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metta2uall

267 karma · joined June 2, 2018

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metta2uall··on The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?
I would consider "Effective Altruism" to be a fairly broad abstract attitude of trying to effectively help living beings (oneself & others), as guided by one's own opinions. Self-examination, critical thinking & debate are core values, and as far as I can tell continue to be so.

It's unfortunate that it's being defined by the rightly controversial opinions of famous people..

To balance this article, consider checking out one of the main EA websites https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e...

For example it indicates that longtermism is "a school of thinking within effective altruism". The popularity of such ideas will vary with time and they will be further refined with ongoing thinking & healthy debate. I for one fail to understand why it's important to maximise the number of future lives, which don't even exist - it seems very risky & unsustainable.

metta2uall··on The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?
That's an over-generalization... I would think most effective altruists recognise that acting unethically by for example, risking client money, is not justified due to the long-term damage that causes. Big lies usually get found out. Most effective altruists are outraged at what SBF apparently did..
metta2uall··on The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?
The concept that seeking our own interests is to the betterment of the whole seems to be demonstrably false.. For example consider the tobacco and fossil fuel executives who are trying to delay the phase-out of their products. Or the people who buy/sell meat in spite of the resulting ecological damage & animal suffering.

By the way, a charity quite popular in mainstream Effective Altruism is Give Directly - which aims to avoid trying to figure out what poor people need by giving them cash.

metta2uall··on Our Code Is Harming the Planet, We Need Carbon Aware Design Patterns
Nice to see an article on environmental impacts but it seems to be missing the "approach" of simply using less energy.. For example:

1. Generating less logs & expiring them more quickly 2. Including fewer third-party SDKs 3. Using lower-resolution images & videos 4. Not encouraging people to buy unnecessary goods through marketing..

metta2uall··on Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants
I think the point is that indeed Japan is known for earthquakes & tsunamis, and yet they still failed to do the work of making their reactors tsunami-proof. Thus people think that if Japan, with a reputation valuing "high quality", takes such brazen shortcuts, can their own government be trusted to responsibly operate nuclear power? It's quite tragic since nuclear is a great technology in many cases, especially where there is high density populations but not much land for renewables.

Re. the low death toll, perhaps it's quite low because people were forced to evacuate. Evacuation and the marking of land as contaminated by radioactivity is considered a very high price to pay.

metta2uall··on Meta Quest Pro
Consider how much environmental damage they're doing by churning out so many physical products and convincing many people to buy them ASAP. That's arguably worse than privacy issues. Not that Facebook is any better - their business model relies on helping turbocharge excessive consumerism through targeted ads.
metta2uall··on Meta Quest Pro
This Metaverse/VR stuff would seem to require a lot of electricity.. and given our climate change problems I think it's mostly quite harmful.
metta2uall··on Google employee resigns after ‘retaliation’ for protesting Israeli contract
When "Zionism" only means that Jews have a right to live in those lands, that's fine because Jews are indeed one of the "indigenous" inhabitants of them.

When "Zionism" also means that Jews can create a "Jewish State" that discriminates against non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants (e.g. through a racist "law of return") - this is a big problem.

That land must be shared..

metta2uall··on Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
I've been using a Clevo-based laptop for years - very good value and works well with Linux. Just don't expect something light-weight with a great battery life - but if you're happy to carry more weight (it's actually good exercise..) and mostly plug it in that's fine. In Australia you can buy from https://www.metabox.com.au/
metta2uall··on Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
If modern "Buddhists" are skillful their practice won't be poisoned by a couple of problematic/corrupt passages within the huge Pali cannon..

There's the now-famous Kalama Sutta where the Buddha specifically encourages people to not rely too much on canonical texts: https://suttacentral.net/an3.65/en/sujato

metta2uall··on Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
Well, I don't think there's a conspiracy - accesstoinsight.org is actually an old site that is missing many suttas. It even links to a new updated website (e.g. from https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an08/an08.053.th...) and if you change the URL the sutta you mentioned is actually there: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN8_51.html.

But regarding this, and other, anti-women references in the Pali canon, the passages could be corruptions that don't reflect what the Buddha actually said. Or they could be authentic statements the Buddha made due to genuine beliefs and/or wanting better cultural acceptance to help the survival of early Buddhism. In either case it's not a disaster for Buddhism, which emphasizes the need for individual wisdom & compassion, rather than blindly following some real or imagined leaders.

