del82

I recently learned about using mussels for buttons when I visited the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa and have been wondering since: can Zebra Mussels be used for buttons? That would create (even more) economic incentive to go after them.

Full title: Reese’s didn’t change its chocolate because of corporate greed. It was climate change.

I mean, I think the reason I would say the night sky is “beautiful” is because the meaning of the word for me is constructed from the experiences I’ve had in which I’ve heard other people use the word. So I’d agree that the night sky is “beautiful”, but not because I somehow have access to a deeper meaning of the word or the sky than an LLM does.

As someone who (long ago) studied philosophy of mind and (Chomskian) linguistics, it’s striking how much LLMs have shrunk the space available to people who want to maintain that the brain is special & there’s a qualitative (rather than just quantitative) difference between mind and machine and yet still be monists.

It's absolutely true that we should consider the source for this and any other reviews / studies / news articles etc., and be aware of their likely position.

We should also recognize that, for all but the most mainstream possible questions or topics, most of the study is going to come from interest groups-- they're the ones who are interested enough to do the work to look at the data and publish their results!

If we dismiss reviews like this out-of-hand simply because they are created by an interest group, then we'll miss out on a lot of information and opportunity for reasonable discourse.

(Note that I'm not saying the parent comment is advocating this, but it did raise the point in my mind.)

Omega Tau Podcast did a really great episode [0] on container shipping, including the optimization of container placement and route planning, highly recommended.

[0]: https://omegataupodcast.net/146-container-shipping/

(I can't read the full article due to the paywall, but) another framing of this is: farmers can supplement their income by renting out their sheep to help solar farms manage the vegetation around the panels:

https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2020/07/solar-grazing-livesto...

> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc).

Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0], making explicit what everyone understands, viz.:

"Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about 'proof of concept.'"

[0] https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/

See also Kiryas Joel, New York:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas_Joel,_New_York

Propublica, because they do really amazing journalistic work, both in partnership with large for-profit news organizations as well as independently.

The American Cancer Society, which does a bunch of amazing things, including having "Hope Lodge" facilities near major cancer treatment centers. When we were in grad school (and had less than no money) my wife needed daily cancer treatment for 6 weeks at a hospital that was hours away from our house. She and her mother were able to stay at Hope Lodge completely free for the entire length of her treatment.

Wikpedia, which I use every day.

This is great! Definitely therapeutic to be able to name-and-shame frustrating password experiences. Is the goal to actually get these sites to change their dumb rules?

If so, I wonder whether it's worth adding a (politely-worded) summary at the top of the page describing why rules like these are dumb? Then the people responsible for these sites, most of whom are themselves probably not dumb but just mis- or uninformed, can learn from their mistakes.

Oscillates between 0.1 and 0.7 for me, and I'm changing nothing on my end (just hitting "Try again"). Does it have to do with refresh speed, I wonder?

Privacy Badger and ABP on my work (less-locked-down) Mac.

Particularly interesting is the tidbit in the middle of the article that there is no freight rail crossing of the Hudson River south of Selkirk[0], near Albany. So any freight train that wants to travel between NYC (except Staten Island) and points west must go almost 150 miles North of the city.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkirk_hurdle

Queens Boulevard[0] is like that, with through-traffic lanes and local lanes divided by a barrier, and it's very much not a pleasant experience to walk or bike near it. It's just so wide, loud, and dangerous[1], though there have been some recent fixes to improve safety.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens_Boulevard

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens_Boulevard#Safety_issues...

Not tipping the doctor, but the hospital:

"Many hospitals conduct nightly wealth screenings — using software that culls public data such as property records, contributions to political campaigns and other charities — to gauge which patients are most likely to be the source of large donations.

"Those who seem promising targets for fund-raising may receive a visit from a hospital executive in their rooms, as well as extra amenities like a bathrobe or a nicer waiting area for their families."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/business/hospitals-asking...

Going to college isn't all about "quality of education"; it's also about networking and building connections. Plenty of State Universities provide a high-quality education, but don't offer the same opportunities to build connections to elites, future elites, and their families.

> If you do everything right, you'll get this malfunction under control. But it's easy to see how pilots whose plane is acting up unexpectedly can miss it, and it's reasonable to ask whether Boeing could've done better

Absolutely reasonable to ask what Boeing could have done better. I'm just not sure the information about Boeing's actions contained in the article gets me all the way to "indefensible", paraphrasing another comment.

But the difference is not only do the pilots of a commercial airliner have vastly more training and experience than your average driver, but they literally have a list of things to try (and extensive training on following the list) in the case of a malfunction like an uncommanded nose-down.

Imagine that the failure that caused the nose-down wasn't a failed AOA sensor giving bad readings to MCAS, but some other reason that _also_ wouldn't have been solved by pulling back on the yoke, but would have been by completing some later step on the checklist. Suppose the pilots didn't follow the checklist. Would that be enough information to say that Boeing is responsible?

