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throwaway74432

310 karma · joined March 8, 2024

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throwaway74432··on Diet May Be More Important Than Exercise for Long-Term Weight Control (2021)
"weight is not really a great measure" followed by saying you measure yourself by looking in the mirror, on an article about weight control is a pretty confusing way to communicate that you measure your health by looking in the mirror. you've made a few other confusing statements, like "Long term, higher intensity cardio builds muscle", so take this entire thread as another data point that you are not communicating your thoughts clearly or precisely.

>In any case, scales can lie too.

Can you stop with low effort bait please? Is it really worth our combined time to draw people in with silly statements about miscalibrated scales?

throwaway74432··on Diet May Be More Important Than Exercise for Long-Term Weight Control (2021)
You're changing the subject now. The article wasn't about measuring health in general, it was about weight control. And the line of discussion that we're on is a good measure of weight. A good measure of weight is different from a good measure of health. I'm not interested in discussing the latter.

Also, you seem to have missed the point of me mentioning measuring hair, which wasn't to say it was a good idea, but to say how you could do it if you wanted to. You're getting hung up on why anyone would want to do that, which misses the point.

throwaway74432··on Diet May Be More Important Than Exercise for Long-Term Weight Control (2021)
You're right, it isn't complicated. The beauty of a true good measure (ie, a scale or other measuring device) is that you can track actual discrete progress over a very short time span. If you didn't know your hair grew, could you track the amount that it grows in 24 hours by looking in a mirror? With a measuring tool, you can. That's a good measure. Compared to it, looking in the mirror is a poor measure. That's why scientists use measuring devices when trying to track quantities, instead of "eyeballing" it and claiming its good enough because they noticed some change.
throwaway74432··on Diet May Be More Important Than Exercise for Long-Term Weight Control (2021)
It sounds like you want someone to agree with you that your memory plus your subjective view of yourself is a "good measure" of progress, despite the existence of scales and measuring tapes, which dwarf your subjective memories in terms of reliability and accuracy. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
throwaway74432··on FTC announces rule banning noncompetes
Does anyone know the history of noncompetes? It seems like a case of Tacit Collusion[1]. But if there is no competitive advantage to the noncompete, how did it catch on?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion

throwaway74432··on Diet May Be More Important Than Exercise for Long-Term Weight Control (2021)
Because "a good measure" does not change based on how you feel.
throwaway74432··on The problem with invariants is that they change over time
Yes, it's called evolution. Software evolves as well as scales. Scaling is architected growth, evolution is unarchitected growth. (Sometimes scaling results in unarchitected growth, if the architecture was not reasonable.) There are many patterns for handling evolution, but they almost always involve a pattern outside of the existing architecture (a super architecture) to lean on for support. In my opinion, codifying and optimizing these super architecture patterns is one of the highest goals in software engineering because they allow for less error prone evolutions.
throwaway74432··on Anonymizing research funding applications could reduce 'prestige privilege'
Honestly I think that you are trolling me, but I am trying to assume good faith. In your first reply to me, you said "[an explanation is that] systemic racism in education in the past has left black applicants less well prepared than other applicants." Now you are saying this is a shaky hypothesis and has minimal impact on the applications?
throwaway74432··on Anonymizing research funding applications could reduce 'prestige privilege'
It's not crazy to assume that people with less resources and support will do worse. The logic is sound and its in fact the standard explanation (along with discrimination) as to why marginalized groups do worse.
throwaway74432··on Anonymizing research funding applications could reduce 'prestige privilege'
If they knew that blacks have less resources and are therefore on average worse applicants as a result, then they knew that a bad application statistically meant a black applicant. So by not picking the worse application, they were in effect being statistically racist.
throwaway74432··on Anonymizing research funding applications could reduce 'prestige privilege'
>>The study adds to a growing body of knowledge about what anonymizing funding applications can—and can’t—do. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, experimented with concealing information about applicants’ identities from peer reviewers as part of an effort to understand why Black applicants are 35% less likely than white researchers to receive grants. The results were mixed—Black applicants’ scores did not improve, but those for white researchers decreased—and some experts were skeptical about whether the reviewers truly didn’t know the identities of the applicants.

