OkayPhysicist

I'm pretty sure the causality is backwards. People aren't drinking less because they hear people saying it's poison, people are more willing to tolerate people calling it poison because they're drinking less. People have preached about the evils of drinking to excess as far back as we have records of people discussing stuff. It just got ignored, because it's a crucial social lubricant, and thus everybody imbibes anyway. With the rise of addictive social media and gaming, we've seen a decrease in socialization in meatspace, and that's where people drink. If you're missing out on the positive aspects of alcohol anyway, then it's a lot easier to listen to people talking about the negative aspects. And then those voices get amplified to justify not doing the thing you weren't doing anyway.

And that's what the beer is for. Your ancestors figured this out thousands of years ago: alcohol makes socializing easier, and more enjoyable.

There's a compelling argument that civilization itself is a bunch of scaffolding around beer making. Human social lives have been shaped by alcohol since before agriculture. Conflating having a few drinks with substance abuse is like saying eating lunch is an eating disorder.

Society being healthier is a good thing, but not at the cost of human socialization.

It is a generational thing, but IMO you've got the wrong root cause. Discussion of the dangers of drinking stems from people choosing not to drink, and people are choosing not to drink because they are attending the kinds of social gatherings that are lubricated by alcohol less.

As such, I'm hesitant to point to the decline in alcohol sales as a public health win. If people were drinking less simply because they were choosing to drink less, that's probably a public health win. If people are drinking less because their social lives have evaporated, that's probably really bad.

You're confusing SoCal and the Central Valley here. Southern California (LA, San Diego, the Mojave Desert) doesn't have enough water. The Central Valley, fed by the Sacramento River from the Sierras and Cascades, and then extended south with canals, has plenty of water for agriculture. In fact, it was quite prone to flooding before we engineered the water shed.

All of which is irrelevant to the wine conversation, because the relatively dry climate is exactly what makes the Napa and Livermore valleys some of the best in the world to grow grapes. You've got good soil, dry summers allowing for control over how much water the grapes get that make them grow more flavorful, and very few frosts. The fact that the region gets almost all of their rainfall during the winter also helps avoid the grapes going to mold.

Huh? We've got the best farmland in the US, possibly the world. It'd be a terrible shame not to take advantage of it.

> Calling a named individual an "absolute scumbag" in this context is fine grounds as any for a lawsuit.

Based on your misunderstandings of US defamation laws, and the fact that you jumped to stabbing over shooting, it sounds like you've been steeping too much in eurotrash defamation rules. Here in America, truth and opinion are both perfect defenses against defamation lawsuits. My comment consisted only of true facts (the man donated to support prop 8), and the opinions that follow from those facts (the man is a scumbag). You can only sue someone for lying about you, and for public figures like a CEO, you need to prove they were lying on purpose.

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The US has been prepping for a showdown with China over Taiwan for quite a while now. It's the primary focus of US military strategy, and considering a when, not if. When we're sinking their ships (and them ours), shooting down satellites won't even register as an escalation.

Because anybody near-peer to the US at this point has the capability to shoot down satellites, and anything launched on a classified satellite launch is a prime target.

The thing I find fascinating about the root beer thing is that I don't recall root beer being an acquired taste. Like, I remember cola being a acquired taste, and Dr. Pepper being an acquired taste, but root beer, best I can recall, I enjoyed right off the bat. Same with most North Americans I know. And yeah, my overseas cousins find the stuff foul.

From your list of purposes about freedom of expression, you're missing "the ability to criticize powerful individuals". If you cannot prove, in a court of law, that your statements are 100% true, you can absolutely lose your shirt in a defamation suit in the UK. It's so egregious that the US had to pass a law specifically shielding American free speech from the UK's libel laws. (to their credit, in 2013 they improved their laws substantially, such that you can no longer be found liable for provably true statements)

In the US, in contrast, you can say pretty much anything, as long as it plausibly enough true that the plaintiff can't prove you don't believe it. "Donald Trump is a child rapist" is an example of speech that would not be protected in UK courts. Sure, I can point at all his visits to Epstein's Island, and his running child pageant shows, and complaints made against him to establish that it's not unreasonable to believe it, but I cannot prove in a court of law that he did it. So in the UK, he would win a defamation suit against me. On the flip side, here in the States that is quite safe to say in a public forum. It's quite difficult to prove a negative, and even if they passed that bar, they would then need to prove to a court that I did not believe that statement.