To be sure, in this case the pilots may have followed the checklist! It may well be the case that Boeing is completely responsible! The checklist items might not have worked, or there may have been a good reason that the pilots didn't follow it, or the checklist might have been crazy, or they might not have had time to do what needed to be done, etc. There's still a whole lot that's not known (or hasn't been released) about what happened.

I'm just not sure that the current evidence, _viz_ that Boeing made an internal software change, that they didn't explicitly call it out to pilots, and that there's no difference in the actions prescribed in the event of an uncommanded nose-down pre- and post-change, is enough to say that the fault is entirely Boeing's for this accident.

That's fair, but what does the checklist say? I mean, say there are a thousand different malfunctions that could cause an uncommanded nose-down. This one happens to be #359, but the pilots don't know that, they just know that they're pointed at the ground. Maybe it used to be the case that the first item on the checklist (pull back on the stick) fixed problem #359, and now it's the second. But there are several hundred other malfunctions that might have caused the problem that also aren't solved by pulling back on the stick, so the next move is to go to the next item on the checklist, right?

Based only on what I read in this article, I can kind of see Boeing's point? From what I understand, the procedure/checklist for an uncommanded nose down didn't change from the old to the new version, even with the addition of MCAS. So from the Pilot's perspective, there is nothing that they should do differently in the new vs. the older 737s when this happens-- follow the checklist, which will (eventually) cause you to flip the Stabilizer Trim Cutout Switches, and that will fix the problem.

So the interface didn't change, and the procedure's the same. Should Boeing and airlines update training every time they change something "under the hood", even when the procedure for pilots is the same? How about when they make software updates to already-flying models?

> *High tax isn't a problem by itself. The problem it that high tax states in the US don't turn around and deliver a proportionate amount of public good.

I certainly agree that there's waste, and more taxes leads to more waste. To your point, though, about "proportional amount of public good", I think there's a case to be made that higher tax areas do generally enjoy better services. An example is in quality of public schools, which is very important to me and my spouse.

NYC and its suburbs (including Westchester and Nassau Counties) are very high-tax areas. If you look at the US News ranking of public high school quality[0], you'll find that 42 of the top 50 public high schools in New York State are in NYC, Westchester, or Nassau; 3 more are in southern Putnam County (just north of Westchester) or western Suffolk County (just east of Nassau).

There are legitimate questions to be asked about how much signal is in USNWR's rankings, but the quality of schools is one of the things that keeps my spouse and me in the NYC metro area.

[0] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/search?st...

> Their whole business is to encourage folks that should not be day trading to day trade

See also E-Trade's "Don't get mad, get E-Trade" commercials[0], which are clearly intended to give people the impression that stock trading will make them Super-Yacht rich.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHVKU2qFM7q2HuTv5RCU0...

OK, question from a fellow Emacs user: If a student asked you which text editor / IDE they should learn _ab initio_, would you recommend Emacs without reservation?

I'm not sure I would. I'll certainly never stop using it, because I've got 15+ years in it now and the key bindings and my config are as automatic as breathing. But I wonder if the investment is worth the cost for a new user, who could just use another excellent editor that's maybe a bit less full-featured but with a drastically shallower learning curve?

If it were only about hauling people then isn't a minivan as good or better? But U.S. manufacturers are abandoning minivans even more quickly than sedans-- only Chrysler still makes one, Ford and GM don't.

The chicken tax and the "cool" factor / branding must play a role over and above the raw utility of hauling lots of people, surely?

The linked story seems to have been updated to remove references to the Volt being cut:

"The company also plans to stop building several models now assembled at those plants, including the Chevrolet Cruze, the Cadillac CT6 and the Buick LaCrosse."

How? I mean, you can argue against tax incentives for corporations, but you can also argue for them. For example, you could say (as others in this thread have) that $48k per job over 10 years is a good investment, and will likely generate much more than that in economic activity. How is it evil?

I grew up in Michigan and moved to greater NYC after grad school, and I want to push back a bit against the idea that nobody on the coasts even considers the middle of the country.

My spouse and I would love to move somewhere less expensive than NYC, but we just can't make it work. We're both in fairly specialized tech fields, and prioritize walkability, diversity, great schools and career growth opportunity. Outside of say Chicago, it's hard to come up with a place that checks those boxes.

> Our society was built on large amounts of discretion being exercised by law enforcement

This I get.

> and the ability to convincingly lie to law enforcement.

This less so. Can you elaborate?

I've used it for a couple months now. It's great, and I can't remember any sites that plain didn't work, though some were pretty ugly.

The one thing I miss is tabs, which FFF doesn't seem to have.

> So, there are clear efficiency and quality gains to be had if the system is specialized.

I'd agree that "specialization" is a good thing when it means that educators have the training needed to most effectively deal with other-than-typical circumstances. But it may be less of a good thing when it means segregating those students into their own classes or their own schools, which I think is what GP is saying effectively happens with charter schools. Setting aside the cost argument, giving students a chance to interact with and befriend those with different backgrounds, circumstances, and abilities benefits the students and society, though it may not be reflected in standardized test scores.