BuyMyBitcoins

;)

Even the wink emoticon includes a semicolon.

That being said, we were also advised to “use at most one semicolon in the writing section of the SAT. Proper usage will help your score. But, you better make sure you’ve used it correctly.”

Immigration when done right, can have a positive impact. Both economically and culturally. However, I think mass migration into declining populations risks having the opposite effect. I’d like to present a historical example.

Hawaii has a famously multicultural society. That being said, it became that way because rich plantation owners simply wanted cheap labor. In the span of a few decades the native Hawaiians became a minority in their own land. Traditional Hawaiian culture is practically extinct as a result. The economic situation of native Hawaiian communities remains impoverished to this day. They wound up being marginalized and almost all of the economic gains that resulted from the mass migration went to those who implemented it. Going further, the Kingdom was eventually overthrown. This was partially enabled by the fact that the new population was so fractured and disunited.

Since statehood, the politics of the state have been largely been controlled by Japanese Americans. Japan was the largest source of immigrants to the Kingdom. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, however. I allege no racism on the part of the descendants of plantation workers. I just wanted to illustrate how a society can be radically altered through mass migration in a relatively short amount of time.

I can only speculate, but I imagine if the Hawaiian people in the 1800’s had known this would happen, they would have chosen a depressed economy instead.

Why deal with six months of vicious comments alongside well intentioned pitiful condolences when you could only have to deal with one or two month’s worth?

I would have done the same thing. For what it’s worth, I think an exceedingly small number of people can actually refuse to let those who hate your guts “live rent free in your head”.

Sometimes it is good to go against the grain.

I also feel like Microsoft’s heavy handed dark patterns trick less computer savvy people into using it, and those people probably aren’t aware of how much info Microsoft is collecting about them. As a result, I seriously question that Edge’s market share is organic because people actually like it.

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

-Aristotle, Civilization V (2010)

I posit that engineers and computer scientists gave extra time and attention towards accommodating Greek because they were so familiar with seeing and using those glyphs during their education. They knew that those symbols would be encountered in English, even before full internationalization efforts would take place. Whereas Turkish was merely an afterthought.

Edit: This post of mine is unfounded/inaccurate, thank you to dhosek for providing a proper explanation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905574

As for UTI reduction, I should have framed this differently. There is a reduction, but is that reduction worth it? Tonsillectomies used to be routine, but now they aren’t and are only suggested if there is a chronic problem. Surveys have been conducted and found that an overwhelming number of intact men would not have the procedure done just to have fewer UTI’s. I for one, would rather treat such infections as they arise rather than amputate some tissue just so that I could deal with those uncommon infections less often.

>”We accept the practice for newborns under the logic that it will be less traumatic and less risky than doing it when they come of age later in life.”

It is said that it is less traumatic to do this at birth, but I question this. I suspect people only believe this because babies cannot articulate what is happening to them and none of us are able to remember anything from our infancy. I have no idea what babies “think” but if we agree that this surgery is traumatic and risky, I simply don’t believe one can argue that it is less traumatic and less risky for a human who is only a few days old. A newborn cannot possibly understand and contextualize the intense pain that it is being subjected to, both during the procedure and during the recovery. Whereas an adolescent or an adult opting for this procedure would be informed beforehand, give explicit consent, and be given sufficient anesthesia.

From what I’ve heard about the Rust community, you may have made an unintentionally witty pun.

As an outsider, it seems like the moniker of woke best applies to the pattern of thinking that broad problems have a simple and heavy handed solutions. Furthermore, criticizing such solutions will put you in the same camp as those committing the offense, even though you may agree about the problem.

There is no need for this condescending attitude. The average citizen has virtually no say on these things and our infrastructure was decided decades before most of us were born. Major cities are investing in transit improvements but the nature of these projects means they will take over a decade to reach fruition. We aren’t doing nothing.

Alas, Windows 11 is merely rounded corners, a worse file explorer, telemetry galore, and a mandatory Microsoft account meant to hock OneDrive and Copilot on unsuspecting laypersons everywhere.

Even simple applications like calculator and photo viewer now launch with a noticeable delay, no doubt because they have to try and communicate with some Microsoft service somewhere in the cloud before letting someone use an application locally.

I’ve also encountered several “load bearing bugs” where subsequent integrations/workflows were designed to accommodate the bug. Sometimes this was because the bug was known but couldn’t be fixed at the time, or the developers assumed the program was working correctly and accommodated the bug thinking it was expected behavior.

Therefore fixing the original bug would raise questions about what else needs to be updated as well.

Furthermore, the challenge with AI is that even though it can deliver some shockingly impressive results, it also generates some bafflingly stupid responses, as well as answers that are seemingly correct but are never less wrong in ways that are hard to determine. Those hallucinations really shatter the illusion of quality and reliability, which ultimately undermines confidence in the functionality as a whole.

Given that, Apple is stuck trying to catch up to the rest of the products in the AI space while also realizing that everyday AI is nowhere near as polished as Apple would expect it to be. So the more Apple pushes AI, the more customers are likely to pick up on the errors and inadequacies of the product.

Even though other AI assistants suffer from the same fundamental problems, the ones from Apple Intelligence are going to seem more embarrassing because of Apple’s brand image.

Pardon my ignorance here, but don’t the central banks of most nations hold foreign currencies in a strategic reserve? I feel like we probably already have Ruble reserve.

The house would organize itself around voting blocs and certain representatives would naturally end up exercising an undue amount of sway because they control those blocs. With each individual representative having much less influence, they’d have no choice but to gang together to try and achieve something.

To steelman the argument though, it seems reasonable to audit these recipients so that we can get their true birthdate entered. The number of recipients who lack a valid birthdate because they found a way to fraudulently claim benefits is likely non-zero, but probably low. But in any event, cleaning up the data can’t be a bad thing.