vharuck

No need to invoke a hypothetical water example, just look to how Nestlé pushed baby formula in developing countries¹:

>For example, IBFAN claims that Nestlé distributes free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

100 years ago, horror stories featured wizard-like scientists using electricity to perform magic. A few decades after that, it was nuclear fission. Then quantum mechanics decades after that.

Magical thinking will always live in the new.

>Retroactive amendments change the legal effect of provisions for a past period — an amendment published today can declare that it applies from last year. This retroactively alters the legal state at historical points in time.

I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past events and entities." It states, "This applies to entities with the quality of having done an action or met some quality in the past."

I'm not familiar with the EU law system the article is based on. How would it handle a case where a person was found in violation of a retroactive law, and their past violating action was done along with another action that is considered illegal when done during a crime? For example, if somebody wrote that they never used illegal drugs on a government form, and a drug they had used is later retroactively declared illegal, can they now be prosecuted for having "lied" on the form?

Did both the president and vice president attend past dinners? I thought protocol was to rarely have them in the same location, in case of something like this.

A lot of Ukiyo-e wood prints have small details that mean a lot to locals. I enjoy learning about them on the NHK's English channel.

In this case, the boats are fast (each has a bunch of crewmen) and were used to catch valuable fish. And the boats on the right have two people not at work (barely discernable in TFA's recreation). Those people were on break, getting ready to replace tired oarsmen. That way, the boat could be moving at all times.

I (or really, my parents) were burned by something like this recently. They bought my kid an FAO Schwarz marble run tower for Christmas. It's made of terrible plastic, with rough seams, and every play session ends when a marble gets stuck somewhere nearly impossible to reach. It requires partial disassembly, bending, and a screwdriver to pry things out.

I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked at reviews on Amazon to see if anyone else had these problems, and they had. The FAO Schwarz brand had been bought by the ThreeSixty Group in 2016. Now it's just a way to polish the image of cheap toys.

> Sure it serves their immediate purposes but what are the long term consequences of this? Do these people realize that every time they sell a piece of their soul to increase their personal wealth it destroys a piece of their society? Do they care?

It makes me wonder, at what amount of wealth does it stop being "F%ck you" money and start being a ranking on the scoreboard?

Gift link to NY Times article by the authors of the act:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/opinion/section-702-surve...

People need to be careful about buying into the shorthand lingo with LLMs. They do not learn like we do. At the lowest level, they predict which tokens follow a body of tokens. This lets them emulate knowledge in a very useful way. This is similar to a time series model of user activity: the time series model does not keep tabs on users to see when they are active, it has not read studies about user behavior, it just reflects a mathematical relationship between points of data.

For an LLM and this "vague" domain expertise, even if none of the LLM's training material includes certain nuggets of wisdom, if the material includes enough cases of problems and the solutions offered by domain experts, we should expect the model to find a decent relationship between them. That the LLM has never ingested an explicit documentation of the reasoning is irrelevant, because it does not perform reasoning.

They aren't just amazingly efficient in converting calories to protein, they're great at eating things without much other (agricultural) value to us. They eat the invasive spotted lantern fly!

I agree with the gist of your points, but not much with these two:

>followed by white-collar business formation as customers realize that product quality went to shit when all the people were laid off.

These will be rare boutique affairs. Based on how mass production and cheap shipping played out, most people value price over quality. The economy will rearrange itself around those savings, making boutique products and services expensive.

>mass cheap fake media will likely lead to its fragmentation as any old Joe with a ChatGPT account can put out mass quantities of bullshit.

We have this today. And that's not a "same as it ever was" dismissal. Today, there are a lot of terminally online people posting the equivalent of propaganda (and actual propaganda). Social media pushes hot takes in audiences' faces, a portion of them reshare it, and it spreads exponentially. The only limitation to propaganda today is how much time the audience spends staring at the "correct" content provider.

>if you value say "economy" more than "time", you spend a lot of time to save a few cents, but if you reverse that stack order your spend extra cents to avoid spending the time. If the person you're dating has a very different stack than you do, it will be a source of problems going forward and doesn't suggest you'll have a successful marriage.

This exact difference exists between my wife and I. For example, when her car needed a replacement part, she enlisted her dad in an effort to find the cheapest part on eBay, attempt to replace it themselves, and then shop around for the cheapest mechanic to install the part they bought. When my car needed a part replaced, I took it to the dealership where I bought it. I figured they'd have the part on hand and know how to do it right. They would overcharge, but not a criminal amount.

We've come to an understanding: I like to use money to reduce stress. She likes to save money because it gives her a feeling of accomplishment. Not very different from hobbies.

Men are also often the primary breadwinners in families, so they feel the need to take a higher paying job. In families where the husband's job pays well, the wife's career can be decided by personal fulfillment. Teachers are respected (but not paid well), nurses are respected and can earn a good amount, and social work is a very self-fulfilling role (I don't think society holds them in esteem more than other professionals).

If we want men to take up certain roles, we need to pay more. That's the simplicity of capitalism and free markets. We bend ourselves into knots trying to find clever and (maybe) cheaper solutions to thorny problems.

In my experience, all wealth comes down to either (1) producing and using something yourself, or (2) convincing somebody else to give it to you. Most of us trade labor or goods for wealth, convincing others that our stuff is worth the wealth they give.

If you want more wealth for your work, you need the other side to value it more. Better goods and labor are the obvious choice, but that's difficult. Better schmoozing is less effort and good payoff. Epstein was a paragon of this skill. Also companies that spend tons on advertising, like Coca Cola. Everyone knows their soda exists, but the ads are meant to convince you that you need one right now. No need to improve their product or innovate cheaper production. They just lean on the persuasion.

I can't think of a way to avoid this. If you want more money, it has to come from somebody. How could there be an unbiased and impersonal way of redistributing it?