That's not necessarily evidence of undemocratic processes. One of the big downsides of democracy is that it gives the absolute knuckledraggers the same vote as anybody else. It seems to me like the UK has the same problem as the US: they have a revealed preference for autocratic policies, because no one gets excited about the government apparently doing nothing.

The Dems have never called themselves leftist. They are quite eager to point out that they are the Neoliberal party: “We’re capitalist, and that’s just the way it is,” - Nancy Pelosi.

Unfortunately, when you've got 2 choices, one being "Let's round up the pinkos" and the other being "Nothing will fundamentally change", the actual Leftists have to choose the lesser of two evils.

That is a perfectly workable definition of socialism. Literally textbook. I would expect any red-blooded Leftist to agree with the statement "The means of production belong in the hands of the proletariat", or they're just fucking posers.

Please, Mister or Missues Vanguard of Leftist Vocabulary, enlighten us on what "Socialism" really means.

> Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside.

The converse is also true: Most groups look more heterogeneous from the inside than the outside. Again, to use the Christianity example: it takes a fair bit of inside baseball to figure out how various different sects and denominations are any different, but if you ask one of their priests, they'll be sure to tell you how Baptists and Episcopalians couldn't be more different.

It's a symptom of normalizing to an Overton window. From inside a church the belief that Jesus was just a guy who talked to God might seem an extreme fringe belief to someone who believes that Jesus is fully God, but from the outside we can lump them together as axiomatically holding that God Exists, because we have an Overton window ranging from "God doesn't exist" to "Allah talks to me everyday, and she gave me my promotion".

The writers for Star Trek spent a lot more time thinking about interstellar travel than I do, but I'm not going to go to them for advice about building a rocket ship.

The Rationalists are a philosophical/pseudo-religious organization in the same way the Daoists are. Just spending a lot time thinking about something doesn't make them right, it just makes them internally consistent with their chosen axioms. That is useful: if you agree with the axiomatic beliefs of such a movement, you can probably defer a lot of reasoning about the conclusions of those beliefs to the authority figures within that movement. But it doesn't change the probability of the axioms themselves being true, any moreso than the Pope saying so affects the probability of God existing.

AI Is Important And Potentially Dangerous is an axiomatic belief in the rationalist circles that are relevant to AI safety, in the same way that God Exists is axiomatic to Catholicism.

Running a business on that basis would look like the white(ish)-hat version of ransomware. "Oh, your data is gone? How much is it really worth to you?"

map() and reduce() are equivalent in terms of jargon, IMO. Map also suffers from name collision with dictionaries/objects/whatever your language wants to call a key-value pairing.

CJD develops in about 1/1,000,000 people per year globally, and the Fore people have a population of ~20,000. In theory, that suggests there should be an outbreak within 50 years of the society regularly consuming brain matter. Perhaps that number could be reduced somewhat by the infection rate, but the infection rate seems pretty high, to reach the level it did as fast as it did each person with Kuru needed to infect 1.6 people. Perhaps sporadic CJD isn't as sporadic as we assume, and it's tied to being in environments where others have had CJD? Another possibility is tied to the seeming link between genetics and the infection rate of Mad Cow Disease. Perhaps the population regularly went through boom-bust cycles, where everybody with 2 copies of the recessive gene that makes one more susceptible to transmission gets killed off, then the disease dies off for a long enough time for the carriers to re-introduce their recessive trait back into the gene pool.

