LegibleCrimson

Seeing patterns clear as day is, in fact, bias. My condition heightens my biases and makes me confront how flawed reasoning about the "obvious" is. I wouldn't have brought it up if I thought you might try some weird ad hominem about how anxiety makes me immune to "real science". I haven't been attacking you. I just don't think your methods are sound. I don't know what your quote is coming from either, because I didn't say "seeing things that aren't there" either. I said reading more into things than are there and seeing patterns where they don't exist. This is the basis of things like numerology, homeopathy, racism, and many other human failings. The obvious, "clear as day" things can be actively dangerous.

How about your data? Like I said before, I'd be happy to see the data. You've thrown some numbers off the top of your head, but I'd rather see the raw gathered data.

That's fairly rude. My point was that what manifests in myself as being negative manifests in other people as simply reading more into things than is actually there. Even trivial experiments are prone to biases.

I feel the same way, but people I know like their TV and I don't judge them for that. I have my own idle happinesses. If my favorite things to do were available on the same terms as modern television, I'd probably be pretty unhappy about it.

The unfair bit is the filtering happening in your own brain. Without actual hard statistics, it's an anecdote. I don't care about scientific consensus, but I do care about process and data.

If I try it myself, it'll be done right, and I won't keep the stats in my head. I know how fallible my own perception is, and as somebody with an anxiety disorder, I know how easy it is to read patterns out of thin air. For some people, reading patterns that don't exist seems mystical or illuminating, for me, it's a sense of constant unease and fear. I can't be universally open to just accepting things, or reading patterns with my intuition, because my intuition is that everything is potentially poisonous and I'm definitely going to die in less than a week.

No channel 4 content still sucks. I have no legal avenue to even pay to watch the Stand Up to Cancer Bake Off episodes, unless I move to the UK.

I'm pirating something that I would gladly pay for if they'd just let me. I'm not going to do a VPN; that would be more work than piracy in the first place (and besides, Channel 4 demands a UK address and even a UK credit card). It's downright ridiculous.

Most people I know went from dealing with live TV, high prices, and having to pirate what wasn't airing to paying for one or two streaming services to get everything they want. Then half of them kept getting new services and pay more than they did for cable in the first place, and the other half rotate services, pay less than they did for cable, and still have to wait to watch what they want and pirate some things.

It's better than cable was, no argument, but it's like we passed right through the bright future, ripe with possibilities, and landed at marginal improvement.

It does when your friends are also watching and somebody texts you "GOOOOOOAAALL" 30 seconds before you see it.

That's an experiment that is extremely susceptible to biases and unintentional information sharing, including things like expressions on either party's face. Not to mention your very subjective determination of whether or not the predictor is confident, or the fallibility of human memory and experience.

For that experiment to be fair, you'd have to interact with them, and then they would have to write their guess and confidence down without you knowing what they're writing, and then afterward you'd have to collate the information.

This is the common thread that I've always seen, as someone who used to be very interested in the paranormal and supernatural. When you actually start measuring things properly and controlling for biases, the supernatural mysteriously disappears. It's only there when it can't be proven. Human imagination is extremely powerful. Remember the story of Clever Hans. Everybody, including the trainer, believed the horse could do math: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

This story comes into my head whenever I see psychics and readers of anything like this. Nobody is lying. Everybody believes it, even when it's not real. You can read body language and pick up on things without even understanding how. It's interesting, because you seem to be the opposite of me. I started out open to much of what I now consider hoodoo, and became a naturalist and a skeptic through my experiences. You had the reverse path. I suspect the answer may lay closer to the middle than either side, but I'll keep with what can be objectively shown in well-controlled tests.

I regularly can't do that in LaTeX due to changes in packages. Yeah, the core is stable, but dependencies are still an issue in TeX land.

Science is specifically a process of cooperative knowledge building, using testable explanations and minimizing human biases. I would like to hear about your experiments, though. I don't have full faith in scientific journals, and they've had loads of problems in regards to reproducibility and legitimacy of data, but the process is the best we have for determining truth.

You don't blind people to their own birthdays, you mix real astrological predictions and readings with randomized ones, and see if the results fared better than random chance. I'm very skeptical of astrology (to be completely honest, I completely reject it), but I am trying to take part in a real conversation here. I believe that astrology is complete bunk, wall to wall, but I'm open to reading more on it and talking to you about it. I don't want to attack anybody for their beliefs.

Yeah, it's probably a regional thing. Here in Colorado, most cars don't really get that gross. I take a hose to mine like 3 times a year and dry it with a towel and it looks pretty nearly pristine. They'll only get very dusty if you take them on dirt roads a lot, or keep them in a garage all the time without ever cleaning them. Ones kept outside will keep mostly clean due to the rain, with maybe a little bit of grime under overhangs, and some sun damage on the paint.