>What dissenting voices are being imprisoned?

There have been a lot of political prosecutions of people who disagree. James Comey, Leticia James, John Bolton, Mark Kelly. Luckily, grand juries and judges have prevented them from getting convictions. But dragging them through the legal process is punishment enough. The administration's incompetence at imprisoning political opponents isn't a reason to forgive them.

ICE has targeted protestors, and Rubio made it clear the targeting was intentional policy.

If we look beyond "imprisonment" and include "illegally or unfairly punish dissenting voices to keep them from having a voice," there are a lot more victims. Jimmy Kimmel, reporters at the Pentagon, openly supporting an ally's takeover of Warner Brothers to control CNN.

>Even if we accept that this would've been enough for a complete shift in how women give birth within France, how does that spread across the world?

France was renowned as being at the frontier of medicine. At least, according to the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum (which I'd recommend visiting for anyone in the area). People around the world looked to it for cutting edge techniques.

>We're fine, the trick is to remember to GET OFF THE INTERNET and remember that reality isn't the same as the Internet.

I can understand how somebody could hold onto this comfort: it used to be (mostly) true. Political "scandals" were usually either truly bad but localized (e.g. a politician caught and kicked out for bribery) or performative furor (e.g. a lapel pin).

It's different now. Those times were our "pro wrestling" era: earnest professionals who put in the work but also put on a show to keep the fans. No matter how dirty the script got, everyone made sure the lights stayed on. Now we're in the "teenage street gang" era. The "show" is actually how they see the world, participants literally delight in physical pain, and citizens on the sidelines are only terrorized.

How anyone could think things would be fine after what the childhood vaccine panel tried to do is beyond me. Or Noem withholding relief funds. Or blanket tariffs without any further plan for improving our industries. Those acts have huge negative effects across the population. The vast majority of citizens have been needlessly harmed by those choices.

>4. Use acronyms to keep the code terse. Real men never define acronyms; they understand them genetically.

I'll see this and raise inherited SAS code where data sets in the process were named "AAA", "BBB", and so on. To prevent any kind of naming reason, even chronological, new data sets could adopt others' when the existing data set would no longer show up in the program. Which was so helpful when updates needed the previous data.

To swing Pennsylvania, they'd probably just need to send ICE into Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Tell them to ignore anybody with a MAGA hat. Big and blue cities in purple states are the only necessary targets.

Remember that war crimes were defined to protect civilians. It's usually better for a civilian to be on the losing side in a war with no war crimes, than the winning side of a war with many war crimes.

Honestly, I thought part of MAD was how, once a nuclear missile was launched, it would be better for other nuclear states to decimate the country of origin than to wait and figure out where it would hit.

The pattern only matches if both ends are word boundaries. So "diffs" won't match, but "Oh, ffs!" will. It's also why they had to use the pattern "shit(ty|tiest)" instead of just "shit".

>In the fall of 1919, Faber Birren entered the Art Institute at the University of Chicago, only to drop out in the spring of 1921 to commit himself to self-education in color, as such a program didn’t exist.

The German word for color is "Farbe," which is an anagram of this guy's name. So I'm chalking one more point up to the universe being a simulation written by a cheeky developer.

>They already had the network effects and no real competitors.

Meta's biggest competitor was users' personal lives, not any other web service. They have been ruthless in crushing that competition.

>It certainly seems that there was an intentional decision to disband departments in the military last year that were intended to confirm targets are appropriate before a strike (although I can't find a reference now).

On the Media recently interviewed somebody involved with that effort, and they discuss the bombing of the school.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/hegseths-p...

My favorite example of poka-yoke is when the pieces and hardware in build-it-yourself furniture kits won't fit anywhere except the correct places: two screws only have the same width if they're interchangeable, wood bars refuse to go in unless facing the right direction, etc.

>But why should the government force me to change that by taxing it?

Because the government ends up paying for the medical treatment of a lot of smokers when they're older. And it's incredibly expensive. You can say you won't rely on government funds, but there's no way to actually opt out of Medicare for life or sign up to never be guaranteed stabilization when you show up at a hospital.

Nicotine is also notoriously addictive, which weakens the "my choice" argument.

>Why tax sugary drinks

That's totally a nanny state thing. Personally, I would mildly support it. But it's not a hill I'd die on.

>or ban or criminalize drugs other than the caffeine, nicotine and alcohol?

Hard drugs cause blight. People don't mind so much if they see a soda can on their street, but if they see a used needle they'll move. And again, any society with a safety net has an interest in preventing common causes of people falling into it.

>why not ban dangerous sports, too?

It hasn't proven to be a big problem at the population level. Hell, public health experts would love to have that problem, because it'd mean more people were exercising.

People who make data visualizations should try to learn the "rules of thumb" to not confuse or exclude readers:

1) Avoid contrasting red/green and blue/yellow, as these are common colorblind pairs.

2) Pick shades that still look different when shown in grayscale.

3) All bar charts should have 0 at one end.

4) Please no 3-D pie charts.

To find good color palettes, check out https://colorbrewer2.org

>We are getting to this weird situation where instead of Alice sending a message to Bob, Alice sends the message to her AI, which sends it to Bob's AI, which then tries to recover Alice's original message.

Somebody's going to revolutionize how we use AI by creating an algorithm where the output of an AI is modified so that it has fewer tokens but results in a similar-enough input for another AI to respond to. Like dropping purely syntactic words or using small synonyms. It'll be a bizarre shorthand that makes no sense to humans, riddled with artifacts of the model.

Or we're going to realize that creating output with one AI for another to ingest is needlessly breaking a session into different pieces. But that would mean a lot of professional emailers getting optimized out.

It's like going to a hardware store for a root canal. The goal might be laudable, but the execution and results are just as important.