scottlocklin

Are you shitting me? You're asking me ... on one hand to "trust the science," to the point humans change our use of power, transportation: basically upend industrial civilization, but you're also telling me this "science" isn't capable of producing models accurate enough for geoengineering? You do realize CO2 mitigation is only one form of geoengineering, right? If they can't suggest another one, why should anyone listen to them regarding CO2?

You can't have it both ways. Either "the science" predicts something or it doesn't. Which one is it?

It's a nice story, but it's about as likely as brie causing fewer realized CHD deaths. There's no way you could deconvolute either from their diet; the red wine meme is probably just upper middle class people telling each other their vices are healthy.

The "French paradox" isn't the only one indicating the statistics are horse shit on saturated fat: consider the Israeli paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_paradox

Now do France.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1768013/

Correlational studies are inherently flawed when you have something as complex as diet. It's probably quite true that in a random sample of 80,000 health care workers in America, the people with more grease in their diets drop dead faster. It doesn't happen in France, Spain etc etc. Meaning it probably has nothing to do with saturated fatty acids, and probably much to do with whatever goes along with it. Who knows what it actually is? Soybean oil, wonder bread, dunkin doughnuts, HFCS, diet coke, being disgustingly overweight, never walking anywhere, granola, fruit juice (bleh -sugar water), dietary iron, twinkies, nacho "cheese," brined ham, trail mix, marshmallows, potato chips, microwave popcorn, soy protein -any number of things the Frogs and Spaniards don't eat or do, but fat Americans do. Using linear regression, grease/saturated fat probably correlates well with all this other garbage, and with dropping dead sooner, assuming you censor out other world populations with different national diet tendencies. Of course including Spaniards in the data set, you get a different answer.

We're not living in a Golden Age of Historical Fiction; in fact everything I recognize in that list is total trash. John Biggins is pretty good though. A Sailor of Austria is better than any of the Flashmans I've read (the other 3 are good too).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Biggins

> So you demand that scientists produce predictions that are bang on not only in 'what' will happen, but also 'why' and 'when'?

Yes, actually: if I'm supposed to take "scientists" seriously, the only reason we listen to them over astrologers is they're supposed to get things right, not make shit up. Why is this confusing to you? Do you think there is some other reason to listen to "scientists?"

Same is it ever was; IF Stone was one of the greats of his era, and he basically fed himself with a private newsletter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone

FWIIW it appears that UPS located the mail.

Just a reminder: git was developed as, and can be used as a decentralized source control system. You don't need github at all. Github came 3 years after git was invented.

Your prediction isn't correct if your time estimate is wrong. I bet some Pacific islands will be beneath the ocean some day with probability very close to 1 (I dunno we could get hit by an Asteroid first). Betting they will be last month is a failed prediction. As far as I can tell they're not having any particular problems now they didn't have 50 years ago. I'm happy to entertain evidence to the contrary.

The greenhouse effect is totally human controllable. You don't even need to stop using fossil fuels or resort to absurdities like industrial carbon sequestration. Geoengineering used to be a thing; if climatologists believed in their models, they'd be able to come up with a solution that works. Painting Australia white, pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere; whatever. Someone could at least make a suggestion which doesn't involve everyone living in a yurt and eating gruel. One becomes suspicious people whose only solution is the latter are millenarian cultists rather than science minded.

That study is absolutely not missing, and it says exactly what you'd expect it to[0]. It's even being tested as an active treatment[1]. In fact, that study was also done with Influenza[2] and other lung borne ailments as well. It pretty obviously works, has tremendous explanatory power in the observed patterns of disease, and the fact that no government has sanctioned its use or its mass production ... well, I guess modernity kind of sucks. Better to pimp useless expensive garbage pharma companies can turn a profit on.

[0]https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04536298

[1] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04385940

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4463890/#:~:tex....

New Englandah here. More or less the same upbringing you describe, where intimate touch is reserved for sexual partners and family members. I don't agree, though, that it's made my life materially worse in any way, and articles like OP actively give me the heeby jeebies. I find touchy-feely people and the West Coast hugs newage (rhymes with sewage) quasi-surf-brah culture to be generally fake and creepy. Yeah, you have to hug babies or they come out broken: that doesn't mean you have to hug everyone all the time, or that grown adults have some USRDA specified minimum required human touch. The idea that there are people so lonely and isolated that they pine for hugs is, of course, deeply sad, but that's a problem with loneliness; not some mechanical need that can be fulfilled the way you can cure a vitamin deficiency by popping a pill, which is certainly what this article implies. Random people, including (perhaps especially including) very lonely people invading my space are not appreciated.

The article itself is filled with ridiculous pleonasms and nonsense statements:

>The language of touch also affects the way that we relate to ourselves and our bodies across the lifespan, with profound impacts on our psychological wellbeing

WTF does this even mean? Followed by "citations needed."

