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Semirhageon What caused the Black Death and could it strike again? (2016)

It’s not necessarily that, it can also be tacitly referring to external civilian influxes, such as mass migration events. Either way, it’s a grim business that few people seem to grasp the full import of.

Semirhageon Fatalities vs. False Positives: The Lessons from the Tesla and Uber Crashes

Ok, you go volunteer on a test track then. While you’re at it, you should volunteer for medical testing, do you know how many people die each year from various diseases?! Maybe the needed progress will come soon, or maybe not, but since your only justification is the magnitude of the present problem I’m sure that you won’t object.

Gooood luck!

Semirhageon Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

I still have Descent dreams. If they’re good it’s just an exciting time, but if it’s an anxiety dream then it’s the equivalent of “the brakes on my car don’t work” anxiety dreams in 3D. I may have played those games a biiiit too much.

Semirhageon Fatalities vs. False Positives: The Lessons from the Tesla and Uber Crashes

Then you and other people like you can volunteer to work at a test track as obstacles. Leave the rest of us out of it. You’re entitled to your utopian fantasy of what might be, and the best way to express that is to put your life on the line instead of volunteering others to do it.

Statements like this seem to be trying to make the point that any amount of increased public risk is unacceptable unless everyone opts in to accept it.

No, statements like mine reject the notion that sacrificing lives today for the possibility of an unproven improvement sat some unspecified later date is morally reprehensible. My answer is to invite the person endorsing this to put their own life on the line instead. If we were talking about medical testing on humans instead of cars, maybe it would be easier for some to understand. “It’s so bad today, the only course of action is to act recklessly to improve things as fast as possible!” is a thoroughly rejected argument.

Semirhageon Fatalities vs. False Positives: The Lessons from the Tesla and Uber Crashes

If a company is playing fast and loose with the false negatives rate, drivers and pedestrians will die needlessly, but if they are too strict the car will be undriveable and erratic. Both Tesla and Uber, when faced with this difficult tradeoff, punted: they require a person to watch out for the false negatives, taking the burden off of the machine.

Companies should not be allowed to punt this way, when lives are on the line. This really is a problem in need of a regulatory or legislative solution, as multiple companies prove they don’t have anyone’s interests at heart, but their own. Worse, every pedestrian, cyclist, and other driver on the road who didn’t sign up for this in-the-wild alpha is being drafted to enrich the likes of Tesla and Uber.

Semirhageon Cryptocurrencies: looking beyond the hype

Whatever “culture” supposedly created it, that’s not the real use case. The same people who will rant about “fiat” will in the next breath, talk about various measures to centralize crypto through PoW. It’s about making money by any and all means including outright fraud, not ideology.

Most damning to me is that the case against cryptocurrency takes two sentences to clearly outline, while the case for them is yet to even emerge.

Transactions are slow and costly, prone to congestion, and cannot scale with demand. The decentralised consensus behind the technology is also fragile and consumes vast amounts of energy.

Nailed it.

Semirhageon Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

“Progress was defeating a ruthless and murderous North Korean Communist regime...”

“Who, upon victory, mass murdered 10's of thousands of their own citizens...”

Proofread! Or at the very least, try not to include outright contradictions in your outlandish claims. Claiming that the US won in one sentence, and in the very next declaring the opposite is baffling.

Semirhageon Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

I respect your charitable interpretation, but it turns out to be overly charitable based on subsequent posts. I’m going to take a page out of the “know when to back away slowly” handbook, and back away slowly from this train wreck.

Semirhageon New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table

While possible, this seems like an even more tenuous argument than usual for theoretical work on phys.org. The original paper is an ocean of maybe’s and if’s, all couched in unsupported models that may well have no bearing on reality. I’m also a little turned off by the term “continent of stability” which sounds like a grandiose rephrasing of the more commonly hypothesized “island of stability” further down the table. That island is very much hypothetical, and the stability referenced is in comparison to other super heavy elements, not matter in general.

Semirhageon Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

And FYI the US handily and clearly won the Vietnam war; the South Vietnamese insurgency was defeated and the North Korean Army was obliterated.

That’s a serious, if delusional claim that requires a loooooot of support. “Handily” in particular seems like a ridiculous way to state it, even if you only look at US casualties.

Semirhageon Content moderation became an industrial process

Go to Reddit, then go to Voat. It makes a difference. You can’t completely win, but you can definitely lose.

Semirhageon Content moderation became an industrial process

If that was ever an option, it isn’t now. It would just be a bot war drowning everyone else out, and that’s not free speech either.

Semirhageon Sound can be excessive police force, federal court rules

Entitled or not, a crowd that’s armed is going to shoot back. When police fire tear gas, people throw the canisters back, they use Molotov cocktails, but they tend to be outnumbered and poorly equipped. If police are opening fire on a crowd, something has already gone critically wrong, and rights aren’t the issue.

Semirhageon Tesla is laying off ‘about 9%’ of its workforce as it ‘restructures’ the company

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/25/twitter-p...

They’re a profitable business, and became one in three years less than Tesla, without the need to tackle a hard problem like manufacturing cars.

Semirhageon Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say

The long irreversible period of a credit charge is not a technical limitation, it’s a feature.

