rcoveson

If all you do is browse (default) home or all, then sure, it's just a stupid echo chamber obsessed with hating the things its cool to hate. That's not where the value is on reddit, and it's not what people are referring to when they say the search reddit for answers. If you're looking for product reviews, it's not perfect but it's tough to find anywhere better unless you happen to know of exactly the right hidden gem of a forum to visit for your particular subtopic (and the link to that hidden gem of a forum is probably easier to find on the relevant subreddit than it is on google).

> imagine the cost of Probe getting increased from 50 minerals to 60

Yes, please.

- T, Z

I don't think the fact that our 90th percentile capabilities have been known to decrease at times in history refutes the idea that the broader trend is dramatically upward, in such a way that any absolute measure of skill is very likely to give you ridiculous results if you pick it based on the standards of year X and then try to use it in year X + 1000 or X - 1000. Was Pythagoras a first-rate mathematician? By what measure that wouldn't also capture millions of people--most of them not even self-described mathematicians--alive today?

I think you'll find that if you set an absolute bar on most skills you'll end up with zero people above the bar in the past and a growing percentage of people above it in the future. The first person to run a four-minute mile was Roger Bannister in 1954. Now, that achievement is basically table stakes for college-level competitors. Similar effects can be observed in chess, piano performance, and just about any other activity you can measure. Making "first-rate" an absolute bar results in all sorts of crazy answers to the questions "who is first-rate now" and "who was first-rate 70 years ago". If you set the bar such that only the top 10 players of this year cut it, neither Bobby Fischer nor Michael Jordan would be first-rate.

"First rank" is the phrase from OP's link, not "first-rate", but in both cases it is not obvious to me that it is wrong for there to be mathematicians with that descriptor in every age. They sound like relative adjectives; "first rank" undoubtedly so, "first-rate" to a lesser extent.

"Who are the first-rate/first rank musicians of $YEAR" does not seem to me like it could be answered with "there were none in that year".

This is art. Think about writing a book, directing a TV show, or putting on a play. What should happen? There should probably be intrigue, emotion, and excitement. Very likely violence and evil. We should explore a broad spectrum of emotion. It's perfectly likely that most of what we explore is negative emotion, because originality is hard and positive emotion is arguably over-explored if you look at art as a whole through all of human history.

But this isn't just some mass-produced movie or family-friendly Broadway production. This is the cutting edge of art. It's supposed to challenge us. So perhaps we'll go beyond merely pretending at violence and do a tiny bit of actual violence. It's plausible, from a participant's perspective, that the creator of the piece intended that.

That's what I imagine the participants are thinking, anyways. They aren't just average folks of the street, after all, they're attendees at a crazy art exhibit. They've got to compete with people who hang themselves up by hooks driven through their skin, people who bite the heads of bats during rock concerts, and people who whip each other bloody in sadist orgies.

If she wanted to see people acting beautifully, she would have performed it at a soup kitchen, or a temple. Or even just in a little cul-de-sac in an average neighborhood where people know each other and kids are present. Everyday places full of totally average people who aren't used to twisting their minds into scenarios on the ninth meta-level above reality.

All she succeeded in showing is that her audience is full of people obsessed with the ugliness of humanity.

Even if we disregard the anecdote, we can at least infer that the intention was to make an original, evocative piece of performance art. How does that implied goal cause people to act? Like a bunch of avant-garde nutjobs, maybe?

I wasn't trying to say art has no value, just that its value isn't in it being a source of conclusions. Art can raise questions that we wouldn't have had otherwise, and questions are the starting point of science (and that of further art).

> I don't know how you can scientifically glean any conclusion that the artist was trying to discover or perspect, here, as effectively as she is trying to do so.

This is what I disagree with. If there is a conclusion that you think you have drawn from this work, then you should re-frame it as a hypothesis and test it properly. Or just be content with the new questions, perspectives, and the experience of it. Just don't go saying that you learned something reliably predictive about how humans behave.

Attempting to extract a conclusion about human nature from this event is as ridiculous as trying to determine if hypnosis is real based on the outcomes at a hypnosis performance.

