ninthcat

Evolution happens even without any selection pressures, for example with genetic drift.

Another important factor is whether the place is monetizable. Places where you can't make money are less likely to be infested with AI.

> The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue

Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.

System Settings > Touch ID & Password > Use Touch ID for autofilling passwords. Turn this off on Macs with Touch ID and Safari will autofill without requiring Touch ID.

The probability is exactly zero by definition. The maximum score on a test is a raw score of 100%. Tests are normalized to have the reported scores fit a normal distribution. An out-of-distribution score indicates an error in normalizing the test.

In other words, the highest IQ of every living person has a defined upper bound that is dependent on the number of living people and it is definitionally impossible to exceed this value. Reports of higher values are mistakes or informal exaggerations, similar to a school saying a student is one that you would only encounter in a million years. By definition it is not possible to have evidence to support such a statement.

You seem to be under the mistaken belief that democracy means deciding policy based on opinion polls. This is not how democracies work in practice, and opinion polls often show that most people don't want policy dictated solely by opinion polls.

Democracy is a governmental system where political power is vested in the people. It is characterized by competitive elections and the safeguarding of human rights[1].

It is by definition undemocratic for two wolves and a sheep to vote for who to eat for dinner. It is undemocratic to have gerrymandering. It is undemocratic to have uncompetitive primary elections. It is undemocratic for the police to quell protests. It is undemocratic to have state-backed propaganda, censorship, and misinformation.

Maintaining a democracy necessitates maintaining its institutions. An authoritarian one-party state does not magically become democratic just because it has an election or manufactures support for its project. Elections are an insufficient condition for democracy.

[1]: https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jod.2024.a930423

It's possible to do proportional representation with a ranked choice voting system where you vote for individuals rather than parties. Or you could allow voters to rank either parties or individual candidates based on their preference; an example of this is the Australian Senate election.

I don't think national elections need to have districts smaller than a state at all. If all of a state's seats in the House that are up for election were decided in a single state-wide election with multiple winners allocated with proportional representation, it is impossible to gerrymander. Many other countries have this kind of system.

"120" and "0.12%" both have 2 significant digits. "120." and "0.120%" have 3 significant digits.

I don't think it's quite correct to call it a regressive tax. Driving a car in Manhattan is a luxury, so this is a tax on a luxury that subsidizes transportation that works for everyone.

Protests don't need to change the minds of the public to work. For example, protests still work in non-democratic societies in which public opinion has no bearing on policy. They work by directly exerting pressure on people who make decisions.

7 and 49 look the same.

For those who believe that billionaires are a policy failure, the answer is they should be taxed more to the point that there are no more billionaires.

If you want to know whether a drug is more effective than placebo, the answer to that question depends on both the data collected in a study and the initial study design. There’s a reason why it’s meaningless to say “that was unlikely” after somebody says they were born on January 1, or after getting a two-factor code that is the same number six times. There’s nothing special about those particular events except for the fact that we noticed them. Since we live in a single instance of the universe where they have already happened, they have probability 1. At the same time, on any given instance they have probability 1/365ish or 1/10000. The difference between these two interpretations of the probability is the same difference as having a good experimental design vs a flawed experimental design where you repeat the experiment until you get the results you want to see.

Unlikely in what probability space? We only see one version of reality so the probabilities that we assign to any outcome are based on a prior choice of probability space. That is why the researchers' intent matters.

You linked to an editorial about ethics. I'm not sure what to make of it, are you against conducting research and communicating it in an ethical way? Or do you disagree about something specific in that article? Either way I'm not sure I'm seeing the connection between what you're saying and the original article.

Note that as a plane burns fuel, its maximum sustainable altitude and its most fuel-efficient altitude both increase. This explains why the pilots did not climb to a higher flight level earlier.

> How about I authenticate with the payment provider instead of some random store clerk? I don’t want the merchant to even see my name at all.

Apple Pay and Google Pay don't show the merchant the cardholder name IIRC, and they authenticate you with biometrics, although the merchant may still use AVS and therefore ask you for your zip code.

A union B is defined as the set of things that are in A or in B; A intersect B is defined as the set of things that are in A and in B. So I don't really see it as an arbitrary choice.

You can interpret 0 and 1 as probabilities. 1 + 1 = 1 in this case makes sense because P(A or B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(A and B). You can interpret "A or B" as a set union and "A and B" as a set intersection. Of course it's easy to draw a three-way correspondence between Boolean arithmetic, the events represented by the empty set and the whole space, and sets within some universe because all the objects are so simple, but these correspondences also generalize well to systems with more than two possible values. The ease of generalizing makes me think it's not just a matter of coincidence or convention that we have 0 <=> false.

The "disagree and commit" leadership principle is supposed to represent a situation where the manager is the one who disagrees with a subordinate but trusts the subordinate's judgement enough to commit to going along with their idea (this also works for a peer relationship). The relevant LP for the subordinate is "earn trust". Simply following orders is not an LP. Of course there is enough vagueness in the LPs that Jassy can twist the meaning a bit.

Kids need a large house? Not places to play outside with their friends? What is a kid going to do in the suburbs that doesn't rely on being ferried around in a car for hours each day?

It is not possible to prove that calling the server will not produce side effects. The link you provided does not address side effects, but correctness, which is much weaker. A trivial example is that calling the server will consume electricity.

It sounds like you are describing a multidimensional array, which can be used to represent a tensor, but is not conceptually the same thing. A tensor is an element of a tensor product.

If somebody is smart enough to verify that a smart contract does what it says on the tin, they should be more than smart enough to realise that crypto doubling is always going to be a scam.

A copy of digital art has (to an approximation) no value because it is infinitely reproducible. But an hour of an artist's time has value due to scarcity. The obvious answer — that the article doesn't mention for some reason — is that artists make money from commissions, not from selling copies of the art.

Higher density indeed tends to be more resource efficient. The problem is much of what is called a "big city" in the US is a sprawl of low-density suburbs that, due to their city planning, require more driving to get to anything than, say, if you lived in a small town.

Climate change involves more extreme weather events, including anomalous temperatures in both directions. An increase in average temperatures doesn't do as much visible damage as an increase in probability of long-tail events. It is accurate and important to connect statistically extreme weather events to climate change.

If you rewrite it so it's no longer a cryptic one-liner, it's probably easier to understand this way without a comment than the other way with one.

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Here’s a definition used in Florida’s ban[1] on CRT:

> the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.

CRT by this definition is an objective historical fact. The effect of white supremacy on the legal system can be seen from the end of reconstruction, to Jim Crow laws, to government officials allying with the Klan, to the modern-day carceral state. All of these topics were covered in my public school education.

If you want to argue that some works of CRT are flawed, that’s one thing, but substituting the objective historical facts of critical race theory with nationalist propaganda, as these CRT bans explicitly aim to do, is irresponsible and a disservice to the public education system. As NPR correctly points out, it “limit[s] teaching a historically accurate picture of U.S. history”.

[1]: http://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/19958/urlt/7-4.pdf