crackrook

Privilege endures. The lucky player gets a good roll against the odds, the privileged player casts loaded dice. You can be privileged because you were once lucky (e.g. you were born to parents who bequeathed their loaded dice to you), but you cannot be lucky because you are/were privileged

This is probably a bit unhinged but sometimes I will talk to an AI about my interpersonal problems as if I am the other party. I feel that this can be helpful for better understanding the other person, mainly because I first have to make an effort to speak from their point of view (though I suppose a journal would be just as good for this). My hope is that, since the AI doesn't know it's talking to me, it will be less liable to blow smoke up my ass.

Ruminant meat production is estimated to release 62 grams of CO2-Ceq per gram of protein raised. Pork: 10 grams, legumes: 0.25 [1]

I think maybe beef would be more expensive, in a more-just world; Though of course I sympathize with restaurant owners.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Environmental_impact

I don't know anything about Google's architecture but I would guess that the average Gemini request per search query is < 1, surely there's a lot of caching that can be done and a lot of money to be saved by doing so.

Yes, in my interpretation, though not in isolation.

> It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas.

You originally expressed surprise that skeptics hold this book in high regard. I just find your surprise a bit difficult to understand. If, on the whole, the work advocates for skepticism (among other things), wouldn't endorsing it be the consistent choice for skeptics? I would never throw out a programming textbook if it criticized and emphasized the too-common tendency of programmers to over-engineer solutions.

> He goes out of his way in the book to label skepticism and criticize it.

Respectfully, I disagree, his criticism reads to me primarily as a criticism of dogmatism. First and foremost he seemed to identify as a "scientist", but he also maintained that you can't have effective science without skepticism.

> He did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic.

I would just differ by saying "He did not wish to be thought of only as a skeptic," I am not sure if that is a complete departure from your intent.

I read those Sagan quotes as a criticism of capital "S" Skeptics, those for whom skepticism is an identity perhaps more than it is a means to an end. I feel that Sagan's ultimate goal is to foster skepticism (or at least a refined version thereof), and that he is merely offering a warning about tribalism and ego.

Just reacting to the executive summary: where are the tradeoffs? The port decreased memory usage on the client significantly, by how much did the server's burden increase? How have their hosting costs changed now that less work is being offloaded to the clients?

> I'd love to collect on this debt somehow when you're proven wrong in our lifetimes.

Sorry, this is a thread on an internet forum, I'm afraid I don't owe you anything.

If you want to engage with the actual points I've endeavored to make, in good faith, instead of telling me how ignorant you think I am and doubling down on appeals to authority, I would gladly continue this conversation. For what it's worth: I'd love to see proof that you're right, sneaky non-human intelligences living and crashing known-physics defying spaceships in the shadows would be beyond interesting! However, I don't really feel like I can be "proven wrong" because I'm not really making claims here. You asserted something to be "basically fact", and I haven't told you that you're wrong, my argument was that your theories seem implausible, though possible.

First, "conspiracies can't be true" was definitely not the point. You're right, conspiracies happen, governments do keep secrets! The point was: if a conspiracy theory with poor evidence were to be a reasonable explanation for another claim's poor evidence, I could claim whatever outlandish thing I wanted, e.g. "Unicorns are real, our puppet masters just don't want you to know about them!" This explanation is hard to falsify, and (in my view) shouldn't be our top choice, it's definitely not enough for me to regard the ultimate unicorn claim as "well-established fact."

If I wanted to make a compelling argument for my conspiracy theory, I would not only want to explain how the government has managed to keep this profound secret about unicorns, I'd want to to explain why it was theirs to keep in the first place. In a world with many sovereign nations with a vast array of publicly and privately-funded research institutions, camera-toting citizens, security cameras, wildlife cameras, etc., why is the U.S. government holding all of the compelling evidence? Or is not just the U.S.? Maybe we explain this with more conspiracies? Or maybe one really big conspiracy? Do you think it's likely that the government could keep narwhals a secret?

I haven't/wouldn't make any claims about David Grusch being who he says is, I haven't intentionally made any truth claims at all here; that said, whatever titles Grusch formerly held, and whatever title his lawyers formerly held, those titles don't, in my view, grant him credibility in perpetuity, maybe one could argue that they didn't grant much in the first place. The same goes for members of Congress. Should we believe Marjorie Taylor Greene if she tells us "The Jews" are starting forest fires with their space lasers to serve their malicious globalist agendas, on the basis that she's a congresswoman?

If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states: > No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.

Or, perhaps we go searching for explanations as to why Wikipedia or the news organizations it accepts citations from are mere puppets of the conspirators, but at that point, who's being tiresome?

Sorry, dumb thing to write. That's not at all Occam's razor is and I clearly need to get educated.

The person you're replying to wasn't the one who invoked what you call "partisan thought short circuiting," (which, I have to say, reads a lot like parody). It was me. Occam's razor is not at all about "what I prefer" and is entirely about preferring theories with evidence over those that are lacking (instead of inventing new theories to explain away the lack of evidence).

