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lajy

73 karma · joined March 21, 2012

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lajy··on Bingebuster – Walkable 3D video store, stocked streamable movies
Built by olievanss (reddit user): https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1vaan6y/i_built_a_w...
lajy··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
>He is neither affiliated with the person who lost the legos

I haven't watched part 2 yet, but he absolutely is affiliated with the person who lost the LEGOs. He's explicitly working with the son, who was the previous person that was running point on trying to get the sets back until it ruined his life.

lajy··on Cape Station, future home of an enhanced geothermal power plant, in Utah
Heat pump != Geothermal energy generation, or any energy generation at that

Home geothermal /could/ be a power source, sure, but I do not believe that’s what OP intended to say when mentioning heat pumps. I’d be pretty surprised if it was becoming common in Europe to have home geothermal

A heat pump (which are more common in Europe, but they’re gaining popularity in the US) is essentially a reversible air conditioner that can take advantage of the latent energy in the air to move heat very efficiently. They’re a great invention, but they have nothing to do with producing energy

lajy··on Amazon now discloses you're buying a license to view Kindle eBooks
And it's also the result of policy changes that Amazon is making in a few days:

https://www.theverge.com/news/612898/amazon-removing-kindle-...

From the article you linked:

>The new law won’t apply to stores that offer “permanent offline” downloads

Amazon is actively choosing to do this to maintain an even tighter grip on their ecosystem

lajy··on Against the Dark Forest
Are you really saying that psychology doesn’t have “any sort of reproducible outcomes,” or are you not including that one in your definition of “soft sciences?” The comment you’re replying to explicitly did, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Because Skinner boxes exist. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built around them (casinos, gacha games/loot boxes), just to pick a super low-hanging-fruit example.

lajy··on The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)
It makes even more sense when you take the law of large numbers into account. The scale we're experiencing most things on is /so/ far removed from the scale on which these probabilities are being expressed.

There are more molecules in a cup of water (on the order of 10^24) than there are cups of water in the ocean. If you have a cup of water's worth of matter, you aren't just rolling 10 dice (or even 1000 dice) and looking for mostly 6s. You're rolling a few septillion dice and hoping for a significantly non-normal distribution. It just isn't feasible.

lajy··on The evolution of stupidity (and octopus intelligence)
> But if you got a computer program with 1% of the instructions switched out, I bet you’d get a non-working program.

I believe it was a comment I saw on here once that took it a step further and included the OS and all hardware logic in there as well. I can have two identical desktop computers with only one program installed on each, the only difference being that the program is totally different. Those two devices could ultimate be two seemingly completely unrelated machines to the end user, even though they share far more than 99% of the exact same instructions. The only "code" they wouldn't share is the specific program they run. Everything else from the hardware to the OS is many millions of "lines" that are the same.

Something that plays movies nonstop vs a production database. Photoshop vs Halo: The Master Chief Collection. An IDE vs a point of sale system. Control software vs a web browser. A program that locks you into the software vs one that still gives you access to the OS. The differences can start getting seemingly huge very quickly.

lajy··on Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
Stars have to have enough mass to have enough gravity to start and sustain a nuclear reaction that constantly blasts energy out in all directions. This limits just how energy-dense they can get. What they lack there, they make up for in size and lifespan.

We can make sustained nuclear reactions in much less space using engineered pressure instead of gravity, so that skews the energy density ratio.

lajy··on The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself
The narrator on many episodes of How It's Made says "row butt"
lajy··on ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment
I’m aware, but thank for your sharing the info for anyone who might not be :)

I just meant that I wish that /I/ could downvote people. I don’t comment much, but racebaiting like that should just be greyed out

lajy··on ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment
Times like this I really wish I could downvote people on here
lajy··on Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco
> Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime

Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just simply not the approach that countries with globally low crime rates take? At the very least, it's insanely reductive. USA already has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Supporting and hiring more police officers into a broken system won't help anything, especially when the cops are often criminals themselves (let alone the fact that their priorities so frequently seem to be contrary to the community's).

On some level, sure, we need a form of policing that the public trusts, and we need to take crime seriously when appropriate. USA is nowhere near the first point, and is fumbling the bag terribly when trying to apply the second point.

