lvxferre

The interface is amazing. Clean, it doesn't leave huge amounts of empty space that scream "this was made for phone users, everyone else might fuck off", and the subforums already hint "we want to gather political dissidents". It feels like the 00s forums without looking like one, it's the best of both worlds.

I tried to register with a weak password (on purpose) to check security. It works; four tries and three different errors (capital letters required, special characters required, min length required). However, I feel like a user hitting this issue accidentally would've given up after the third try. Perhaps it could be worth to check for multiple errors at once, and output them all to the user; e.g. "The password must mix case, and contain special characters, and have a minimum length of 8". Just an idea/feedback, mind you.

>Essentially a "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

Not quite. It's more like "a gun cannot be held morally responsible for its actions, so actual people should".

The difference is important here because, depending on the situation, you might still want to blame people who allowed the shooter to have a gun, not just the shooter.

>I think this argument breaks down as weapons get more powerful, e.g. if I could walk down to my local car dealership and buy a cheap tank powerful enough to level a city, it seems good to focus more on "ease of tank purchase" than "culpability for tank drivers". // I think the argument also breaks down as AI gets more powerful.

Note how we're still blaming people: the car dealer and the driver. Not the "it" = tank.

And it's the same deal with the AI. If you use an AI system in a way that harms people, sometimes the "car dealer" (the ones coding the AI) should be held responsible, sometimes the driver (you), sometimes both. But never "neither", i.e. "the AI is at fault".

Yup, different definitions; I was going to bring this up but chopped it to avoid the wall of text. (I'm glad that someone caught it up though.)

My definition is roughly "ability to process information and generate useful conclusions as a result". Rationality would be a "side-effect" of intelligence, not part of the definition itself. I think that it's more useful than the def provided by the author because sometimes intelligent people with dumb beliefs will also do dumb shit, that clearly contradicts their goals. Does that mean that they aren't intelligent to begin with? Acc. to the author's definition, yes.

A good example of that would be Steve Jobs. It's hard to claim that Jobs wasn't very intelligent (even if I don't like him); and odds are that "to survive" was one of his goals. Then why the hell would he prefer alternative medicine over actual medical intervention, for something as serious as a cancer? (It's just an example, mind you, we could use others.)

However, once you shift the definition of "intelligence" to the one I'm using, there's no paradox: he was intelligent, sure, it's just that his "processing ability" was not directed towards that specific goal. And sometimes it might've been directed against the goal.

It's like something is diverting that processing ability from the personal goals to something else. Dawkins' memeplexes might be the answer here: the memeplex "alternative medicine" was competing with the goals of the individual, and leeching off his processing ability to its own end, like a parasite of the mind.

So, alternatively, and in addition to what the author said, we get another line of thought: sometimes smart people have dumb beliefs because intelligence does not immunise you against parasitic memes. Perhaps it even makes you more vulnerable, as those memes will be abler to successfully reach you. And then, [this point agreeing with the author], once those parasites are installed, they'll divert your intelligence towards their goals.

[Sorry for the wall of text.]

I can relate to most of what he wrote. And I've also noticed the same pattern that he points out in

>Whenever I post of a cognitive bias or logical fallacy, my replies are soon invaded by leftists claiming it explains rightist beliefs, and by rightists claiming it explains leftist beliefs.

where both sides [often correctly] point out the fallacies of the other side, but fail to acknowledge their own.

>Since you’re reading about intelligence right now, you’re likely above average in intelligence, which means that you, whatever you believe, should be extra vigilant against your intellect being commandeered by your animal impulses.

I fucking love this slap on the face of the reader.

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I feel like there's something else though. Frankly I wouldn't call someone engaging in wishful belief "intelligent" by any measure; intelligence requires the ability to entertain multiple concurrent lines of reasoning, and in plenty of them your belief is wrong. [I can go further on that if anyone wants.] It's the same deal with some basic fallacies (mostly false dichotomy, four terms, and appeal to origins) that are often used to protect those stupid beliefs.