The people were not randomly selected. We are not told what their instructions were. We do not know what their relationships were with the creator/subject of the piece. None of that is a "problem" with the piece, of course, because it doesn't even purport to be science. It's not "performance art" in the sarcastic sense that you might apply to a very poorly designed social science experiment. It's actually performance art. It tells us as much about humanity as an indie film depicting the same occurrences would.

That doesn't sound like a conflict to me. People actively resist allowing vomit to touch most of their mouth. We tend to do the opposite with soda. So swishing with water after vomiting puts vomit where it otherwise wouldn't have been, while swishing with water after drinking soda only dilutes the places that soda already was.

The brushing thing has to do with the effect acid has on enamel.

I doubt you could find a dentist that wouldn't recommend swishing with water after drinking soda.

Because it's functionally a mega-downvote and it's not clear that there are any consequences for abusing it.

Freedom for me, but not for thee

Thou art a common idiot, see?

Though I've tasted the fruit

And seen that it's good

I fear it won't suit

you like prison would.

> There are other mammals who live much longer than humans.

This didn't ring true to me so I did a bit of reading. AFAICT there's one[0] species of mammal that can live much longer than us. We're at least tied for second-longest lifespan of all mammals.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowhead_whale

You're assuming your concerns were dismissed arbitrarily. Why? Is it possible that your concerns were considered, pros and cons were weighed, and the final decision was simply not in your favor?

And what's this nonsense about "my computer, not the app maker's"? How do you think project governance works? Decisions are made, and every single time a subset of users are disappointed. That subset isn't having control of their computers taken from them. This stuff is happening out in the open, for free, and with express permission to override any behavior you want with your own patches. You can even distribute your patched version, also free of charge. It's downright humbling how free we are when it comes to bash and OpenSSH, and you have the gall to come out with "My computer is mind, not the app maker's"? Do you have any idea how low the bar is for user respect in the average app? How much money can be made if you're willing to disrespect your users? And the bash and OpenSSH folks would never, not ever consider any such breach. They have stayed firm, despite world-blanketing success, in their user-respecting free software ways.

And for a disagreement of where to put config files, you'd lump them in with the user-hating rabble that makes up the rest of the software industry. We're surrounded by people who actually do arbitrarily dismiss user concerns (because the users are the product). People who actually do believe your computer belongs to them when you use their software. Please, in the middle of all this shit, keep in mind who your best allies are and just have a civil engineering disagreement with them, without insulting them.

How is lampooning people who disagree with you as "arrogant" not moralizing? Arrogance is a moral accusation.

This isn't a problem where you can just copy and paste a deductively-proven-correct-for-all-inputs solution and be done. One way or another you're creating problems for existing users and existing scripts as soon as you start using the new location. A newly provisioned system with an old script (or an old user (and "old" meaning nothing more than "older than this change")) running on it is going to end up thinking that it's doing a create-or-modify on, say,`.bashrc`, when in fact it's doing an override (because existing config was in the new location).

"Ignorance" is being blind to that problem (and others). "Arrogance" is pretending like it's somehow obvious that that problem isn't worse than the benefits of unifying on this convention, especially when there are so many examples of estimable projects on both sides of the issue.

Why do you think it's easy for most to have nuanced, dispassionate discussions about the ancient Assyrians but not the Nazis? Spacial/temporal/ideological proximity. We're not likely to become anything like the former, but we fear ourselves (or at least our leadership) becoming more like the latter.

Obviously it would be ideal to learn from the good aspects of even the most evil totalitarian regimes, but in practice it's easier to wrap the whole nationalist/collectivist/communist idea-space up in a bundle and throw it out as one, at least in conversations with strangers of unclear motives.

Why all the moralizing? Deciding when to make breaking changes is hard. Deciding it's more trouble than its worth for the developers and the users usually shouldn't be ascribed to one of "ignorance, arrogance, or fear". It's just an engineering disagreement.

I'm trying really hard not to end this flippantly with "go touch grass" but I think the mood fits. Escalating appeals to emotion are unhelpful and "cringe" when trying to convince open source developers to add your pet issue to their roadmaps.

The thing about the Lord's Prayer doesn't really follow. If you use a grammatically correct and semantically commonplace 12 word sequence like that, you surely don't have 128 bits of entropy. But the ease of memorization comes almost entirely from those attributes!