Personally I think these are most likely to be corruptions because the suttas contain many more passages that are respectful of women & nuns. For example https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.044.than.html

metta2uall··on What comes after Git
Network effects, and that once many people get the hang of using git "well enough" they'd rather put up with it's annoyances than take the time to learn something that's marginally better..
metta2uall··on The Coming Food Catastrophe
I haven't seen a study deeply analyzing non-food uses either. I suspect though that while there will indeed be replacement costs they will be less than the costs of continuing the current system.

Michellin apparently already makes "vegan" tyres. Even for cat food, there are already vegan supplements and the science will improve. Beyond Meat being only 2x the price of killed meat is I think quite impressive when you consider how long each industry has had to optimise.

Yes switching from cows to chickens is better with regards to carbon but the problem is it's much worse with regards to animal welfare since many more animals need to be killed per kilo of meat..

There could be an optimal level of meat consumption if you just consider the environment, but it's far below what we're doing now, and given the urgent climate action that's recommended by expert scientists, it seems wise to reduce this consumption as much as possible. We're _far_ more likely to reduce too slowly than too quickly..

metta2uall··on The Coming Food Catastrophe
When scientists take all the complex factors into account and do the sums it turns out that in general plant-based foods are still far more sustainable than livestock, e.g. https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-how-the-climat...
metta2uall··on UN land 5 key takeaways for climate change, food systems and nature loss
Indeed the invasion of Ukraine is terrible all-round but the UN is already doing what they can to stop it. The UN is not some independent organization, it's member-based - but often it still cops direct criticism when the blame lies with the members.. For example, the UN Security Council can't do much about this war because Russia has veto powers - which is due to the very unfortunate fact that Russia has nuclear weapons and a key aim of the UN is to prevent nuclear war, which it does by trying to create discussion/consensus amongst nuclear powers. Even if Russia's veto was taken away, what could actually be done by the UN further to what is being done now?
metta2uall··on SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination and Myocarditis in a Nordic Cohort Study of 23 Million
I don't think it's "virtually zero risk" because there is "long Covid". Regarding myocarditis it seems important to know the prognosis, i.e. how many people quickly recover from myocarditis with apparently no long-term effects?
metta2uall··on NPM package event-source-polyfill compromised by political activists
Looks like a pretty reasonable & non-destructive message to reach Russians who are within the curtains of Kremlin propaganda.. Plus it'll teach some people about dependency management.
metta2uall··on Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?
Well, in addition to the current algorithmically generated pages (where the algorithm highly values new posts and can be gamed by bots), social sites could do more to help users maintain & publish high-quality material. The high-quality stuff would be more static since more effort is required to generate it, and others could view it through user profiles or a follow/subscribe mechanism.

I think YouTube does this to a large extent. They use algorithms to help discovery but users can easily click on a channel and view all of a creator's high-quality material. But YouTube is video-only..

metta2uall··on Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?
Maybe a social network that prioritizes high-quality content rather than fresh content. High-quality content (in terms of being e.g. persuasive & informative) may have a better chance of creating positive change than one's typical posts..

I'm working on an experiment at https://toplists.app/ that tries to leverage existing social networks, but this would probably work much better if e.g. Twitter expanded its "pinned" posts so that the UX would be seamless.

Also - perhaps software that improves visibility/transparency/understanding of energy usage, the lives of people in poverty, victims of human rights abuses, farmed animals, political votes, the impact of donations (Effective Altruism), etc

metta2uall··on Norway Chess cancels Alexander Grischuk
It's actually not plain old settler colonialism because Jewish people are also the "indigenous" inhabitants of those lands - but instead of sharing them with the non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants (now called the "Palestinians") the militant Zionists have declared a "Jewish State" where they systematically discriminate against Palestinians (e.g. no right of return for non-Jews & hardly any building permits for non-Jews in the West Bank).

Regarding bombings & war crimes, they have indeed been done by both sides. The crimes of Palestinian terrorists are obvious, but there is widespread denial & attempted justification of the IDF's crimes, hence the topic generates a lot of writing & debate. Examples of IDF crimes are the bombing of houses with many children in assassination missions (these are obviously not preceded by warning phone-calls) [0], and the shooting of Palestinian protestors at the Gaza fence who do not pose a risk to the lives of IDF soldiers.[1] The data ([2]) also speaks for itself.

[0]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/gaza-israel-wiping-entir...

[1]: https://theintercept.com/2018/04/10/gaza-protests-palestine-...