>As a scientist, but also as a fellow human, I claim the right to touch, and to dream of a reality where no one will be touchless.

Get away from me creepy science lady!

In all seriousness, this is article is a load of West Coast american New Age horse shit. There are entire cultures of no-touchy people: for example, the Nordics, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese. They tend to be more long-lived, happy and vastly more free of mental illness than West Coast Americanos who gabble on about muh therapeutic touch (and who also post HN articles about the mystical wisdom of .... Nordics and Japanese when it comes to their ancient and mysterious customs such as going outside sometimes[0][1]). There's something infantile and needy about over-touchers. Cultures which have different conceptions of shared space (I dunno southern Europeans, Arabs) also have plenty of boundaries -the touchy feely types don't, and I think the latter are the ones with problems.

Lonely people: if you have something that prevents you from making friends in the ordinary way, please buy a dog or something and leave us non-touchy feely people alone.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877796

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886440

I'm kind of flabbergasted anyone from the desktop era stopped using desktop computers. Trying to do serious work on a laptop is either not doing serious work or laughably insane. Big monitors, big IO (laptop motherboards mostly throttle IO), big memory chips, many hardware threads, actually fast and low latency internets; even the keyboard and mouse experience is vastly better than using the proverbial toilet paper tube of a laptop. I mean, maybe most people don't need this: I do. Pretty much every aspect of my desktop makes me more productive. The only downside is it's more difficult to transport my 60lb threadripper than my thinkpad, but even that can be done, and is totally worth the trouble when there is serious work to be done.

Laptops have mostly regressed into consumer appliances; my 2011 thinkpad is significantly faster and has more memory than a 2017 macbook pro. The monitor (and I guess speakers if I'm using it as a TV) is better in the macbook; that's it!

Stuff I use every day: column reflow, djvu/chm/mobi support, cropping and zoom on text size even in scanned images.

Supposedly lots of other features as well , but simply supporting djvu is so huge for me, I can't imagine bothering with nickel.

what? nobody mentioning Koreader? Light years ahead of whatever Nickel reader comes with the thing.

Beyond being complete gibberish, of course their dumb ass phones produce as much "radiation" as an ipotato.

The way the asics were written in 2000 it should work. Should work in free-fall also.

Terrible take; basically flinging poop at the agricultural southern economy without mentioning, you know, how the North kind of burned most of it down.

He quotes a nice description of the American skilled working class of the 1800s, then somehow forgets about those people: you know -the people who actually built everything. The genius of our skilled working class machinist types is now wasted in coming up with new workman's comp schemes rather than building things, because you shipped most of his jobs and his future prosperity overseas. This is pretty much all of it in a nutshell. In Germany those people are building things. In America, it's difficult to make a living building things, so the brightest of them go into IT or whatever. Scumbag economists make up excuses for why improving some scam figure like the overall GDP is good for the 50 year old machinist whose job has been shipped to China, and who has to go to work as a Walmart greeter or janitor in a heroin clinic. It's not good for him, his family and community, or the country.

And it's not good for my blood pressure reading ding dongs like this talking about the South versus the North versus Karen. Talk about the human capital we've destroyed with our imbecile looter pyramid scheme economic theories. Everyone gabbles on about training for "STEM jobs" -the ones involving matter actually count if you want to become a society of builders.

> I don't understand how such a popular language can have such a weak story in dependency management and integration with third party libraries.

At some point 40 years from now, someone will complain about Rust not having full integration with whatever IPFS/blockchain distributed computing package managers/sharded source control/vulcan mind meld the internet turns into. There really was a world before the internet was universal. People used tools like Fortran on these things called Crays; (or CDC6600 or IBM doodads before that) -you'd bring your data on a VHS cassette or reel to reel tapes, because your university only rented a single T1 line -1.55mbps FWIIW; it was seen as plenty of bandwidth for all the scientists in the university. Nobody but the scientists used the internet in those days.

That universe is still around; matrix math is still ultimately Fortran -matrix math is why people invented computers in the first place, as amazing as this may sound to people with ipotatoes in their pocket. That's 50s and 60s tech; with gotos and line numbers: back then, using multiple files for your software was considered getting fancy. You were usually submitting jobs as a stack of punched cards. I never did, but my older roomies in grad school certainly did.

