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mcmoor

628 karma · joined June 11, 2023

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mcmoor··on Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time
There are a lot of ocean, but limited shores. I guess that's the only economical place to build it, but of course it blocks scenery. If people truly built it in open ocean, less people will complain.
mcmoor··on A crime doesn't make a child an adult
> I wish people would stop using the word “child” in an effort to minimize criminal behavior by young adults. A 16 or 17 year old isn’t a “child.”

This reminds me of a horrific study (that keeps getting repeated over and over!) that claims that child death rate of covid is actually not as low as people thought. Then it turns out that their definition of child is 0-18, and in the data there's a really sharp turn in death rate for age <10, precisely what people already thought.

mcmoor··on A crime doesn't make a child an adult
The theory is that people commit most of their crimes in their prime age of ~15-30. If you lock someone until out of that age, their crime rate will go down on their own. Whether or not this is cruel is another discussion.

This is actually a problem for rehabilitation studies, since now they have to sanitize this effect out of their data on how much rehabilitation treatment actuality works. This and other flaws have tainted some claims that a rehabilitation process is successful.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...

mcmoor··on Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
Yeah but then each of those websites would only have 1 audience, which would be economically ruinous. Even HN has >1M daily view which is quite a lot of eyes to cater.

I guess there can be a sweet spot in a certain amount of MAU. And this is why I prefer medium-sized subreddit.

mcmoor··on 1worldflag: A blue dot on a transparent background
Seems like his work now is just keep changing thumbnails of his old videos to bait me into rewatching it.
mcmoor··on Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
I think it can be argued that, because human interests are so different and fractal, there's only so much damage that can be done with non-personalized algorithm. Ads for a certain demographic will just alienate the other demographic. But with personalized algorithm, the poison can be customized for each person and be more fatal.
mcmoor··on Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
I've been forced to do it once for reddit, with the API fiasco, and I don't really notice improvement but I do notice reduced quality of life. Almost no other websites have easily accessible niche memes.

YouTube recommendation is never that good to me. I frequently just scroll desperately and ended up not watching anything, and when I'm peak bored I resort to rewatching my list of liked videos. That's why I feel weird whenever I see projects that want to make YouTube less engaging, it's already not engaging enough for me.

mcmoor··on Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
Yeah there is argument that reddit wasn't social media, but currently is trying to be
mcmoor··on The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games
Well there's kind of motte-bailey going around where the law effort is of course focusing on the thing they might win, while common commenters demand vastly more unrealistic things.
mcmoor··on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
What interesting is that unlike other nations in that list, Indonesians already love soccer to death, literally. But they're still very underrepresented in the world stage.
mcmoor··on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
I thought the concrete ground is much more important for basketball, otherwise the ball would bounce all over the place. In comparison, muddy ground for soccer is part of the fun.
mcmoor··on 4K years ago, Mohenjo-daro grew more equal over time
There's so many variants of prisoner's dilemma at this point which have their own winner I give up tracking. I've heard the most "realistic" one have titfortat as winner, but I've also heard that in certain population mixture, the one who defect more wins.
mcmoor··on Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target
Elon Musk seems like an ultimate counterexample of a person that "deserves" his dozens of billions of dollars. Because his name alone for some reason raises the percepted value of a company by that much amount. No amount of one person's or even dozens' hard labour will be able to match this. Of course it may come crashing anytime and Ponzi also had a similar kind of "productivity", but it really shows that not all labours are equal.
mcmoor··on 4K years ago, Mohenjo-daro grew more equal over time
It's exactly the opposite. With languages/standards, both parties has incentives to have mutual understanding so they don't need anyone else to enforce symbol equality. But with these weights, or money in general, there's huge incentive to deceive each other, so someone has to enforce the equality. That someone can be the parties themselves, but if one party lack the ability, it necessitated the creation of third-party enforcer, which can grow to be a state.

Even then, with languages, whenever there's incentive to deceive it also immediately unravels. See: exaggeration, and necessity to create whole new language of legalese for contracts.

mcmoor··on I made my phone slow on purpose
When the reddit API fiasco happened, I'm forcibly stopped from using it. What I found out is that my life quality just decreases without appreciable compensation. Finally after one year, I found out a way to still use those API so I just go back.

It helped that the infinite scroll was never really infinite for me. I run out of content easily and it just makes me stop scrolling for the day. Same in YouTube. Admittedly I don't use Instagram or tiktok so I don't know how bad it'll be.

mcmoor··on Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart
I thought orbital mechanics would still create those "shipping lanes" as the most efficient way to go from A to B. Of course with enough fuel you can go anywhere, but shipping specifically will love those reduced costs.
mcmoor··on Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
I mean there's a reason why USSR got to develop nuclear bomb so quickly.
mcmoor··on 1024000^2 Blocks, 2B2T Minecraft Server World Download Project, and Discoveries
Yeah I mean whoever hosts the server can add some (tiny?) expenses to host a "static" version of their server. Though I'm not sure why spectator mode isn't sufficient.
mcmoor··on 1024000^2 Blocks, 2B2T Minecraft Server World Download Project, and Discoveries
Whoever host the server? The difference is instead of only serving 50 people before lowering fps, instead now it can serve much more.
mcmoor··on An asteroid discovered days ago will narrowly miss Earth – RNZ News
Well earth moon distance is 384k.
mcmoor··on Actually, democracy dies in H.R.
I've heard that dictator's military is usually weaker than democracy's, mostly because dictator don't want their troops to be too smart lest they rebel. But modern military tactics is too sophisticated for dumb people so it results in ineffective military.
mcmoor··on GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay
Yeah I'm also always confused whenever I heard that a company issues new stocks. Why would existing shareholders agree for that? If there's more comprehensive resources about this I'd love to read it.
mcmoor··on How ChatGPT serves ads
Feels like the harm of "at last resort" lie is more harmful than the benefit of "is being honest" for him.
mcmoor··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
I thought it's also mostly to preserve feeling, to obscure the connection between performance and layoff to ease employee transition to another job. That's why sometimes it's a branch all at once from the middle to bottom.
mcmoor··on Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players
Lmao the character used is so cute
mcmoor··on The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
I feel like Turing completeness has always been set as the boundary of programming language if there's any boundary at all. That's what people has been using to not include HTML as programming language for example. Or to include MTG as one.
mcmoor··on Not all elementary functions can be expressed with exp-minus-log
I don't know if I read this right, but I thought it's proven that "elementary functions" can't solve 5th degree or higher polynomial, so I'm confused how it's interpreted if elementary functions also include arbitrary polynomial roots. Or is it different elementary functions?
mcmoor··on Reading Is Magic
Yeah, I've a friend that'll react the same way. This reminds me of a question, why are a lot of early stories a fable? It's because it's the easiest way to discuss an abstract thing, to become something still concrete enough to imagine, but detached enough from reality to not create unnecessary problems.
mcmoor··on Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play
I've played it, but what's impressive about this game (technically)? I don't remember its implementation being anything special as opposed its plot.
mcmoor··on The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
Ive heard someone saying that, Microsoft or Oracle already has hundreds of those 10x engineers for decades now, and what they produce is... current Microsoft and Oracle.
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