This sounds a lot like satire. This excerpt for example is blatantly self-contradictory:

>We’ve found zero [scenarios] that lead to good outcomes. // Most AI researchers think good outcomes are more likely. This seems just blind faith, though. A majority surveyed also acknowledge that utter catastrophe is quite possible.1

So they found zero scenarios that lead to good outcomes, but most AI researchers think that good outcomes are more likely?

Brushing off a majority view as w*shful "thinking", and then backing up the argument with a... majority view?

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Anyway. The problem with AI-driven decisions is moral in nature, not technological. AI is a tool and should be seen as such, not as a moral agent that can be held responsible for its* own actions. Less "the AI did it", more "[Person] did it using an AI".

Ah, nevermind. Your focus was on the last part of the quote.

My bad.

Perhaps it's a side effect of our desire for different flavours, that would encourage us (in a wild environment) to seek a diversified diet that provides multiple types of nutrients.

>> Cookbooks generally distinguish between seasonings [...] and **condiments** [...]

>huh? people in everyday speech frequently blur **herbs** and spices [...]

Emphasis mine. Thyme, basil etc. are herbs; ketchup, mayo etc. are condiments. At least acc. to what most people would call them.

The excerpt is correctly saying that people see stuff like ketchup, mayo etc. as intrinsically different from paprika, cloves etc.

This is just a guess but I think that there are two problems here, not one: 1) inefficiency strictu sensu (more operations required for the exact same task), and 2) lower diminishing returns (that kitchen sink being included weights far more than the rest of the project, but maybe you should still not remove it because it still provides a small return of user utility).

The reason that I'm scolding those users is not "disagreement". Disagreement implies that they have something to offer - an opposite point of view, or perhaps info conflicting with what I said. They don't, because they didn't even get the point of the text linked in the OP. Or the context where it was written, even if it's blatantly obvious for anyone actually reading it.

>You might have been serious or not when writing that, but framing your comment in a more positive manner will result in better discussion.

Frankly, the users who might get their very, very precious feelings hurt with this "learn to read" are most likely the ones who won't contribute jack shit to the discussion, no matter how polite of a tone you might use with them.

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Now, yet another thing that those users didn't get is that this text is two, perhaps three decades old. Things have changed and nowadays developers put a bit more of thought into the users. Even then, the general idea - "who cares about your data structure, show results that the users benefit from!" is still important.

I think that some users here in the comments are bloody missing the point.

It's easy to figure out what the authors are saying, provided that you guys have something called "basic reading comprehension". Here's a TL;DR: "software is being judged by the wrong criteria. Focus on the users, dammit. Software should be judged by its usability, speed, bug-freeness, and innovativeness." The authors aren't really picking a bone against structured programming (or object-oriented programming, or whatever), those bullet points sound more like the type of excuse for crapware that you'd hear back in the day.

Also look at the references; the newest one is from '94. This text is probably from '94-'00. Tech reference there should be contextualised to those times, not to 25~30 years later aka now.

Finally, the general tone being used by the text is not serious, it's cheeky and troll-ish. Odds are that the authors intended this as food for thought, not as a dissertation that should be analysed and replied with "ackshyually, this specific example is 0.573% inaccurate lol lmao".

>Yes, it is sophisticated. Phishing emails are opened more often then regular mail and click-rate is pretty high.

You're confusing "sophisticated" with "efficient". Phishing is efficient but unsophisticated; it boils down to one of the oldest tricks ever, to make you believe that $foo is $bar.

>No, Reddit. Phising is not a sophisticated attack.

You're right, it isn't. It's just Reddit admins lying through their teeth, it's their usual. Almost like they take most of the current Reddit userbase as braindead. (Spoilers: they might be right.)

In this specific case they're lying to not make it so obvious that they're pretty much incompetent to manage their site.

>I'm a PhD chemist.

This sort of "chrust me, I have kwalifikashuns" is rather fitting the overall poor quality of your comment.

There are a thousand things wrong with this application. Viability of the process is NOT one of them, as already attested in the literature. Refer for example to

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016523701...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31917892/

The reaction boils down to R'-CH₂-CH₂-R" → R'-CH=CH₂ + H-R". It's practically the reversal of the polymerisation that created the plastic on first place. It's specially obvious by the third paper that I've listed as example, since they're generating butadiene and olefins from polyethylene.