> the correct scenario is wide declassification

It sounds to me like you and I see the same expansive hole where the evidence should be. My preference would be to say "show me a claim without a hole or stop wasting my time," you appear to assume that the evidence exists - because someone "credible" said it's so - and demand that the hole be filled immediately.

To claim there exists a grand conspiracy and web of well-kept secrets, ironically, is to try to explain away the first substanceless claim with a new one.

Before we had the instruments to observe them directly we could theorize about the existence of bacteria because we could indirectly observe them through their effects on our biology and even their macroscopic effects on populations, effects that had no better explanations. I am not aware of any mysteries that are most simply explained by a hitherto unobserved, technologically advanced (I assume we're not talking about dolphins when we say) "non-human intelligence", whether they supposedly dwell in the depths of the ocean, the Earth's crust, Titan, or anywhere else in the universe. SETI has been listening for ~60 years and hasn't heard a peep from any of the billions (trillions?) exoplanet's worth of radio signals that could have reached us in that time.

The available-to-me evidence suggests that technologically advanced species are exceedingly rare, and the only such species we're aware of emits an overwhelming number of artifacts that would serve as evidence for its existence, so it would be very much not mundane to discover that another one has been living under our noses this whole time.

I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.

> You can think they [...] aren't credible

I think I'd pick this one as being the simplest and most likely explanation if my other options are "psy-op[s] with vague parameters" and non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us. Congress people believing falsehoods is nothing new.

> Are you tired of being required to run `sudo apt update` just before `sudo apt upgrade` or `sudo apt install $PACKAGE`?

Is `sudo apt upgrade --update` really that big of a QOL improvement over `sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade` (or an alias for the same)? Or is there a difference in terms of performance or something else that I'm missing?

I understand that this meant to be a cautionary tale more than a formal argument, but I wish the author wouldn't use "will" in place of "could" or "might" when presenting this extrapolation.

Frankly I think software quality does - and even should - matter more to employers than translation quality and I think it remains to be seen if AI will (in our lifetimes) reach the point that it can write code as reliably and effectively as it can translate works of natural language. I don't mean to say that translation is trivial work, but I think it's clear that works of software are subject to much higher entropy and higher stakes, I think this is true even if you pick a pretty rigorous application of natural language, like legal texts, for comparison. Which is just to say I don't see where the author's apparent certainty is coming from.

You can get nose hard too! https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeymoon_rhinitis

Personally I like my programs to be as performant as is reasonable, not just as is necessary. Rust's low-cost abstractions strike the right balance for me where I feel like I'm getting pretty solid ergonomics (most of the time) while also enjoying near-peak performance as the default.

> It is nicer to write in those other languages, why choose Rust?

Honestly I don't think it is nicer to write in those other languages you mention. I might still prefer Rust if performance was removed from the equation entirely. That is just to say I think preference and experience matters just as much, if not more, than the language's memory model.

I don't fundamentally disagree but I feel there's a selection bias at work here. I'm not an economist, but: maybe the things that could have a market bolstering effect are - by nature - harder to identify because they represent growth opportunities that haven't been captured yet? The sector-reinvigorating innovations over the horizon wouldn't be innovations if they were easy to anticipate.

> software developers nowadays fall mostly in the top 1-2%[1]

> [1] Beware of estimates of the “average income of the top 1%.” That average includes all the richest people in the world. You only need to earn the very bottom of the 1% bucket in order to be in the top 1%.

This doesn't seem remotely accurate, unless the sources I'm using are way off. It's reasonable to to point out that averages can be deceiving, so I'm using the median instead: at $133k/yr[1] the median software engineer in the U.S. is not even in the top 10% and would need to triple their income before becoming the lowest-earning 1%-er[2].

As an engineer who makes a bit less than the median I'm far from destitute, but the author and I are not in the same club.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

[2] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...

> Most people have the common sense to avoid using the stuff without very good reason

I agree that most (not all) people have the common sense to avoid the stuff most of the time. I think things would get dangerous if these substances were to be available at all times to just about anyone; that would mean them being available to people who are at their lowest or least-rational, as well as the intersection of people with an innate lack of self-preservation and those who previously lacked ready-access to drugs. If someone just lost a loved one or had a few too many drinks I think they're a lot more likely to make reckless decisions - I think policy should protect our most vulnerable.

> And decriminalization of possession doesn't really do much. Cops don't focus on possession in the first place. It lets people be more open about possessing (which is a good thing for opiate users--much more likely to get Narcan if needed) but does nothing about the quality problems from the supply chain.

If I were to believe these claims I'd need to see some evidence, it doesn't align with my intuition. My sense is that drug users would be more likely to test their drugs if they didn't have to fear the law and I haven't seen any reason to believe otherwise - of course the government ought want to ensure that drug-testing solutions were more readily available before decriminalization policy went into effect.

