes were those where we didn't just get taught facts and theorems but we also got taught a bit about who proved the theorem for the first time, who discovered this fact, what this algorithm was first used for, etc. So much easier to remember too.

This is one of the best things about studying law: the very nature of it makes it impossible to teach it without the historical context.

milesrout··on I should have loved biology too
This is a myth. Computer science absolutely is about programming. The science that makes computers work is called physics.

There are theoretical parts of computer science, but it is fundamentally a practical subject. All of it is in service to programming. Type systems are about typing programs. Algorithms are implemented using programs. Data structures are for use in programs.

The very worst computer science lecturers are those that forget it is a practical subject and try to teach it like abstract mathematics, because they believe (whether they realise they believe it or not) that it is more prestigious to teach abstract concepts than practical concrete things.

It is the same in mathematics, where unfortunately there has developed a tradition since Bourbaki of trying to teach abstract notions as fundamental while concrete problem solving is left to the engineers. The result is that many engineers are much stronger mathematicians than many mathematically-trained students, and those students have to relearn the practical foundations of the subject before they can make progress at the graduate level. If they don't, they get stuck doing what looks like maths, but is actually just abstract roleplaying.

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