Similarly, the OS you're using is basically mid-1970s technology, written in mid-1970s programming languages. Back then, package management wasn't so much of a problem; the whole source code for the OS could be published in not-too-big book form (and was, FWIIW). Just a reminder: the runtime for modern Rust is absurdly bloated compared to those days; "Hello World" in Rust is literally larger than the entire hard drive of 1970s computers with the OS written in C; hell there were 80s computers with 4mb drives that were seen as fairly adequate. Anyway, that's why C++ (basically PDP-11 assembler with Bjarne's deranged ideas about objects ... and some later better ideas) has a shitty package management story. It's not so bad really; just a skill that n00bs don't have any more. I personally never needed anything fancier than makefiles, and saw CMake as a regression from autotools.

You can do whatever makes you feel better: everyone who is not living in a bubble is getting it, vaccine or no vaccine. Notice how we wiped out the flu with the flu vaccine back in 1956? Yeah, me neither. Lung borne viral ailments do not work that way.

You fail to understand the fact that everyone's going to get it. You can't control that fact, not even by blowing up the economy. The best thing you can do if you're afraid is to wear a mask and take vitamin-D (or go outside to get some).

Unless there is a miraculous breakthrough in vaccines, which seems unlikely in current year, this disease will be with us for the rest of your life. Just like the flu. If it works like other corona viruses, it will burn through the population kill off the people who are susceptible to it, and remain with us forever, just like HCoV-OC43 probably did in 1889 with the "Russian flu" of that day[0]. Nobody worries about that now.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-15/corona...

The reality is, most people are going to get the 'rona. Germany for example; they didn't get it as much last spring; they're getting it now. NZ, same thing's going to happen, unless they develop North Korea style immigration policies or 12 monkeys style lifestyle. They're better off in general because they have healthier populations than, say, the US or the UK, but putting it off isn't going to work forever.

I don't think the US, Brazil, UK or Turkey explicitly realized this or anything (Sweden did; they're doing fine, and are basically over with it). But ultimately getting it over with is probably going to look better in the long term.

Looking pretty path dependent at this point. Don't mistake luck for good policy.

csvlook/csvkit, apparently; something I never heard of before, which is actually not installed by default in ubuntu. He also included the data itself, which is pretty helpful, but which could have more usefully gone into a git repo somewhere.

Also "kids these days" all reach for docker. Otherwise any sane person would have just used cat instead of csvlook.

Upvoted the kid's article, because command line text cleaning is of TOWERING IMPORTANCE to any DS person worth their salt. But he is definitely an inexperienced kid.

You're engaging in solipsism here; the point isn't whether or not you think pre-marital chastity is acceptable or not (I bet there's a question in this goofball RWA book asserting that it's not OK) -the point is the nazis were nudists[0] and homophiles, making absolute nonsense of those questions as any kind of meaningful measurement of "RWA." Again, as I said in the first place; this seems to be a simple list of late 20th century center left bigotries about what American religious people are like rather than anything to do with "authoritarianism."

Despite people who tell me about the TEETH CHATTERING ATROCITIES of the nazi pork butchers ... saying things on twitter ... every sign of authoritarianism I see; from corporate fascism, to the idiots burning the cities down and toppling statues: every last one of them would have scored more like you on that scale as very open minded and accepting people, and less like some random Pentacostal who thinks foamy buttsex is kind of gross, but who doesn't bother anyone and who this scale would denounce as "authoritarian." If words like "authoritarian" are to retain their ordinary meanings, your scale goes into the dumpster, and you must refrain from ever referring to it again. It is a simple measure of WEIRD[1] psychological tendencies. Not "authoritarianism."

[0] better reference: referring to Nazi nudist societies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freik%C3%B6rperkultur#Naturism...

[1] again: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-...

Ernst Röhm was the 2nd most important nazi before the night of the long knives and was an out homosexual[0]. The gayness of the nazis was a source of jokes and criticisms from the beginning. The pro-homosexual bias of fascists are so obvious, there are even books, generally by religious people, which assert, with considerable evidence, that fascism was entirely a homosexual phenomenon. This sort of thing doesn't fit the preposterous bias of the book you quote, which again is simply a list of the prejudices of the authors; more or less, the prejudices of late 20th century shitlibbery, against traditional christian people.

As for nazi nudity: go watch the movie "Olympiad." Or ... hell, just look at photos of the era[1]. A good fraction of them were neopagans as well; they probably invented the phrase "sky-clad."

>Given that I believe private nudity is legal in the US, why should anyone respond otherwise, unless unaccepting of divergence from their beliefs?

Are you joking? There are lots of things which are legal but which people might not be all together comfortable with. For example: gambling, smoking, eating live shellfish, having unprotected sex with 100s of people, going to Church on Sundays (I guarantee you there are people who see something wrong with this), remaining a virgin until you're married (ditto), getting falling down drunk, eating only vegetables: the list is endless. Nudism certainly falls into the category of something all kinds of people might not be all together comfortable with; both authoritarian and non-authoritarian; and in this case both American right wing and left wing people. Do you think Susan Fowler would have been happy if Uber had done its corporate retreats and a nudist camp? Don't tell me it's "inappropriate" -because if "there is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps" -how can it possibly be inappropriate to hang out with your colleagues with your junk hanging out?