Semirhageon Tesla is laying off ‘about 9%’ of its workforce as it ‘restructures’ the company

It’s a valid criticism they seem unable to tackle without massive layoffs, which seems problematic. Taking credit for clean energy is good PR though... maybe they’re a PR company?

Semirhageon Tesla is laying off ‘about 9%’ of its workforce as it ‘restructures’ the company

"Given that Tesla has never made an annual profit in the almost 15 years since we have existed, profit is obviously not what motivates us."

So they’re not a profitable business, and not a charity. What are they exactly?

Semirhageon What's the permanent solution against mosquitos?

It’s worth pointing out that trap choice is critical in terms of efficacy. Ideally you want a trap baited with Octenol and CO2, as traps without the bait are generally ineffective at population control. If you have a large body of standing water, you can also consider introducing Gambusia fish, which eat the larvae.

Semirhageon “All accredited journalists at the #KimTrumpSummit get a free USB fan.”

This is just what I was thinking. Make it highly targeted to a few people, and swap it out at two points. Swap it for the hot unit mid-summit, then swap back for a normal unit at the end. If they’re really lucky this could become a normal or expected thing, and be useful as a vector in the future.

Semirhageon Famous for its resistance to immigration, Japan opens its doors

I'm Japanese-American.

I suspect that’s the key right there. From friends who are the same, I get the impression that in Japan if you’re of Japanese descent the expectations had of you are very different than the typical gaikokujin.

Semirhageon Famous for its resistance to immigration, Japan opens its doors

The experience of being a westerner in China is much worse than in Japan IME. I can’t speak for India or the continent of Africa, but in the latter case I’d guess that it varies widely by country.

Semirhageon The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep

Vietnam.

Semirhageon Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?

You can also reach a point where, as you said, they’re not fanatical or cut off from science and objectivity, they just have a lens through which they view it all. It’s a tough life, and a belief in a higher purpose or underlying cause must be very comforting to some, and if they can still accept reality as it exists, what’s the harm? If they’re not out to convert you, or argue that Earth is 6000 years old, then there are probably better things to discuss than their faith.

Semirhageon Ask HN: Any resources to learn the fundamentals of critical thinking?

Strive to become comfortable with uncertainty and doubt. At first your instinct is to arrive at certainty, to hang onto “facts” and put things in boxes. It can cause anxiety to leave things in some state of either-or-maybe, but it’s a critical too. I’m not arguing for global intellectual relativism, but a lot of what people settle on with certainty isn’t certain. Ask endless questions, and assign weights to answers, but even when one is 99.9% likely, don’t totally ignore the other 0.1%. Take opportunity reevaluate what you “know” based on new information, and try to avoid traps like groupthink or contrarianism.

Above all, accept this as an ongoing process that only ends when you die.

Semirhageon Leaked Emails Show Google Expected Military Drone AI Work to Grow Exponentially

In the immortal words of Rob Delaney, “Guns don’t kill people. People who say “Guns don’t kill people” kill people. With guns.”

/s/guns/drones

Semirhageon GDPR: Programmatic ad buying plummets in Europe

If you’re going to claim that targeted ads are that kind of improvement over the alternative, you should present some evidence of their relative efficacy. From what I’ve seen, unless you rely solely on marketing claims, you won’t find it because the improvement is marginal at best.

Semirhageon Amazon follows Google and Apple and bans system-wide ad blockers on app store

Dangerous people are out there.

Yes, and psychopaths like your aunt exist, but if we design society around authoritarian ideals designed to totally eliminate their ability to do harm society breaks every time. A balance has to be struck that acknowledges the presence of a significant minority of criminals, while protecting the rights of the majority. A thousand anecdotes will not change that.

Semirhageon Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia

Read the comments here, and it seems like Telegram is being pretty shrewd from PR perspective, since everyone is willing to blame Russia and Apple. Admittedly Russia is a deservedly easy target, and Apple has some vocal critics. If enough people want to believe the accusation, and are willing to at face value (and that seems to be the case here at least) then it’s already “mission accomplished” for Telegram.

Semirhageon Tesla Model 3 teardown points to $28k in potential material and production cost

He already pretty clearly said what he thought. I'm looking at the numbers. That's reality. You, on the other hand, are operating on future assumptions that may or may not come to pass

Meanwhile your counterpoint is a very vivid fantasy of what Tesla wants to be beyond a car company, which is something it’s not doing particularly well. You’re engaging in just the kind of fantasy “Future assumptions” in question, and really just buying into empty PR and marketing. The evidence suggests that Tesla is a car company, and struggling to be just that. It’s an act of intense mental gymnastics to say that no, they’re not just a car company, they’re a whole economic sector that started as a car company... before they’ve even pulled off step 1. Maybe they will be, but the odds are not in their favor, and it’s going to be a moot point if they can’t even turn a profit on their cars.

Arguing from an imagined future should be the job of marcom, not you. It’s not a failure of imagination or a lack of faith for rational people to look at what is, not a vision of what may or may not ever be.

Semirhageon Tesla Model 3 teardown points to $28k in potential material and production cost

Can they use the profits from S/X to deliver the 3? Yeah, but not on the timelines that their customers and the market demands. People want their Model 3s today.

Is it about what people demand, or what they promised when taking deposits?