It is by no means on the same level as "selling you a way to change Iron into Gold".

>Plastics have very LONG carbon chains, usually with many double bonds, and very little hydrogen

General purpose polymers like polyethylene and polypropylene do not usually have double bonds. Specially not in the main chain (that you need to cleave to get smaller molecules). You'll only get double bonds in the main chain if your monomers had a triple bond in its place, as one of the bonds is broken in the polymerisation. Most monomers however start with a double bond and the resulting polymers have single bonds. Here, let me show it to you:

(...) + R'=R" + R'=R" + (...) → (...) + [·R'-R"·] + [·R'-R"·] + (...) → (...)-R'-R"-R'-R"-(...)

This is common knowledge among chemists.

>That is why, when you heat plastic it decomposes into char -- as in charcoal.

Yeah, because the hydrogens magically disappear. The presence of nearby oxidants (specially one that you, QuackOfAllTrades, should stop consuming, for a better humankind) is totally unrelated.

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For actual criticism of the application:

You'll get nasty junk oil as output. That oil will have ONE purpose: to be burned down. If you're burning down the oil might as well burn the plastic directly.

This could be solved by fractional distillation... yeah good luck doing it at home.

What happens if some clueless individual tries to recycle PAN? Or even PVC, given how nasty organochlorines are. So there is both health and environmental concerns.

What's the catalyst being used? Plenty catalysts are environmentally nasty.

1KWh/kg is a lot of energy, and it will have an environmental footprint.

It is not trying to sell you a magical device that transforms iron into gold. Instead it is trying to sell you a device that converts good iron into crappy iron, and marketing the crappy iron as if it was more useful than it is.

It's all about small decisions. I'll list some examples but keep in mind that they're just examples.

* Prefer markets that overall use less plastic, even if this might bring you a small inconvenience. For example if market A sells groceries in bulk (bring your own bag) and market B sells the same groceries in styrofoam trays, then you buy it in market A, even if it's a bit further from your home.

* Actively refuse unnecessary plastic. For example, where I live bakeries often put bread inside paper bags, and the paper bags inside plastic bags; so I usually tell the workers there "no need for the plastic bag". I'm still creating some garbage (the paper bag) but it's way less than I would otherwise.

* Homemade alternatives for store-bought products. It doesn't even need to be the same product, as long as it fills the same role for you - like homemade fruit juice versus soda, homemade tomato sauce, or buying Parmesan in chunks and grating it instead of buing it pre-grated in small packages. You'll need to take your tastes into account, but some replacements might be even cheaper or better than what you're replacing.

* Reusing containers so you need to buy less tupperwares. Like ice cream pots, soda bottles, even margarine pots. Where I live there are even jokes about how ice cream pots never contain ice cream, but cooked beans.

I have a better idea: reduce plastic consumption. I know, I know, totally OC donut steel.

I think that #5 is a bad point, as there are multiple reasons why someone might get irritated with a trait of another person, and "I see that trait in myself" is only one of them. I don't think that it's even a "probably"; it's at most a "perhaps".

#7 is way more complicated than it looks like, as it only works under the assumption that humans are morally consistent (we aren't).

Other points look fairly sensible IMO.

Def #1 is way off. Loneliness is to feel that other people don't relate to you; to be misunderstood _can_ create this situation but so does different likes/dislikes, different moral premises, or even plain prejudice.

Def #2 assumes that there's no such thing as non-verbal knowledge. I wouldn't be so sure; if there's one thing that all that qualia crap shows, is that some things cannot be communicated verbally.

>the lack of understanding you by other people is caused by the lack of skills to explain yourself to others,

Even if someone accepts the heavily questionable premises ("definitions") #1 and #2, this is still problematic because it is an unwarranted assumption. It is not a logical consequence of the premises, even if dressed as such.

>Ultimately, you are the recipient of feeling understood or misunderstood, not others. So it’s your task to make others understand you.

GI/GO. Questionable premises + faulty reasoning = dumb "advice".