To get 128 bits of entropy with words, you need to pick about thirteen out of a million words--which is on the order of all the words in the English language--and give all of them equal probability. The sequence needs to be fully random as well. What you end up with will surely be easier to memorize than a UUID, but substantially more difficult than the start of the Lord's Prayer.

EDIT: Math is wrong, I was thinking 10 bits per million instead of 20. So 6-7 words out of a million (whole language) or 13 words out of a thousand (very limited subset of the language). Point about random selection still stands, but it's certainly easier than 13 very uncommon words. Still much harder than a realistic sentence of that length, though.

It's not obligate-multiplayer, but seeing as it's a Dungeons and Dragons implementation with lots of best-in-class multiplayer features it seems libelous to call it "single player".

FWIW I am very surprised to hear that lxd depends on snapd. There are surely lxd users that predate that dependency.

I disagree. I've known photos could be faked my whole life but I doubt I've ever been presented with a fake photo of somebody I know, and I'm confident nobody has ever faked a photo of me that I've seen. A world where anybody can fake a photo of anybody else with nothing but a laptop and a text prompt is radically different.

It's not the abstract knowledge that something is possible that influences our gut reactions, its our experiences. When your friend group chat is chock-full of little jokingly-made fake images of each other, then your behavior of reacting to realistic photos as though they were real will dull and eventually go away entirely.

Can we please just skip to 2-5 years from now when image/video generation is so good that it's as easy to fake it as it is to lie in textual form?

Most important information is textual, and there's really nothing at all that binds text to reality. So we have laws about fraud and libel for important matters. Trust is a hard problem! But we're working on it, and images were never much of a solution to it anyway.

Most of the time, we just don't care. Many stories are untrue; explicitly fictional. Some of them are untrue in ways that could emotionally damage others (gossip, insults). That's just a part of social life, to be mitigated socially, not judicially.

Images are going to be just like text. Let's all just embrace that already. You can't lie any more or less with them than you can text, once we all (inevitably) stop trusting them as though they were difficult to fabricate. There's a little turmoil coming, but there's less if we all just decide to get over it now rather than cling desperately to the idea that images are somehow more deeply intertwined with the real world than text is.

> Human intelligence and a foundation of consciousness is just as much the ability to forget somethings as it is to remember.

What's the word for something that's phrased like wisdom but doesn't hold up at all to mild scrutiny?

"Just as much the ability to forget as to remember", feh. One of those things is a bit more important, isn't it?

> Though only one of the hypervisors works well.

Well don't leave us hanging, which one?

(My money's on QEMU)

That's what this is. "Containers" implemented as actual VMs.

0 is a year if we say it is, which astronomers have for hundreds of years (because its extremely mathematically convenient), and which ISO-8601 does.

Year 0 is what historians like to call 1 BC, but historians are also just making that up. Nobody numbered years from Anno Domini anywhere near year 0.

I'm sure it's clear to everybody here why year 0, -1, and -2 are significantly better arbitrary, ahistorical names for the three years preceding year 1.

An expansion card that is flush with the rest of the laptop frame compared to a dongle that dangles from the side is absolutely not just an aesthetic difference. Expansion cards don't need to be disconnected and reconnected whenever you move the laptop. Dongles do. You can't put a laptop with four dongles hanging off of it into a bag.

The distinction between USB-C and PCIe, on the other hand, is meaningless for most peripherals.

An imaginary handheld AM radio is more similar to a handheld FM radio than the handheld FM radio is to a desktop FM radio, from the user's perspective. You could say that "comparing AM to FM is apples to oranges", but the user wouldn't care as much as they care about how they actually interact with the thing.

Notable, a form factor that does not dangle.

Are PCIe cards just dongles in another form factor? Is it a question of how much of the peripheral's surface area is visible from the outside? Or is it the difficulty of insertion/removal that separates expansion cards from dongles?

For me it's the dangling that makes the dongle a dongle.

Sounds like most people estimate surprisingly well. Fermi-wise, the obscure term in your numerator is 10^10 and the obscure term in your denominator is 10^8. The more obvious term (room size) is 10^1. So the answer is 10^3, and people are guessing 10^0 or 10^1. So some people are only off by a couple order of magnitude, which is explained by a rather small estimation error in either or both obscure terms.