[0]https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaust-remembrance-day/.pr...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturism_in_Germany

>What cryptographic standards have come from cryptocurrencies?

Zk-STARKS, which are fairly revolutionary and completely unknown outside magic internet money dudes. Non-trusted setup ceremonies and the newer Zk-SNARKs are also pretty much crypto-only. Bulletproofs arguably as well. Maybe verifiable delay functions; not sure of the history there. Most cryptocurrency engineering is evolutionary, and it's the combination of things (Mimble-wimble etc) that makes it worth something.

On the non crypto side, there are novel consensus algorithms, interesting data structures and contributions to distributed computation in general.

There's lots of social problems with blockchains, including carnival barker types overhyping things they don't understand. You could have said the same things about the internet in the 90s. The technology is pretty interesting, and making the things do useful work is one of the few actually innovative areas in software engineering right now.

There's lots of obvious places for this sort of distributed, trustless database that aren't just magic internet money. DNS is an obvious one. Identity is another one. Provenance of food/wine/art is another. Pretty much any place where database disintermediation is desirable, which is almost everywhere.

>How can "would score high" and "accepting of divergences from their beliefs" not be disjoint?

Simple: the scale, as I keep saying, is total bullshit. Someone's opinion on nudism or sexual dimorphism doesn't influence their day to day behavior or tendency to throw people out of helicopters in the way the author of the scale thinks they do. Hell; the Nazis were pro-nudist and an awful lot of them were screechingly gay (and all of them accepting of their screechingly gay comrades) ... in the 1920s and 30s, when that sort of thing was a lot less popular.

South Korea's industrialization is under-appreciated. 8% a year for 20 years is pretty bonkers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_South_Korea#Rapid_g...

Like China, authoritarian and protectionist. Though Park eventually drove the country in a democratic direction. He's seen like a combination of George Washington and Paul Bunyan in South Korea; wish there was a good bio of him in English.

I agree that "burn the heretic" has been normal human behavior for a long time: you can see it at work now, mostly among left wing authoritarians. You might have noticed them: they've been hard at work forming mobs firing people for expressing opinions, and lately tearing down statues (literal iconoclasm: a la Calvinism in the 16th century, or Taliban now) and burning down American cities. They'd all be extremely low in RWA score, which is why I assert that this "measurement" is simply a republican (aka classical liberal) detector.

Classical liberals are not meaningfully authoritarian in any sense of the word; though of course there have been historical aberrations (pre-Salazar Portugal could have been considered both Authoritarian and classical liberal, as I suppose were some post-war governments).

I agree that the book doesn't use a meaningful definition of "authoritarian." That's all I'm trying to say here. The author is some kind of nut attempting to demonize the half of America that doesn't vote his way as being "authoritarians." He also wants to "cure" them. That seems .... kind of authoritarian.

On those details: Evola ... I mean, the man is about as influential as Miguel Serrano or any other fascist crank who persisted too long into the 20th century. Who cares what he says? It's burbling nonsense. Toole's character was a farce designed to make fun of Evolan types (pretty sure anyway; maybe it had an element of self mockery). And Dreher is a hipster ding dong whose hipsterness consists in having read "Confederacy of Dunces."

I know actually right wing and actually religious people who would score high on this "RWA" scale. They're not authoritarian at all! Much more accepting of divergences from their beliefs than even modern American centrists.

Yeah, see, I don't think any of this has a single, solitary thing to do with "authoritarianism." It's just testing for normal human attitudes, rather than urban WEIRD attitudes.

I'm doing "that internet guy" again, but it's necessary here; from m-w[0] the definition of "authoritarian"

1: of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority had authoritarian parents

2: of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people

There's nothing about our forefathers, homosexuals, feminists, theism, women, sexual preferences, pornography, sinfulness or any of the other bullshit in those questions that has a single, solitary thing to do with the definition of authoritarianism. Until the 1990s, most Americans, indeed most Westerners outside of (maybe) Holland and Sweden would have been considered "authoritarian" by those lights. Do you believe Westerners were "authoritarian" for all of human history until ... say, 1997 or whatever? I was alive back then: it was very obviously less authoritarian on almost every level. And mind you, I score fairly "non authoritarian" (aka not so conservative) on this test.

Anyway, I appreciate your constructive engagement, but I am extremely allergic to bullshit which dehumanizes normal people. I mean, we decided as a society that dehumanizing gay people and feminists was bad: the reality is people who are don't think the last 10 years of modernity is an amazing success are not particularly authoritarian, but dehumanizing them absolutely is.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/authoritarian