Some people will never understand you no matter how much you know yourself, and how good you are at explaining yourself to the others. And some people will never relate to you no matter how much they understand you.

It gets worse once we remember that electricity can be transported, but the damage stays mostly in place.

A few things that I'd like to highlight, regarding decipherment of older languages.

You can somewhat guess which kind of script you're dealing with, by counting how many different graphemes there are. Something around 20-40 and likely got an alphabet, abjad, or similar; 100-200 and you're likely handling a syllabary; for a thousand and above, then there are at least some logograms mixed in, or the script is fully logographic. Mixed systems also pop up from time to time.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are in large logographic, and those are specially messy to recover. What Champollion did towards the phonetic part was no simple feat.

Another caveat is that sometimes a script offers more than one grapheme for each sound or syllable, or multiple sounds are associated with a single grapheme. Latin is a great example of that, with ⟨V⟩ representing /u: ʊ w ɨ/ (as in OO "boot", U in "put", W in "was", and a closed version of the A in "about"), while that /ɨ/ wasn't associated with any specific letter, sometimes being represented with ⟨V⟩ or sometimes ⟨I⟩. So you can't simply rule out a sound/sequence for a certain grapheme, just because it's already represented by another grapheme.

Living relatives of a language can give you valuable clues. For Egyptian this would be Coptic, one of its descendants; you can somewhat see things from other Afro-Asiatic languages in its grammar, but they're simply too distant to give you any sort of

You also need to take into account that languages change over time, and often diverge quite a bit from place to place. For example, that might mean that your /ka/ (kah) from one text is actually /ʃe/ (sheh) in another, so you need to be fairly certain on the time period and location of your sources.

Context is king, queen, bishop, knight, tower, and pawns. It's everything; and without that context, you will not be able to do anything. For Egyptian that context was provided by the Greek part of the Rosetta Stone, because it offered pretty much the same text translated into three versions (Greek, Demotic, Hieroglyphic), so the Greek part provided context and translation for the rest.

As another poster said, that isn't a code issue.

You know what is a code issue though? "I dun need no optimazashun, I'm a faithful beleevur in Moore's Law, in the fuchur ppl will run my junk XD". Every single of those needless operations that your software does consumes electricity, without actually improving the life of anyone. Those will pile up because it isn't just you, it's software developers from the whole world doing this kind of stuff, with software run by almost everyone in the world.

It's fine to not care too much about efficiency when you're just solving some local issue with a dirty bash script, that you'll run exactly once and forget about it. However, software developers should have a bit more insight that needlessly wasting everyone's electricity.

That's pretty much confirmed already; Kievan Rus' (middle ages government) with Rurik = Hrœrekr of Ladoga in 862, who was an Old Norse speaker; not even four generations later his family was already native Common East Slavic speakers, assimilated to the locals, like the very name of Svyatoslav I of Kiev shows. The process was extremely similar to what happened in Italy with the Longobardi and in Spain with the Visigoth.

And that Kievan Rus' is the ancestor state of Ukraine (aka Ruthenia), Belarus (white Ruthenia/Rus') and Russia (Rus'-ia). The very trident that you see in the Ukrainian coat of arms is almost certainly a Rurik symbol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Ukraine#Tryzub

>Russian state going rogue in an invasion

I'm not even a tiny bit surprised. The Russian government is one of those states where you don't expect anything reasonable, human, or moral.

>Sweden, where this facility is supposed to be built, hardly has any fossil fuel electricity production.

That would make their process suitable for countries that barely produce any iron to begin with. Unlike countries actually responsible for a big chunk of the world's iron production¹, and heavily reliant on fossil fuels; such as China, Japan, India, Russia.

>Also you should compare the natural gas hydrogen process to the currently used coke process.

No, I shouldn't. For three reasons: a) everybody knows that the "traditional" coke process is nasty, and is looking for alternatives; b) other alternatives already exist, as syngas-based³; and 3) the resulting iron is slightly different in properties.

Could the method from the link become more attractive in the future? Sure. Even then I strongly suggest everyone to hold their horses before going "WOOO THAT BIZNIZ SAID THAT THEY'RE CHANGING THE WORLD!!1". There's no "exciting" development yet.

