sho

Understood. I apologise for stepping over the line.

The false premise is that the religious explanation is the default or incumbent explanation, which must then be bettered or countered by "challenger" explanations such as science. It tries to frame the argument with religion as the "defending champion" for challengers to somehow unseat ("atheists need to explain how...").

In reality, of course, religious explanation has no such presumptive default or incumbent status. Religious explanations are just one of many potential explanations for how the world works and compete on equal terms with any other. And when the religious explanation really just boils down to some variant of "god did it", it becomes very obvious how inadequate that is compared to even the worst scientific attempts.

Related: religious apologists constantly try to pretend that criticisms or problems identified with scientific explanations somehow count as points in favor of their religious alternative. This is also a false idea. It is not a debate, where pointing out flaws in your opponent's argument helps yours "win". It is a search for truth, and finding fault with another theory does nothing at all to enhance your own.

Not when you understand the tradeoffs being made. If you enable Advanced Data Protection and lose or forget your password, Apple cannot help you recover it. It makes sense that it's opt-in and users make a conscious choice to make that trade-off.

> all of them, time and again, have shown themselves to be totally untrustworthy in all possible ways

Sorry, but this seems like a very vague claim to me. Can you specifically point out a time where Apple proved itself untrustworthy in a way that impacts personal privacy?

When Apple says they treat my data in a specific way, then yes I do trust them. This promise is pretty central to my usage of them as a company. I'd change my mind if there was evidence to suggest they're lying, or have betrayed that trust, but I haven't seen any, and your post doesn't provide any either.

Thanks for your well-informed contributions to this thread. Food for thought. I must admit that I hadn't known the "factory environment" made such a big difference in outcomes.

In your opinion then, do we need to add a 3rd "variable" to the nature/nurture question? "Nature" is generally understood to be DNA, "Nurture" is generally accepted to be the post-birth development environment. If the "embyronic toolkit" at hand is so important, surely this popular concept needs a 3rd leg.

I'd also be interested in your thoughts on surrogacy. I had naively assumed that, so long as the surrogate mother was well-nourished, the baby would likely be fine. But it seems it's a lot more complicated than that, and I feel like a lot of people are underinformed about this.

No. I know it's nonsense even without reading it, because it starts from a false premise.

> This is probably the reason why everyone ~online~ (and not in departments) loved string theory two decades ago, and virulently hates it today

Hang on. Which one are you trying to say is right or wrong?

As far as I can tell, everyone should hate string theory, or at least the failures and pathologies of the scientific/academic system it has come to represent.

Also searchable by its other title "God of the Gaps Volume 6,000 - Forget the Other 5999, This Time We're Really Sure, Can You Stop Doing Research Now Please"

> Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans

Well, some would say if you took 10 identical fertilised eggs and put them in the same human in serial you'd get 10 different humans. Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything.

The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no?

> It comes down to the individual programmer(s).

I think you hit the nail here. People credit lisp because it is, or was, the language of the super high end geeky dev. But it's the high end dev self-selecting into lisp, not the language itself, that is the real advantage IMO.

Find a really good developer and let them use whatever they like. I've known the proverbial 10x (or even more!) dev in a number of languages, even "blub" ones like C#. A motivated, highly competent developer with an eye on the vision and skin in the game is the real "secret weapon" no matter which tool she happens to choose.

This is happening in Australia as well. I am looking forward to a legal decision that SAAS-mediated collusion is still collusion.

Er, I think you're agreeing with me?

> The Vision Pro is a big flop

Not to sound like an apple fanboy but is it, though? I don't think anyone expected v1 to set the world on fire. They put a normal-for-Apple amount of time into trying to polish it as best they could be I don't think anyone bought a Vision Pro not knowing it was kind of an experiment.

I'm never going to wear some ridiculous pair of ski goggles as a computer. But I'm also aware that some day we're going to have some kind of functioning AR, and it probably started with the ridiculous pair of ski goggles. Faulting Apple for taking their best shot at a v1 of that eventual product is just weird to me. Yeah, most people shouldn't buy it, but isn't this exactly what they should do? Get something out there, see what works and what doesn't, and start iterating?

I suppose we'll find out if Apple thought it was actually a "big flop" if they never make a version 2, but I suspect they're thinking a little more long term than this blog.

I see your definition of non-technical is a little different from mine...

My own anecdata: the (also two) ex-McKinsey people I've known seemed reasonably decent people at heart, but both possessed a toxic combination of:

(1) being absolutely intoxicated by their own old-money-fueled prestige academic/career path, which gave them a

(2) vastly overrated sense of their own knowledge, ability, wisdom, capability, importance, and general superiority to anyone not in possession of these stellar academic/prestige institutional credentials which was

(3) completely unfounded in every way.

I'm no longer impressed by Ivy League or any of these prestige institutional credentials.

In my experience there is absolutely nothing "simple" about a static website, especially one that is going to be used by other people. If it was my personal blog or something, sure. A website for a non-technical friend with a business who wants to be able to post updates, etc? Omg no. No no no no no.

Good managed wordpress starts at like $10-20/month. All those problems you mention go away, you can even do things like rollbacks if someone breaks something. If what you want to do fits into what WP can do pretty well, it's a no-brainer.

Yeah. My usual advice to anyone who asks is "Use Rails unless you have a very good reason not to". Those reasons do exist, but they're pretty specific and don't apply 90% of the time.

Of course if we're being really real, the first piece of advice should actually be "Can this be Wordpress?"

