PraetorianGourd

Well Stevie Nicks might disagree that it is less prone to abuse.

Maybe if you're the leading provider of meeting software used the world over, you should work to ensure that it is incredibly trivial to host a secure meeting

I threw up heavily and daily on straterra. Just because it doesn’t have the same suffix as meth doesn’t mean it’s a panacea. Doctors should have the ability to prescribe what is best for their patients

Klonopin is a very powerful benzodiazepine, whereas hydroxyzine is a more akin to Benadryl. You undercut your point when you prepend your point with easily falsifiable information.

Opiates are incredibly effective at treating debilitating pain. Not headaches, not toothaches, but overwhelming “please just kill me” pain. I take adderall with a prescription but I am not going to pretend that my psychological needs are somehow more worthy of medication than another’s pain.

You want to get real angry? Cannabis and psilocybin are both schedule I drugs while cocaine is schedule II. I know cocaine has medical uses and is unfairly maligned, but still.

Do not reply in bad faith. You know the person you are replying to was not saying that capitalism is the only system to ever exist. They were saying that, despite its numerous flaws, it appears to be the most successful system we’ve tried.

Human nature is often contradictory, and is in no way universal across humanity. No system of organizing humanity will fit neatly with human nature. No economic system, religion, moral system, government, educational model, language, and so on, will ever work well universally. So this leaves us all with a series of tradeoffs and concessions. Capitalism has one set of tradeoffs, feudalism had another, socialism a third.

We might disagree on the relative importance of the concessions required, but I hope we can all agree that there is simply no perfect system (yet).

If you can afford to buy food, but decide to shoplift instead as a moral stance, you are hurting the poor. The stores will raise prices to cover the loss and the poor can’t gamble on a $2,000 fine.

You can argue that stores ought not raise the prices, you can argue that the law ought to not consider shoplifting a crime, but neither of those conditions are the case, so your moral stance ends up being a material cost to the very people you claim to be fighting for.

There is a reason it has been rebranded as "global climate change" because the _real_ expected impact is for more extreme weather, both cold and hot. If anything Russia will have more leverage in the future, as methane can/is used for both cooling (electricity generation) and heating.

The _presentation_ is impressive, but the forecast is often the raw output from various models, and thus not entirely reliable. For example, I live in a valley where most forecast models smooth over giving more snow/cold than we ever get.

And for a lot of "low-value" targets, this is still a completely reasonable suggestion. It _is_ demonstrably better than shared passwords or easy-to-guess passwords.

Cool now do influenza. Viruses fuck you up. That has been the case forever. SARS-CoV-2 is not all that unique.

Assume best intentions. Don't attribute anything to an immutable aspect of one's character.

It is very unfortunate. Snowden is no hero. What he revealed was abhorrent, and should have never occurred. He did right by the world in revealing what he did. But it was reckless. It was sloppy. It was "baby with the bathwater" in such a way that the lives of those in the field were at risk. And then he fucked right off to Russia, where similar and worse activities are undertaken by that government.

So he revealed a terrible fact in an irresponsible way, and then sought asylum in a country which shits on human rights left and right. And this isn't whataboutism, it is an expectation for consistency in morals

As someone else said, Snowden pawned off the responsibility to redact and protect to a group of journalist with no subject matter expertise. It was a reckless and irresponsible choice. If anyone in the chain of custody knew what to redact to protect those in the field, it was Snowden. But he chose to abdicate that responsibility to journalists.

If there is a "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" example in this industry, this is it.

Open source is not a panacea, in fact it can be the opposite. I don't know the opposite of a panacea. But a maintainer can decide to fuck right off. And unless your team has the skill required, or another maintainer steps up, you are screwed. Businesses like predictable, they like contracts, they like knowing in 4 years somebody will support them. F/OSS advocates need to recognize that.