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1. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron#Industrial_production

2. Refer to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/share-electricity...

3. Note that syngas still uses coke, but as a DRI method it uses it more efficiently.

>This assumes a zero-sum situation where we have a fixed amount of fossil free electricity

I'm not assuming a zero-sum. The concern still holds without a zero-sum situation, as long as some commonly used sources of energy are not fossil-free.

>but that's unlikely because fossil free energy (solar specifically) is the cheapest type of electricity generation we can build today.

Higher demand can increase prices. Usually this wouldn't be a problem, but considering how big the iron/steel production sector is, the impact of the electricity used for the H₂ be measured, not assumed.

>Furthermore, the hydrogen can be electrolyzed at times when the supply of fossil free energy exceeds demand, thereby actually improving the economics of intermittent renewables by increasing their overall utilization, and hence incentivizing building more if it.

That is actually a fair argument. Unlike the above.

What the link is "conveniently forgetting" to mention is that most industrial hydrogen production emits CO₂ (steam reforming: CH₄ + 2H₂O → 2H₂ + CO₂). And there's a good reason for that: electrolysis consumes a lot of electricity. I won't do the maths here but, if the electricity was generated through fossil fuels, I wouldn't be surprised if the process actually increased CO₂ emissions instead of reducing them.

But let's say that the hydrogen is from fossil-free electricity. You could be plugging that fossil-free electricity elsewhere instead. The press and media link does not mention that.

>Hydrogen-reduced carbon-free DRI is highly metallized

That can mean two things:

1. They're able to retrieve more iron from the oxide. Good, but it isn't enough to replace the current processes; at most to add hydrogen as the "chef's kiss" to the iron produced through another method.

2. Less cementite aka iron carbide aka the stuff that actually makes steel "steel" instead of plain iron. That's great or awful depending on application.

>has superior mechanical [...] properties

Again, it depends on application. I expect their iron to be rather soft and malleable, but lacking tensile strength.

>This new knowledge is a direct result of close value chain cooperation, determined innovative thinking and bold efforts in piloting new technology – a recipe to copy for other industrial sectors,”

>Hybrit Development AB has filed patent applications describing the included inventions to the European Patent Office.

"Guys, we made something to copy for other industrial sectors, except that we're smearing patents on it so you can't copy the process~".

There's another detail that the press and media link doesn't mention: hydrogen makes steel brittle.

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Take this link with a grain of salt.

I stared the title for a few seconds, thinking on the ambiguity, until I said to myself "either is fine".

I like to play old games. And I like to drink old grape juice.

It's simplified but not a myth. This article from Science Alert explains it better than I do: https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let...

ThE OvErAlL SHapE MatTeRs ToO, and that's what makes case-mixing so annoying.

> throw away everything that’s been written in Braille, or force the visually impaired to learn two alphabets.

Neither.

Check the picture linked in the very comment that you're replying to. Then you'll notice my proposal is to modify the current system, by either a) tweaking the shapes of the individual dots or b) replacing certain sequences of dots with lines. The underlying associations are still the same.

If it helps, think on it as a different typeface for Braille instead of a new alphabet. The actual con of the idea is printing, not reading.

Fakoo's idea on the other hand is, effectively, a new alphabet. It might be more advantageous than Braille, I don't know; however keep in mind that learning a new alphabet is by no means such a Herculean cognitive burden as you're pretending it to be, provided that you're already used to the relevant medium.

>Let’s say it’s 10% better. Would that be worth it?

Nobody needs to assume anything in this case. _If_ the idea is worth trying, this can be measured by testing it.

The author phrased it poorly but there are two nuggets of good advice through the text. I'd phrase them as follow.

1. Knowledge is more important than judgment. 2. Intentions are esoteric babble.

In the kindest interpretation of what he said, he might be referring to people trying to use Chomsky's ideas for AI language processing (plenty do), and implicitly restricting that "nobody will remember him" when it comes to this specific subject. (X-Bar will haunt us forever. /s)

But that's just me hoping, that there's anything worthwhile in the comment that you're replying to.