Strong social support nets and programs, fostering community and civic culture, a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place--these are all much more effective steps as opposed to "more cops, more people in jail."

lajy··on Documentary spurs a new look at the case of the first gene-edited babies
> I'm saying maybe it's as ethical as current medical science, as long as you sterilize them

This is eugenics. You are the one that brought it up saying maybe it's relatively ethical. I'm rejecting that point and saying that it categorically is not ethical.

lajy··on Documentary spurs a new look at the case of the first gene-edited babies
> It's pretty easy to monitor a handful of test subjects with heritable mutations and make sure they don't reproduce

So just to be clear, what we're talking about here is a protocol for performing eugenics on humans that were bred as part of an experiment, right? And ethically, that isn't a hang-up for you?

lajy··on Can self-replicating species flourish in the interior of a star? (2020) [pdf]
Dragon's Egg [1] and Starquake [2] by Robert L. Forward are both hard sci-fi novels about fast-moving life on a neutron star. I enjoyed both of them, especially the xenobiology and xenoarcheology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starquake_(novel)

lajy··on I hate what video games have become
I assume you're still talking about Rocket League? All models in that game fall under 1 of 6 hitbox types [1], each of which are attainable without purchase

[1] https://support.rocketleague.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029832...

lajy··on Are Today’s Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters?
I'd say architecture fits in a bit differently here, due to the extremely high barriers to entry (you have to secure property AND fund the design AND fund the construction) compared to almost any other form of artistic expression. American society (and much of the rest of the world) has become more profit-focused over time, and buildings are a huge cost. Therefore, they've been increasingly designed to be purpose-built. Aesthetics cost money, and rarely serve the purpose of whoever is paying for the building.

If you funded the most talented architects alive to create works of beauty, I bet you'd get it.

lajy··on Ask HN: How liquid is Bitcoin?
And that's to sell it all off instantly by putting in the absolute least amount of effort possible. The point is that exchanging a million dollars worth of bitcoin is not difficult.
lajy··on The Forged ‘Ancient’ Statues That Fooled the Met’s Art Experts for Decades
I don't follow the path of reasoning there. Can you elaborate?
lajy··on SEC Rejects Rule Change for Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund [pdf]
Surely you made a lot of money shorting the market today then, right?
lajy··on Tyson Foods CEO: The Future of Food Might Be Meatless
I wish I had an answer for you, I'm really honestly not too educated on the subject. I just know that there are more expensive and better reviewed meat-replacements out there than what I've personally bought in the store. That being said, Gardein is no slouch. I've also been to The Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis and Twin Cities Veg Fest and the quality of meat-replacements (and cheese-replacements) at both those places were on a whole other level.
lajy··on Tyson Foods CEO: The Future of Food Might Be Meatless
Gardein Breakfast Patties[1][2] retail for $3 at my grocery store and regularly have $1-off in-store coupons. Even the macros are solid. Everything else I've tried from Gardein has been excellent as well, and this is far from the best stuff out there.

[1] https://gardein.com/products/breakfast-patties/

[2] http://imgur.com/XUodQQv

lajy··on Tyson Foods CEO: The Future of Food Might Be Meatless
I'm hesitant to believe you've had modern, high quality (or even moderate quality) meat-replacements. My girlfriend is vegan so I've been exposed to an array of options, and there are plenty that I would have never even guessed weren't meat had I not already known. There are members of the vegan community that won't even eat some meat-replacements because it tastes and feels too much like flesh and it grosses them out. Granted, part of that effect likely comes from not exposing oneself to meat for extended periods of time, but the technology really is making rapid progress. Getting some big, mainstream money behind it is only going to accelerate that process.

It doesn't always even come down to technology either, you just have to know some of the methods. Prepare a jackfruit the right way and it becomes delicious seasoned shredded chicken. Textured vegetable protein can become seasoned ground beef just as easily. Yeah, the flavoring plays a big role in those cases (which it often does for meat-replacements, to be fair), but it does in many situations with meat preparation too e.g. adding cumin to make taco meat, marinading your meats, slathering them in BBQ sauce, etc.

lajy··on Snapchat’s Success: Connectivity, Easy Media Creation, And Ephemerality
You clearly didn't read the article or the speech. If every word you ever said aloud was recorded, you'd probably speak differently than have you entire life. The whole point is that by making it ephemeral, in an age where nearly everything can be stored indefinitely and shared immediately, it becomes a mode of communication rather than a preserved expression.