That actually supports the point that people aren't acting under purely financial motivations. If the guy was purely following financial motivations, surely he would have chosen to sell the vulnerabilities to the shadier side of things. Instead, he dumped them publicly, burning their value while amplifying the "fuck you" factor to Microsoft.

Ignoring reports, or just fixing the vulnerability without acknowledging the work put in by a researcher, is rude and invites rudeness in return.

There's a pretty heavy survivorship bias on that, so you probably shouldn't extrapolate to all pre-civilization humans. For a group to remain largely uncontacted, it means they have to be remarkably insular, living somewhere other people don't want to be particularly bad (implying resource scarcity), and it definitely helps if they respond to attempts at contact with extreme violence.

Hunter-gatherers who survived to adulthood (and childbirth!) could expect to live to their mid 60's to early 70's. The big wins that modern medicine have gotten us are drastically decreasing infant/child mortality and deaths during childbirth. Compared to our ancestors, we've only really added 5-10 years to the life expectancy of elderly life. Largely unrelated to modern medicine, deaths by misadventure are reduced living in civilization, and then even moreso when you've got a large portion of the population not working in dangerous manual labor roles.

Level 5 is a pretty massive difficulty spike. Not sure if there's tech that I'm missing (it seems like 3 and 4 pretty strongly encourage double hits), or if I'm just bad.

You can do E2E encryption for organizations, you just establish all conversations as at least 3-way conversations: the two members of the org, and the org itself. You let the server refuse to host any conversation it isn't privy to, and then apps that support organization mode automatically add the org listener, and users using third-party clients can add it manually.

Definitely my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies. I've got a special place for the wild tone shift between the murder and the comic relief scene that follows in particular, as the rather temporary release of the tension that had been building for the prior act is incredible. In my AP Literature class, we had to perform a scene or so from a Shakespeare play of our choosing, but thankfully the only injury during our performance was somewhat intentional. After two weeks of trying and failing to get the girl playing Lady Macbeth to pull off a convincing stage slap, I told her to just give me her best shot the day of. Turns out this 4'10", 90 lb soaking wet fury had a heck of an arm, and thus I ended up finishing up my lines scrubbing my hands while seeing stars.

Surely at any point after "Make the "Add to Cart" button blue", it'd be faster to just do it yourself: "grep -r "Add to Cart", insert "addToCart" as a class to the html element, then crack open style.css to stick "button.addToCart {background-color: blue}"

I'm counting maybe 80 keystrokes? That's shorter than your second prompt.

This idea generalizes. Large Language Models are poorly suited for tasks that we have already purpose-built systems to be easy for humans to use. The easiest way to tell your website that you want a button to look a certain way is to update the code. If you know exactly how you want something done, we have developed an incredibly efficient way to tell computers how something should be done: it's called source code.

LLMs work best when they're handed tasks that you don't want to figure out how to do.

That's not why East Germany's universal child care was dismantled at all. East Germany's universal child care was dismantled after unification because West Germany didn't want to pay for it, and former East Germany couldn't. It was one of the most popular programs East Germany had, and was a source of quite a bit of consternation when it was taken away.

IMO, the bigger issue is all the things copyright covers. I don't think there's a particularly damning public interest in being able to publish an author's book without paying them. For art preservation reasons, the copyright limit shouldn't be indefinite, but IMO as long as somebody's around to claim ownership, and offer a legitimate means of obtaining access to a work of art, it's not a big deal for them to have a monopoly on such.

But copyright covers a lot more than just the right to produce copies of a specific work. The monopoly on derivative works serves the public significantly less. IMO, this one should taper off pretty rapidly. Maybe 20 years as is, then another 20 where you lose the ability decide who can or can't use your work, but they still owe you royalties.

Then there's the clusterfuck that is software. With how rapidly the world around software changes, its protections should be substantially shorter. For derivative works of source code, I'd pitch skipping the complete monopoly step entirely. You get a decade or two where people using your software owe you royalties unless you say otherwise, then nothing.

"Oh nooooo, my boring, ugly alleyway isn't ugly anymore".