a_shovel

The 'overweight' category starts at 25, 'obese' starts at 30, and 'extremely obese' starts at 35. It's an interesting coincidence how these natural divisions in human health line up so perfectly with convenient, arbitrary-looking multiples of five in this one numeric scale.

The idea that this framing is better than the original really goes to show that superintelligent AIs aren't being discussed because they're a realistic near-future possibility, but because they let techie atheists ponder religious concepts like omnipotence and god without admitting to themselves that that's what they're doing.

I have spent far too much time trying and failing to get Linux to sync its clock from the internet, out of a stubborn refusal to accept defeat, for me to entertain the thought that it's usable to the average person.

It's not just that it introduces uncertainty by trying to predict the future, it's that it contends that most important issues are the ones that effect people in the extreme distant future--which is the time that's the most difficult to predict, meaning the predictions have the largest possible uncertainty.

In other words, Longtermism tells you to give preeminent weight to matters you have no way of knowing the nature of or whether you're improving things or not. At that point, you might as well switch to astrology.

I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure that storing food for hard times is something humans have done at least since the invention of pottery.

Runaway AI could cause the extinction of humanity, but The Big Red Button That Turns The Universe Into Pudding would cause the extinction of all life everywhere, including extraterrestrials, so it's obviously the more pressing concern. Why are you wasting time on AI when the Button is so much more important?

No, The Button doesn't currently exist, and all available science says it cannot ever exist. But the chance that all available science is wrong is technically not zero, because quantum, so that means The Button is possible, so unless you want everything to be turned into pudding, you need to start panicking about The Button right now.

Huh? Are you saying human artists don't consider composition while creating their works?

The value of the time and gas needed to go to a drive thru usually isn't high enough to outweigh the cost of delivery fees and tips from a delivery app. In the end, they're middlemen, and if you don't need the service they provide, there's no reason not to cut them out.

This is a common sentiment that misses the point. Human happiness isn't based on how good or bad things are in absolute terms, it's based on whether things are getting better or worse.

Also, there's no need to insult other users.

Enough oversharing trans people show up on my Twitter timeline for me to know that quite a lot of them are perfectly capable of orgasm.

How much is one math, anyways? Is it an equation, or a plus or minus sign, or a number, or what? For that matter, how much math is five maths?

I recall another article on the subject that said lab meat needed purified amino acids as food for the culture, and that many amino acids just aren't sold in the necessary quantities. A cow, on the other hand, needs only grass because it has extensive equipment to generate those amino acids from grass, called a digestive system.

It's not clear to me how this article relates to the OP, or what point you feel the OP fails to address. Could you be a bit more specific?

The primary source cited in the article seems to have been wiped and replaced with "under review", but based on the article it seems it was primarily that if a trans kid is out at school, staff shouldn't assume they're out at home and so they should default to using the kid's legal name when communicating with parents. This seems like a good policy; if someone doesn't want to come out to their parents, it may be because they fear being beaten or thrown out of their home if they do.

"Schools transitioning children" is not a coherent phrase. "Transition" in the gender sense is not a transitive verb; transition is not something done to someone by others, is something that person does themselves.

The SF police budget does not seem to have been defunded, with a 4.4% increase from 2019 to 2022.

(You quoted the same paragraph I did, so I'll just delete my comment and move my response to this quotation here.)

Exactly. Why am I supposed to take this seriously?

Believers in Superintelligenceism seem to assume that any problem in any field - physics, chemistry, biology, math, sociology, geometry, whatever - that hasn't already been proved impossible to be within the capabilities of an AGI, justified with a handwave and "oh, it's so super smart that it'll have it all figured out in an afternoon". This has more in common with religious concepts of omnipotent and omniscient gods than with anything any AI developers are working on today.

A comment from the author I found interesting (with some minor edits, mainly for spelling):

> "All the evacuations at Fukushima were unnecessary, and in the case of the frail [or] elderly murderously so. If there had been no evacuations, few members of the public would have received more than 1 mSv/day peak and some 1600 lives would have been saved, and some 100,000 less lives sadly disrupted. Even the EPA now counsels shelter-in-place rather than evacuation.

> At Chernobyl, it probably made sense to evacuate the 45,000 non-workers from Pripyat for a month or so. (Most of the plant workers never left. ) All the other evacuations were tragically unnecessary. The 1990 evacuations were completely senseless as is making the Exclusion Zone off-limits when the dose rates almost everywhere in the zone are below average planet wide and have been for a very long time."

My "limiting principle" is "not being porn." I'm not going to try to fully define porn, otherwise I'd be here all day, but I think one obvious requirement is that it is designed primarily to cause sexual arousal. Based on the excerpts from Gender Queer that I've seen posted to support its ban, this is a test that it plainly fails.

It is unclear what harm you believe Gender Queer might cause to teenagers.

Yes, a blowjob is more explicit than a bare breast. This is not relevant to the topic currently being discussed, which is about how dishonest it is to compare a depiction of a sex act in a memoir about coming to terms with one's own identity and sexuality with pornography.

The fundamental dishonesty of these book bans is conflating books with sexual content with "hardcore pornography".

These bans are happening in high school. Be honest with yourself and admit what you already know: High schoolers are horny. Restricting them from books that discuss sexuality in a realistic way, combined with "abstinence only" sex education still common in these places, makes it more likely that their first exposure with sexual media is actual hardcore pornography, and I don't feel like I need to explain to you why that's bad.

So they did. I probably should have asked them why they thought that instead of you, then.

Are you saying the SPLC is an organization of these "witch hunters"?

> They got a political rally in support of keeping civil war statues shut down by the government.

The only thing similar to that in the article is the Charlottesville protests, which the ACLU defended.

The Romans did actually have a simple dozenal fraction system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions

Two word title, creator's contact info, content, end. The platonic ideal of a single-purpose website. It's beautiful.

The backend isn't quite so clean. It has a bunch of superfluous Wordpress template cruft, even some trackers my ad blocker had to catch. Still, I like it overall.

[flagged]

Jamie Reed's account was previously discussed on Hacker News here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34753240], with 319 comments.

This seems to be a theme with this kind of article.

A headline and lead proclaiming some school has done something outrageous, such as for example telling people to stop using terms like "white paper" or "submit" because they're supposedly offensive. It details some of the most outrageous parts of it, but you get the strong impression there's a lot they're leaving out. They never, ever have any kind of sources or hyperlinks to let you see the documents for yourself. If you do manage to find them on your own, you find some critical context (in this example, that the list of offensive words was not a school policy, but a fully optional document created by the IT department) that undermines the point the article was making -- a point they strongly imply, but never quite state, so it's not technically lying, you see.

> This is perhaps the central tragedy of fy_iceworld. The game industry benefits from its legacy, but the conditions that spurred its influence no longer exist. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 does not offer a freely downloadable level editor for players to make new custom maps, nor does it allow a decentralized network of player-managed multiplayer servers to distribute these custom maps. We can only play what someone else has decided for us. This climate change has ensured that there will never be another fy_iceworld.

Couldn't agree more. I have a lot of fond memories of playing on stupid custom TF2 maps. In most ways, game development has gotten more accessible by miles over the last few decades, but this is one of a few ways it's gotten less accessible. It's easier than ever to make a full new game, but it's become impossible to make a single simplistic map for an existing shooter that your friends actually play.

They protest all-ages drag shows because they view being transgender and other forms of gender-non-conformance as inherently deviant and perverted. They focus on all-ages drag shows so they can run a "think of the children" angle to get unwarranted sympathy. They absolutely oppose adults-only drag shows too.