onnoonno

Talking, arguing for materialism also means that one separates materialism from 'the rest' or 'the other ways of seeing the world'.

This means that anyone calling themselves a materialist must also have a concept of this 'rest'. But what the heck is it if you fully believe in a materialist world?

Maybe a related question:

Where does the idea of materialism fall?

Is the idea of materialism itself part of materialism?

How do you avoid damaging the consistency of Python objects then?

I think the only way to do that would be to have a reentrant lock for each object individually. Isn't that potentially a big performance issue?

I think that is the main reason behind this quote from the article:

> Several attempts have been made over the years and failed to do it without sacrificing single-threaded performance.

... and it should be added that having infinitely many worlds is maybe not really the simplest explanation of reality.

Agreed, it just feels inadequate to me, too. Information theory is a hammer ... and now everything we can think of (~ information...) looks like a nail.

Another hint that maybe the big Turing machine isn't quite cutting it might be the experiments showing that gravity isn't quite like 'just' an entropic force but seems to behave genuinely different.

> But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first place.

Exactly. It can also be argued that not reproducing is probably the most 'green' thing one can do.

How about putting

#if !defined(__AVR__) && !defined(__MSP430__)

#warning "Fix this FIFO - ++/-- possibly not atomic!"

#endif

into the header of that thingy then. Save work on small uCs, and be warned when moving it somewhere else.

> "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsing

Seconded. I think this one does a good job at resetting one's worldview to the state of 'what do we actually know?'

He's angry, but arguably every item in his list is valid, so shouldn't he be angry? Why do you call this unhinged?

People argue equally well that feminism as a word is used up and all kinds of bad things happen under the label of feminism, so it might be better for you and your friend to distance from it.

More to the point, you might want to have a look at this video from a female, also check out her other videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp8tToFv-bA

Parents are unavoidable. Kids and gf/wife pretty much are avoidable.

If we'd all live like Walden, the planet would be a suburbian dystopia.

I sincerely hope many people WANT to live in cities.

But then, if they make their own phone OS it does go to infrastructure, or doesn't it?

The enthalpy of fusion for water is 335 J/g. The specific heat capacity of ice at -10C is 2.1 J/(gK). So the major part in melting the water isn't heating it until it melts - it is the melting itself that is expensive.

That said, I do see some value in solar ways in the space savings.

One thing I would likely miss living in a small forever is the intellectual input. Sure, it is nice to have exchanges through the Internet for that, but sometimes it is good to have some intriguing discussions with other driven people.

OTOH, the vibe/'cutting edge' in big cities is just a fad/false religion more often than not.

But I do think it is easier to find like-minded people or people to connect to in bigger social groups.

So you think we're driving each other crazy?

Resonates with me. But I still don't know whether it is really the others or just oneself doing the driving.

Interesting weird and crazy read. Thanks for the link.

So maybe we are going towards a 'Weirdocalypse' now?

While reading the article, it feels to be somehow close to the edge of insanity. For some reason, that seems to happen nowadays when big concepts are put together.

I have this impression this means we are starting to lack new and better language for the stuff that we describe.

> Ah, actually that's not true at all and is a foundation of this debate. If an individual had a machine that created infinite bread for free the person, under the current market, could restrict access and distribution all they like. I think in practice this (not the bread thing) is what will happen with certain goods where marginal costs go to zero.

Funny how the optimists throw out all the law of conservation of energy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics to make their points. Quite an interesting kool-aid you drank there...

Ah ok, I see. Well for a while I was looking at those factors to be external rather than internal as well - but I am more and more convinced that people get exactly the government they want, all the time.

> I don't know but having lived in all three countries, I don't see that many differences in term of people's character that could explain the difference in murder rate.

No offense, but could this be selection bias? You have certainly only talked to a selected subset of people..

I think if 80% of the U.S. population would want a thorough reform of their justice system, it would happen.

What exactly would an 'external' factor be for you?

^ This. There might be a very harsh wake-up to energy realities for the ignorant subset of the treehuggers, but nuclear can and hopefully will keep us going energy-wise.

I am MUCH more scared of a nuclear war breaking out over diminishing oil resources than I am about peaceful nuclear energy. That would be mankind's biggest and worst irony.

IMHO, it is bordering on insane to not consider peaceful nuclear energy as someone who is keen on saving the planet.

Sure, conserving, saving, making everything more efficient is fine and laudable. But one still has to support the energy needs of some 7e9 people.

> SDI made sense. We still have SDI. Now we call its "Strategic Missile Defense" and its our biggest counter against rogue nation nuke launches and other attacks. It also has Putin scared as he can't match it and is demanding we don't continue to build new sites in Eastern Europe out of desperation.

You just basically said that SDI is destabilizing because it will take away MAD. I fail to see how supporting that is rational or sane.

Did he say anywhere that he is gay? If he is neither gay nor bisexual, gay marriage is obviously not an option for him.

And heterosexual marriage looks more and more like a really stupid idea for guys, with no visible benefit. I guess that is his point?

Why marry at all? I mean, seriously, what is the advantage?

A video that might be worth to watch, criticism of feminism from an eloquent woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp8tToFv-bA

Hmm, but the randint(...)/... method should come pretty close to a uniform distribution on the 0..1 interval, shouldn't it?

It wouldn't have maximum entropy, though.

> So unless there is a relatively low limit for total humans on this planet, we won't reach it before we become a spacefaring race, at which point the limit will be the carrying capacity of the Universe.

But even in that case, you can only have at most polynomial growth (human habitat spherically expanding with speed of light) instead of an exponential one.

Looks indeed very interesting, thanks for the link!

What is the naive way? Interpreting a random bit string as a float? Or rather randint(1000000000L)/1.0e9?

A very good reason to generally attack/dismiss feminism IMO is that it is this morphing amoeba-like ideology. One's personal feminism is always different from 'those mainstream feminists', yet you do not see a lot of distancing from some of the very harmful feminist extremists that are around. ("NAFALT" - not all feminists are like that)

It's gotten to the point where the analogue would be to label oneself a 'stalinist libertarian' (because not all stalinists are like that) or other similar nonsense.