Sometimes, when I feel like I know the basic domain and can think of something reasonable that I could use as a "north star" test end-point, I work like this. Think anything that could be a unit test, or even a simple functional test. But when I don't know the domain, or if it's some complex system that I have to come up from scratch, writing tests first often makes no sense at all. Then I'd usually start literally drawing on paper, or typing descriptions of what it might do, then just start coding, and the tests come much, much later.

Right tool for the job, as always! The only thing I can't stand is blind zealotry to one way or the other. I've had to work with some real TDD zealots in the past, and long story short, I won't work with people like that again.

The omitted context in this comment is that the RoR stack propelled those 2 companies to the level of usage and viability where they needed, and could afford to hire, SRE engineers.

I'm not saying RoR doesn't have its faults, I've left it behind too. But I can't deny its productivity, and even in 2024 I would be hard pressed to name something better for a SAAS company starting out.

You've actually pointed out the fatal flaw in your own argument:

> you'd dump your resources into bioengineering something human-like that was better suited to space, and/or into robotics

And how do you even know what to bio-engineer before you know what the effects on humans in space are? How can you test what robots work in space without humans, at least at first? Your argument is basically a circular chicken-and-egg dead end where you don't want to do anything until you can do it properly, but you have no idea what "properly" even is because you haven't tried to do it, repeat.

> don't build the factory before you have an ACTUAL profitable product in mind

Yeah, but you build a mockup. You do some trial versions. You test things out, run some experiments, see what's possible. That's the phase we're in. Have some patience.

Geeze, I don't know what you're so animated about. The ISS isn't even that expensive.

Yes, spot on. I don't think I'm that much of an idealist, but you've got to have at least some idealism or no-one would ever do anything.

And as for the "fools wasting their money", let me invoke the great George Bernard Shaw:

> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

In arguing against others' excessive optimism, IMO you've slid into excessive pessimism, which is just as much of a fallacy. If you're going to be this reductive about it, why don't you plant a flag on a hill somewhere and tell me what ISN'T a "colossal waste of time and money kept alive primarily by stupid romanticism"?

Of course everything you said is technically true. All research and exploration is a colossal waste of time and money right up until it suddenly isn't. You can say this about basically every scientific development ever. And yet, some of those bets paid off, and here we are.

Playing the cynic is always easy and always safe. But a cynic never invented anything, and cynics don't move the world forward. I'm glad people are pushing the frontiers, even if for now it looks like "a colossal waste of time and money kept alive primarily by stupid romanticism".

I don't know what you guys are playing at. He said Thailand had "transitioned", past tense, to cars. And I walk, ride or drive past tuktuks outside of tourist centres almost every single day. The government is starting to try and phase out ICE tuktuks, because of noise and pollution concerns, and new electric ones are being introduced to replace them. They are not being phased out because they're deemed "unsafe".

Literally everything you said is wrong. Trivially, provably, wrong on all counts. Why are you making these type of comments?

> Props to Alephnerd and others

Be careful with some of the comments, and commenters, here. Just yesterday Alephnerd was confidently proclaiming there are no tuk-tuks in Thailand anymore. This is just.. completely, easily provably false and it's baffling why anyone would make such a claim. Source: me, who lives there. Fact-gathering methodology: looking out my window.

I would take anything from these commenters with astounding tales of the "inside scoop" with more than a pinch of salt. When there's a story with a bunch of mostly unverifiable claims, and the part that is verifiable turns out to be total nonsense, it makes me more than a little suspicious about the rest of it.

> Thailand has transitioned to cars. You don't see "Tuktuks" outside of tourist centers anymore.

What are you talking about? I live in Thailand and there's tuktuks everywhere, especially outside tourist centres. And I make heavy use of an electric tuktuk ride-sharing service called Muvmi.

Yes, the Hilux is the most popular personal vehicle choice country-wide, because that includes a lot of rural areas. It's certainly not the most popular choice in the city. And people don't buy tuktuks for personal use, or Hiluxes for ride sharing, so I really don't know what you are trying to say.

What a weird, confident, and completely wrong comment.

I can't edit my post now, but to be clear I was talking about kinetic energy. I would have thought momentum is not a very useful thing to talk about in a case like this where there was some pretty obvious transformation of energy into damage, etc.

As I said though, I'm far from a physicist so happy to be schooled if I'm way off...

Well, my service was envisioned more as a "whistleblower" kind of scenario where someone might be in possession of information that caused them some kind of fear, whether it be for their life, job, or what have you. Or, a trusted service where it might be crypto keys or other potentially extremely valuable information. Basically, high-value information of some sort which others might be very motivated to acquire, or block release of, or the like. The service was fully encrypted, provably, and my side only held partial keys.

I think the author of this project probably has a slightly different use case in mind, but it's easy to imagine how a project that had my focus could quite easily get embroiled in lawsuits or other drama. I'd still like to do it one day, but it would need to be under circumstances of absolute isolation from myself both physically and legally. For the time being, I don't have the resources and/or time to make that happen, so shelved it was.

Hm. I'm no physicist but I think your math is off. Remember it's velocity squared. Your car going that fast is has more than a kiloton of TNT or approaching 5 terajoules of energy... that can't be right.

For a 2 tonne car, my very rough math puts it at more like 2100 mph.

I had a very similar idea to this a long time ago and built a basic thing, registered a domain etc, was ready to put it live.. and then I spoke to a lawyer, who told me to think very carefully about whether I really wanted to deal with the possible legal and personal ramifications of sending potentially explosive material on or around someone's death. I decided I probably didn't want to so I shelved it.

I think it's important something like this exists but I'd also ask the author if he's really thought this through.

Sorry for the tiktok link, but this was it - pretty impressive https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSFU7hr3k/