Humans are such amazing pattern matchers. Even with the identities concealed, the reviewers were able to figure out who was black and discriminate against them in favor of white applicants. This level of systemic racism is absolutely dumbfounding.

throwaway74432··on Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
So just like a non-self-organizing department then?
throwaway74432··on Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
And people are flabbergasted at the healthy skepticism towards pharmaceutical companies, when they literally treat people like expendable cattle at every chance they get.
throwaway74432··on House votes to ban TikTok in the U.S. if it's not sold
You think a little hypocrisy will get in the way of political posturing? It never does.
throwaway74432··on Women Who Code Closing
You fire people until you can afford the people who are left. It's far from insurmountable. Instead, they chose to fire everyone all at once.
throwaway74432··on Women Who Code Closing
"insurmountable challenges." That rules out funding and community engagement, since both of those can be improved. The problem must have been systemic...
throwaway74432··on Women Who Code Closing
Were there any warning signs of this decision? I quick look at their blog[1] doesn't raise any red flags. Who knew about this? I'm sure the community would have kept them going if they had known. Is there more to the story?

1. https://womenwhocode.com/blog

throwaway74432··on Creating sexually explicit deepfake images to be made offence in UK
Wait until your Neuralink can show what you're visualizing.
throwaway74432··on Ask HN: Is RAG the Future of LLMs?
I suspect we'll discover/invent an IR (intermediate representation) that behaves like RAG in that it primes the LLM to produce a specific bit of knowledge/facts, but the IR is a lot less like normal english, and more like a strange pseudo-english.
throwaway74432··on Super Mario 64's invisible walls explained [video]
I'm not dismissing anyone, nor am I a "DARE kid", nor am I projecting my own "meaningless life." I'm simply sharing my own unprocessed genuine reaction to this kind of content, and trying to see if anyone else can relate to it. You obviously don't, which is fine, but I don't see why you seem to be taking it personally.
throwaway74432··on Super Mario 64's invisible walls explained [video]
I feel very deeply that my life is full of meaning, so it can't be projection. Not interested in trying to suppress my feelings with drugs either.
throwaway74432··on Super Mario 64's invisible walls explained [video]
I don't mean to knock this video or anyone that gets a kick out of it. But does anyone else feel a sense of despair when they see that someone has put so much time and effort into something like this? I feel the same about speedrunners. Yes, they aren't hurting anyone, and yes they're following their passion, but I still feel an instinctual sense of despair when I see someone work so hard on something like this. I'm sincerely not trying to hate on anyone.
throwaway74432··on [dead]
What is it called when two nations launch retaliatory attacks in self defense?
throwaway74432··on Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America
When you use circular definitions, as you're doing now, you can re-define a word to be whatever is convenient to you. If Christianity is also defined by what Christians do, then what defines a Christian? You have to ground it in a concrete definition at some point, and that definition is: the teachings of Christ. If a Christian acts in a way that is against the teachings of Christ, then that is not Christian behavior, and is not representative of Christianity. That's a pretty simple and unambiguous concept.

Your "No True Scotsman" variant just shows that you don't really grasp this idea. Ironically, what you're doing by making Christianity a grab-bag of bad behavior from people you don't like, instead of grounding it in a clear and unambiguous definition, is a clever perversion of this fallacy.

throwaway74432··on Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America
Christianity is Christ's teachings, and any other definition is a strawman. What you're talking about is man's sinful nature, and that is separate.
throwaway74432··on ULIDs and Primary Keys (2022)
It's a security vs convenience tradeoff. For most people, making the ID practically unguessable, while also preserving index locality in databases, is the right balance.
throwaway74432··on Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America
I'm asking you because you're the one who just laid the blame of the last 2000 years of bad things on Christ's teachings, and not on mankind's natural behavior. Somehow it was what Christ taught, because it didn't stop people from doing bad things.
throwaway74432··on Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America
The evidence of the overkill hypothesis stands against your lack of evidence that it never happened before.
throwaway74432··on Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America
Where does Christ's teachings tell people to do those things?
throwaway74432··on Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America
No, my complaint is the pervasive anti-American history. People get actually upset if you notice it and mention it. As if the default behavior should be to cheerfully self-flagellate for American history.
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