jasonhansel

So, do you think that people who buy weed while under the age of 21 should face legal repercussions? And likewise for people who sell weed without checking for ID?

If so, then you also believe in legal penalties for marijuana use; you're just disagreeing about who those penalties should affect and what form they should take.

> after weed got super easy to find in my state.

This is, frankly, a damning indictment of our current approach to legalization.

I'm also defending science by, as you say, pointing out that it's like what most people do all the time. But it's precisely for this reason that I don't think that one can draw any clear distinction between scientists and non-scientists or see scientists as somehow distinct from "citizens."

Of course, we can use various terms to describe people belonging to specific institutions or working in specific disciplines, but I don't think it makes any sense to draw a general distinction between "professional scientists," "amateur scientists," and "non-scientists." (Few, I think, consider "amateur" a compliment.)

This isn't really relevant, but I dislike the term "citizen scientists."

It seems to imply that those working within formal institutions are normally the only ones capable of "doing science," and that it is somehow abnormal to consider mere civilians as even minor participants in the scientific process.

Of course, there is no precise line between science and just gaining everyday knowledge through observation or experimentation, something all of us do, to a greater or lesser extent, all the time. So it makes little sense to see "scientists" and "citizens" as two sharply distinct groups.

Maybe a system of law enforcement that doesn't kill people for trying to sell a single cigarette? That seems achievable.

There are options between "an inhumane system of frequent and revolving incarceration" and "never punishing public drug use under any circumstances."

The issue is that making a behavior more visible tends to normalize it.

I've become convinced that there are very few, if any, reasons to MMAP a file on disk. It seems to simplify things in the common case, but in the end it adds a massive amount of unnecessary complexity.

The fact that you only have anecdotes doesn't make those anecdotes more reliable.

They are not doctors. I would not trust that website as a source of medical advice.

I'm rather surprised that their focus is on improving vertical scalability, rather than on adding more features for scaling Postgres horizontally.

It seems like MDMA doesn't always change people's beliefs in the right way:

> MDMA has, for instance, been used by the Taliban to channel connection to the divine during prayer chants, according to Nuwer.

Indeed, it would be very surprising if a drug consistently made its users' beliefs more accurate.

> The base version of gcc was fine, but the Ubuntu people applied about 5 MB of patches

Yikes. I'm guessing there are other surprises to be found there.

> they care less about their mission, users’ experience, and users’ trust than they do a pile of cash

It's called "being a for-profit company."

Tell me again about how decentralized crypto is. It seems that, in fact, there are a few central actors crucial to the system's survival.

Gary Gensler isn't targeting individual crypto users. He isn't even targeting Bitcoin; these suits are related to other coins that fall under ordinary, existing securities regulations. This is just routine civil law enforcement of the sort that occurs in every industry; if crypto is an exception, it's only because companies in that space have an unusual tendency to break the law.

They're banning smartphones, not (say) laptops. Presumably the latter are less of an issue since you're not tempted to be using them constantly at all times.

> it will also remove the facade that previously disguised meaningless tasks.

Sounds good. Content that nobody reads might as well be content that nobody writes.

At a certain point, of course, the perfect prompt will itself take quite some time to write. If you want your writing to actually contain specific content, AI might be less helpful, except as a way of making your writing sound more eloquent. But if you don't care about saying anything meaningful, as is all too often the case, you might as well let the AI do it for you.

The issue is that these self-driving cars are limited to a few big cities--where they're least necessary, since good public transit is far more efficient, many things are within walking distance, and speed limits are low anyway.

IMHO the biggest potential for self-driving cars is in suburbs and exurbs where mass transit is inherently less efficient.

I'm not sure how less banking regulation would improve that situation. Likewise with AI.

How can banking be regulated without a single global authority? Or will they propose some single global authority with exclusive access to capital to police the regulation?

Governments will advance banking as fast as possible for their own use, regardless of any international agreement to the contrary. Just like experimenting on deadly pathogens in labs.

Do you think criminal banks will adhere to any laws?

So basically governments and criminals will have full powered banking and the rest will not.

Unions get a large number of legal protections that aren't available otherwise.

The original LLMs?

The vast majority of people in jail before trial are not suspected of shooting anyone. Many are low-level offenders waiting in jail for months despite still having the presumption of innocence. Often the time they spend in jail before trial exceeds the length of the sentence they would get if convicted. This can pressure people to falsely plead guilty since it's actually the fastest way to get out of jail.

That study says that the risk factor is red meat consumption, not seed oils:

> The typical American and Northern European diet is high in omega-6 FAs, with the average person having an omega-6 to omega-3 FA intake ratio between 15:1 and 18:1. These populations tend to overconsume red meat and underconsume unprocessed oils and cold-water fish.

Even when he was at Vice he had a long history of espousing racist views. This isn't something new.

So...if we have ChatGPT replace the doctor, as suggested, how would that be an improvement? I'm not sure how having a computer say "take some antibiotics and I'll bill your insurance company $500, see ya" would be any better.

IMHO part of the issue is that Postgres was built on the assumption that snapshot isolation would be widely used. I don't think this has proven to be the case.

Snapshot isolation isn't as robust and straightforward as strict serializability, but it also isn't as performant as READ COMMITTED. It seems like the worst of both worlds.

> that's up to the parents more than it is to the school.

The reality is that some parents simply do not have the time and resources to provide this sort of support. The purpose of our educational system is to educate kids, not to supervise them while their parents do so.

It wasn't the article per se, it was the comments section below it.