Do you feel the same about Snowden or the other WikiLeaks dumps? I am not accusing you of being in this camp, but the conventional wisdom at that time was that information should be released as soon as possible with no redactions, even if doing so risked the lives of agents in the field

That may be a popular wisdom but it doesn't make sense. You really think a multi-billionaire who is moderately good-looking couldn't get a date? With literally anyone?

Sure that is great comedy fodder, but it isn't really at the same level of the others.

While not popular here, I would say Bezos has done a relatively good job of keeping his head amongst madness.

Not exactly. It is year-over-year, so it is possible that prices are lower in November than October, but still higher than they were last November. In reality, prices rose by .1%. We will probably see negative month over month here soon, though YoY will still be positive.

Are you sure? Because last time I went to Target, they had a literal “bargain bin” of mainstream BluRay disks. i am talking dollars for a mainstream blockbuster. Maybe you should focus on convincing “the masses” that they should pay per game, because if the market is any indication, people prefer a fixed cost subscription service.

It’s okay, it isn’t the first time that the interests of “the market” are in opposition to one’s values and it won’t be the last.

Most people don’t have the same values as you seem to have. That doesn’t mean that either are wrong, but it does mean you might be tilting at the wrong windmill

But the moral argument is the same. Unless you are saying that monetary interests (which can be used for everything from basic survival to re-investment) are less important than “credit” which can be used by a limited number of people for a…slightly better job? I can see the confusion…

That is cool for you, but I would argue you aren’t the “average consumer”. Buying physical games in antiquated for a lot of people. And I think the vast middle ground is where most consumers are. Use GamePass for a majority of games, and buy the physical copy for the ones worth replaying.

There is no indication that physical copies are dead. In fact, for all the impacts of streaming on movies, you can still buy physical copies of almost every movie.

This isn’t about killing “choice”, it is about giving consumers a different choice than the one you would make. But thankfully it isn’t zero-sum so you can still buy a CD custom wrapped in plastic

I was being purposeful not to extrapolate out to cities/cultures I do not personally know or have experienced. I can speak only for the Western USA, which is why I tried to limit that comment to that region. I am sure other locales have other unique circumstances.

I think you are missing a bit of nuance in the wording. The long-form would be "Prior to reviewing the latest data, scientists were confident that carbon emissions would not surpass previous levels, and continue a downward trajectory. However, latest data show that emissions are again rising above record levels"

Isn't this the same argument pharma companies make in support of drug patents? Huge R and D can't be recouped if a third-party takes the formula as soon as it is published and then undercuts on price, without having to worry about recovering the capital investment.

I agree with you, but I think this also makes a great case for any sort of proprietary period for things that require immense upfront costs (be it time, money etc.) which have very low costs of execution.

Think of the layout of a modern office tower. Nearly open floor plans, one or two multi-user bathrooms per floor, one or two kitchenettes per floor. Designs optimized for ingress and egress via a single path. Sound abatement is minimal. Support columns are in the open.

So at minimum, you would need to plumb and power each "apartment" which would require essentially a complete replacement of the plumbing in place, as well as the electricity. And since the units are distinct, you would need to meter and isolate each unit. You would need to ensure that each "apartment" had a reasonable exit for fire safety reasons. You are restricted by architectural/engineering decisions that were based on an open layout (aforementioned supports).

Think of it this way, have you ever seen the progress as a tower is built? Isn't it remarkable how the "shell" or exterior seems to get finished in a blink, but the rest of the "innards" take 4 or 5 times as long to finish? In this case, most of the "innards" would need to be re-worked. Huge capital investment with unclear returns (nobody wants to live among the blight that a lot of west coast city centers are seeing).

Agreed, but I am concerned over the chance that lots of these models are used in critical scenarios without much validation of the data set.

We are certainly at the “throw money at the buzzwords” stage of ML, especially LLMs. And while this is certainly caused by the gold-rush mentality hype cycle, there is an issue of those in this field wildly over-promising what this tech can do.

The scary thing about this hype cycle is that AI and ML are both being deployed in life-and-death scenarios like automated driving and health-care settings. This isn’t the normal web hype of “Uber for X” that we are used to.