[2]: https://statistics.btselem.org/en/all-fatalities/by-date-of-...

metta2uall··on SPAs Were a Mistake
This is probably true if you're writing an SPA from scratch, but in reality much of that complexity is handled by libraries like Next.js. I also think it's much easier to learn a React-like library than to learn various server-side template frameworks..
metta2uall··on Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
Donating and contributing to various causes that will hopefully make the world a better place for everyone is what adds a lot of meaning to my life
metta2uall··on PRQL – A proposal for a better SQL
Looks pretty cool. I'd be interested if the README had a comparison with Google's Logica (https://github.com/EvgSkv/logica)
metta2uall··on From TypeScript to ReScript
There is also F# via Fable: https://fable.io

Business logic can be shared with .NET and it has lots of ways to interoperate with JS. There's even a TypeScript converter though of course it's not as pleasant as "yarn add" and YMMV : https://fable.io/ts2fable/

Here's a demo of building some React components in F#: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6Ct3CM_lj4&t=860s

metta2uall··on More Americans are saying they’re ‘vaxxed and done’
Many possibilities: firstly by reducing costs from excessive profits, insurance company staffing, "management", etc. Secondly by increasing revenue, e.g. from reducing corporate tax loopholes & increasing corporate tax rates.
metta2uall··on U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
I think a more accurate phrasing is that we're "designed" by natural section to _optionally_ eat meat. Large numbers of people like many Hindus, Mahayana Buddhists, and now vegans don't eat meat and can live healthily. By the way, most meat-eaters utilise fire when processing the meat - something that was invented - rather similarly to how Vitamin B12 supplements have been invented and now help vegans.

Re. empathy - I very much doubt it's to our detriment when one of the main threats to our survival is lack of empathy leading to extinction-causing wars - something that may have already destroyed previous intelligent civilisations around the universe. Even with medical experiments on animals - if they were much reduced I think this would likely lead to more effort & subsequent innovations in replacement technologies like cell cultures & simulations - which could lead to faster medical breakthroughs than if we continue on the current animal-testing business-as-usual trajectory.

metta2uall··on Customers shun red meat after carbon footprint added to weekly shop receipts
This makes statements like "Eating less meat won't save the Planet" (obviously true) and debunks obviously false straw-man hyperbolic claims like "cows are polluting the air with their methane rich burps, they're eating all our food, drinking all our water, and taking all our land that we could be using to grow human food on" (0:15).. At the end (19:28) they even say that reducing meat is a smokescreen to deflect from reducing fossil fuels - whereas of course hardly any environmental advocate deflects from fossil fuels (though of course a short cherry-picked clip of some animal rights activist not mentioning the systemic issue of fossil fuels was found & used).

It also states that going vegan won't make much of a difference (even if true you could argue that almost all necessary actions won't make "much" of a difference by themselves), cherry-picks examples of "bad" plant-based foods, doesn't seem to account for crops being fed to animals (including for "finishing" cows), and states that methane emissions are part of a natural cycle that's been happening historically (perhaps true for US but we'd still have less warming if this methane was much reduced!).

Some of his points seem valid though - e.g. ruminants making use of "marginal" land where mostly grass grows, but this is specific to ruminants whereas the video title just says "Meat". I agree that in many situations beef is indeed environmentally better than chicken & pigs, whereas in other situations, like when the Amazon gets destroyed, it's worse. So he could have written "Eating less Beef won't save the planet". (BTW, since cows are large beef also results in less killing per pound of flesh)

So how about both Meatless Mondays and No-Food-Waste Wednesdays (22:37)... Food Waste is certainly terrible & should have much more focus.

PS:

There's also a "debunking" video from Earthling Ed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkMOQ9X76UU

And the subsequent response: https://www.patreon.com/posts/51285771

metta2uall··on My Evaluation of SvelteKit for Full-Stack Web App Development
The major difference seems to be that preact uses native browser events, unlike react which implements "synthetic events" - so preact may have issues in old browsers like IE8 (https://preactjs.com/about/project-goals/)
metta2uall··on My Evaluation of SvelteKit for Full-Stack Web App Development
If a React developer is concerned about code size they can use Preact which is about 5kB: 3kB for Preact core [1], and 2kB for preact-compat [2].

[1] https://preactjs.com/

[2] "preact-compat adds somewhere around 2kb to your bundle size, but has the advantage of supporting the vast majority of existing React modules you might find on npm" https://preactjs.com/guide/v8/switching-to-preact/

metta2uall··on Lazygit: A simple terminal UI for Git commands
The edamagit extension for VS Code is also fairly good: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kahole.m...
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