You could also provide some evidence instead of telling me to gather my own. I'd happily read some more double blind studies on the effectiveness of astrology, most of what I've read points to it all being complete bunk.

This is a 2.4 million year cycle, not something that can lend any credence to the idea that the arrangement of the planets at birth has any effect on a person. The arrangement of your house or neighborhood has a stronger gravitational effect on you at a young age than the planets. Feng shui would be a better predictor of people's personalities than astrology.

No, that's how optional flags should work. I mean how specifically -i works. With GNU sed:

-lN, --line-length=N, -l N, --line-length N

All work the same, set line length to N.

-iSUFFIX --in-place=SUFFIX, -i NEXTARG --in-place NEXTARG

Don't all work the same. The argument is only actually taken if it's attached to the flag directly. In the latter two forms, no backup is made.

GNU mktemp is similarly annoying, but different, with the --tmpdir flag.

-pDIR, --tmpdir=DIR, -p DIR, --tmpdir NEXTARG

Only the last one is different. If you use --tmpdir literally without attaching an argument to it, it defaults to $TMPDIR, otherwise it takes in DIR.

This is inconsistent and unpredictable. A flag should either take an argument or not.

I also dislike Python's argparse variable-length nargs behavior for similar reasons. Even with an integer nargs, it makes for an ugly command line, but with variable-length ones it just gets hideous, and can make it impossible to pass an argument beginning with a hyphen to a flag.

I can agree to a point, but it's not very scalable. Imagine if the safety of every bridge and building came down to each construction worker caring on an individual level. At some point, there need to be processes that ensure success, not just individual workers caring enough.

Secure software happens because of a culture of building secure software, or processes and requirements. NASA doesn't depend on individual developers "just doing the right thing", they have strict standards.

I hate that behavior of GNU sed (and also of mktemp). Having a flag optionally take an argument is just so weird and surprising, and the syntax is always unexpected and inconsistent.

It's not just "progress" vs "no progress". Some technical innovations, like leaded gasoline, have had more of a negative impact than a positive. It's not a binary, and not all technology is without cost.

The argument against current AI progress isn't anti-technology, it's pointing out that these things can have a hugely negative impact that's mostly being shouted down or swept under the rug in the name of "progress". The climate crisis is pretty serious business, and the AI power consumption is making it worse, not better. The risk of huge amounts of unemployment are being mostly handwaved away as "yeah, that's not gonna happen, we always make jobs out of somewhere".

You replied directly to a comment about currency, and replaced the word "currency" with "gold". How is that not comparing gold to a currency?

Bitcoin can't handle more than 10 transactions per second. That's absolutely useless for anything beyond a toy currency.

I'm not against the idea of a fully-digital currency, even a crypto-currency, but Bitcoin is never going to be viable.

I read books pretty sparingly, but my wife reads about 150 books a year. We heavily exercise our local library.

Yeah, I keep seeing suggestions like this and I just don't get it. Like the only way people can fathom something being available is if it's for sale. We really need shorter copyright terms more than anything else.

I don't think that's what the word "private" means. It's not the same thing as "honest".

Compare the data. Mozilla may be less honest than Google and Microsoft (a premise I also disagree with), but they are demonstrably harvesting much less data.

Yes. Literally every thread about monopolies.

My Comcast gigabit internet is only 25Mbps up. I'm pretty unhappy about it, as somebody who regularly has to push large docker images and wait forever each time.

Would be pretty easy for a motivated corporation to set up a branch composed entirely of those indigenous people for the purpose, or to form a partnership with a company of those indigenous people.

I don't understand the logic. They're more private for admitting that they don't respect your privacy?

TLS is more costly to implement than simply not encrypting or signing anything.

Sometimes cost of implementation isn't the only consideration.

I'm kind of an AI pessimist, but I think that sounds like it could be a wonderful society. When the only work you need to do is work that you actually want to do. It could free up people to actually chase their dreams and achieve what they want to, without having to constantly chase subsistence.

The reason I'm a pessimist is that I mostly see society preserving the status quo. I don't see AI democratizing things and freeing us, because we have fetishized the concepts of work and profit that we can't imagine a society that functions properly without demanding those two things be put above all else.

I don't envision a dystopia or a utopia, I envision a future where AI disenfranchises people who should be taken care of, bolsters profits of the already powerful, and replaces the most fulfilling human pursuits without actually saving people from unfulfilling toil, mostly because society will bend backwards to try to preserve the status quo.

I think that's impossible. Bevy works heavily with Rust types and generic monomorphization. You couldn't do that in another language without literally generating Rust code and calling the compiler.

Exactly, I'm sure good projects exist, but that involves active goodwill from the company. The incentives are loaded in the favor of exploitation rather than public good.