I think decriminalizing the sale of all drugs, without a great deal of research supporting the conclusion that it wouldn't catastrophically increase the rate of drug abuse, would be highly reckless from a policy perspective. Decriminalizing possession seems like a good first step to precede more research, I think we agree about the harms and immoral motives behind the war on drugs - I don't yet have reason to believe that the war on drugs is a loose Jenga piece that we can freely remove.

I totally believe that treatment should be the focus for drug users; the only focus, even. What I'm having trouble believing is that convenient access to drugs would not result in net-harms that are worse than those inflicted by (imperfect attempts at) holding people accountable for selling these chemicals to the vulnerable, irrespective of whether or not those people are pharmaceutical companies or cartels.

I would like to see evidence that jurisdictions in the developed world that stop prosecuting dealers for freely selling what I'd call "hard drugs", e.g. opiates and amphetamines, see their population's well-being improve, on the whole - if there has ever been such a jurisdiction.

When I bought weed as a teen, I bought from all kinds of characters, but meth and opiates were never on the menu for me.

At least in my circles I'd have a much harder time getting access to meth or heroin than I would a product that can be bought from a special store. I imagine there are many individuals like me, but I'm not sure, which is why I ask for data.

There's no doubt in my mind that addicts know how to find dealers, and don't have trouble finding new dealers when their former dealer gets arrested. What I'm worried about and asking for data about is the possibility of legalization creating a new cohort of addicts who would start to use hard drugs if they were to be as conveniently-obtained as liquor.

I'm not advocating for the war on drugs, to be clear, I'm dubious about treating hard drugs like alcohol, tobacco, or weed (in some states). I still lean towards decriminalization of possession and harm-reduction as being better policy, but I recognize it doesn't solve all the issues.

I have a few reasons I might more willingly accept the legality of alcohol, I believe they're also the reasons prohibition didn't work:

1. Alcohol is deeply embedded in human culture, to get a significant portion of society to stop using it would be like trying to get people to stop eating bread or to stop having sex. It would be expensive and unproductive to enforce.

2. Alcohol is easy, though more dangerous, to make. To prohibit it would be to turn people towards more-dangerous moonshine.

3. Relatively speaking, alcohol's health effects aren't that bad; it's poison, but it's only very mild poison. Overindulging on alcohol once mostly leads to a hangover, it's difficult to drink enough alcohol to kill yourself and it starts to get unpleasant before you reach that point. The real dangers of alcohol seem to come with chronic use.

4. Alcohol is not extremely addictive. It seems most people can somewhat regularly partake without becoming alcoholics. In my understanding most addictive drugs won't get you hooked the very first time you try them, but trying them a few times is usually all it takes. Anecdotally, having used both, sometimes in excess, I find it much easier to resist a drink than nicotine.

If you pair these with the other harms and expenses of general drug prohibition (organized crime, disproportionate criminalization of minorities, etc) it becomes very hard to justify the prohibition of alcohol, in my mind.

Some of those things apply to tobacco too but to a lesser degree, so the case for illegalizing it might have some legs, although I suspect it's not worth it either. I might argue that burning tobacco products, specifically, should be illegalized due to the fact that there are several known, practical, and less destructive nicotine delivery methods. Lozenges, patches, and vapes work, and so far seem to be much less catastrophic for one's health. It's not clear to me that you'd get murderous tobacco cartels who lace their product with fentanyl.

Yep I misunderstood "legal" to mean "regulated like alcohol/tobacco" or "unscheduled" in this context and "decriminalized" to be the colloquial term meaning "legal to own and use but illegal to sell." My mistake!

I see. I understood "legalization" to mean the same thing in this context that it means for cannabis, e.g. legal to distribute/purchase for recreational use. I should have clarified, thank you.

I know we have data that shows just how harmful the war on drugs has been, but I'm curious if we have data showing that legalization in a modern society, with global supply chains and marketing campaigns, does not result in a bunch of people who previously wouldn't have done drugs - for fear of legal consequences, or just because they're hard to obtain - suddenly doing drugs. I'm genuinely interested to know, this isn't something I've made up my mind about.

I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier.

Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.

I saw Joe Rogan share the same graph to support his claim that scientists don't know anything about the climate and that the ones who claim to all have conflicts of interest; I can't recall if it came before or after the ad-break for all-natural, grass-fed and methane-relieved Beef Stix.

If you zoom in on the tiny sliver at the end of that graph, the portion that represents the last million years or so, you'll see that we're rocketing upwards at an unprecedented rate. We're experiencing one of the fastest sustained rates of temperature change on geological scales, outpaced only by isolated incidents like dinosaur-killing meteors. But, even if that wasn't the case, geological scales aren't what matters! The question is: what rate of change can our civilization and current biosphere (whose organisms had millions of years to adapt to the current climate) tolerate? The mountain of evidence and research that you'd call "propaganda" suggests that humanity and the rest of life on earth is not well-equipped to tolerate changes this fast.

Consider the possibility that you are mistaken, and have your head in the sand.