progne

The fact that the two highest profile examples of starvation in Gaza have confounding conditions makes me suspect otherwise. If it is as widespread as feared, it should be easier to find pictures of starving Gazans than fat Gazans.

It is notable that in the same famous photo of the emaciated Mohammed Zakaria al‑Mutawaq in the NYT article, his not-malnourished looking brother Joud was cropped out. And their mother is not emaciated. Is she supposed to be starving her younger child to feed herself and her other son? To me this is evidence of press cooperation with a propaganda campaign.

I submit that if you find either side in this propaganda war to be credible by default, you do the other side a disservice.

Blown up hospitals can be secondary to firing rockets from the parking lot and using them as ammo dumps and military headquarters. You can take this line of reasoning back to the big bang without addressing the quality of evidence of a severe food shortage.

“Automakers have been making hybrids long enough that they’ve gotten really good at it. Plus, many hybrids are also made by manufacturers that tend to produce reliable vehicles overall, such as Toyota, Hyundai, and Kia.”

It's anti-intuitive that hybrids would be more reliable than pure ICE cars. But it would be explained by this if hybrids are somewhat less reliable than the ICE cars from these three makers. Presumably Consumer Reports has that data ...

For the big picture you need to compare the relative reliability of components after X million have been built. I would be surprised if the reliability of EV tech hasn't improved faster just because it has developed more recently.

I agree that it shouldn't be used for anything complex, even if it reduces to one line. But I do like it for simple things. Maybe it's staring at very similar code all day, but such short statements read fluently for me.

And even if an extra line of separation is used, it's still 6 lines instead of 11.

Just 12 years full time with Ruby here, I'm a noob. But when I see that I could replace

  def initialize(text)
    @text = text
  end

  def inspect
    "#<#{self.class} #{text}>"
  end

  def ==(other)
    other.is_a?(Word) && text == other.text
  end

with

  def initialize(text) = @text = text
  def inspect = "#<#{self.class} #{text}>"
  def ==(other) = other.is_a?(Word) && text == other.text

I start drooling a little. That's 3 lines to replace 11. We have a soft limit on class length of 100 lines, and I like the extra conciseness this allows.

You can also do it like

  define_method(:inspect) { |text| "#<#{self.class} #{text}>" }

and we do that in some places, but that extra verbosity makes for more lines.

In other words, to get your mass emails read, mimic personal emails more closely. It's a hack to use our noise filters against us. It's not exactly a dark pattern, even if it does make it a little harder for us to distinguish the signal.

See also Senator Paul going after the PATRIOT act in particular.

https://www.paul.senate.gov/issues/protecting-privacy-civil-...

SEC v. Jarkesy is a current SCOTUS case recently discussed here that's very much about interpreting the body of the constitution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38441401

> Kissinger saw combat with the [84th Infantry Division] and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge.

Thank you for your military service Mr. Secretary. Fighting real Nazis earns my gratitude.

When you hire according to which candidate has worked hardest to fight against oppression, it isn't surprising when their academic work is about gathering evidence for the fight against oppression.

> AI is useful and transformative, but it is nowhere close to "general intelligence."

Whether the intelligence is general or not, it is sufficient to automate and replace many many jobs now held by intelligent people. That by itself is quite sufficient to sustain many doomer narratives, even if nobody ever declares it "general".

We talk about the evil wages of hate but seldom about those of love. People love those flat little anthropomorphic faces, often very fiercely. That love creates demand for an unhealthy creature by the millions. This particular love has proven wide spread and enduring.

It was never about whether the motive is hate or love, both are correct in their place. It was always about the short- or farsightedness of their pursuit. We're probably just not farsighted enough to freely make those cute dogs rare.

Remember "Wilson" from Cast Away? That felt realistic to me. A psuedo-relationship in which the partner can actually reply intelligently is just an optional feature.

> A low Earth orbit with a separation of approximately 0.1 km may be suitable for experimental purposes.

Wouldn't that also suit an Earth surveillance array with unprecedented resolution?

The simulation points at the possible problem and solution. A big problem seems to be the slosh crashing into the tanks on engine ignition. The solution would seem to be just more time separation between the individual engine ignitions. I wonder why they didn't do that.

Recurring pain in the upper left abdomen. After seeing two different doctors about it and getting a PET scan, a conversation with GPT-4 convinced me that I have a problem with gas. It might be wrong, maybe I'm dying of something horrible. But I sleep better in the meantime.

I occasionally get large military transport planes that buzz my rural area at very low altitudes, often below my house in a canyon just a 3 iron away. I suppose they're training. The roar is epic. It'd be nice to get a little notification when that's about to happen. Not enough to write my own app for it though. Kudos for the hustle.

  Immune function analysis displayed significantly lower phagocytosis of monocytes and granulocytes in an older vegetarian population (vs. older nonvegetarians (P < 0.05, P < 0.001). Similar effect of diet was observed as decreased phagocytic activity of granulocytes in younger vegetarians. Regardless of age, respiratory burst of phagocytic cells was also significantly decreased in women vegetarians versus nonvegetarians (P < 0.05, P < 0.001). Older vegetarians revealed significantly suppressed proliferative response of T-lymphocytes to mitogens (P < 0.001).

  In conclusion, our data indicate that a vegetarian diet might have a possible impact on human immune response.

https://journals.lww.com/epidem/fulltext/2007/09001/The_Effe...

I just finished BG3 with 50k gold and nothing to spend it on. It made me feel dumb for obsessively looking in every container and looting every corpse for the previous 200 hours.

If 50k gold was the cost of a new heart for Karlach I would feel completely different about it.

> I don't think any VR headsets are going to offer better experiences than Intellij or VS Code.

What I mean to ask is whether tools like this are sufficiently legible on a 2D screen as displayed by MQ3, with a VR desktop? Or to see it well do the fonts have to be so large that there isn't enough room to work?

Is it viable as a coding environment?

This seems like a fine way to steel man a controversy by going directly to the sources. I'd like to be able to, e.g., dial up a debate between Karl Marx and Milton Friedman. Even better if it's possible for Karl to convince Milton or visa versa.

Are you Little Bobby Tables?

https://xkcd.com/327/

> If you have tried listening to audiobooks before but find it’s hard to pay attention, I recommend you start only with re-reading. It is hard to convince people of this but I am sure it’s true: Re-reading is often much more rewarding than reading for the first time.

I do this with long series, like Master & Commander or A Song of Ice and Fire, but for the opposite reason: so that I don't have to listen closely. I listen while I'm doing other things that take a variable amount of concentration. I know those books so well that there is little lost when I miss a random passage. But it's still comforting background noise.

The re-listening is often more rewarding, I agree. I look forward to the especially good bits and learn more and more of their foreshadowing.

Are you the sole support of this app, and if so what's your life expectancy? I'd just like to evaluate this lifetime offer. Age? Do you smoke or vape? Skydive? What's your BMI? Could you post your medical history?

In a Ruby app we just convert to a high base, like

  > 1234567890.to_s(36)
  => "kf12oi"

That gets us most of the way there, but Sqid has a Ruby library and lets you set a much higher base, including upper case characters, and I suppose, emoji. We're going to need much bigger numbers before that space savings makes much difference. I like it, but it's hard to know when something like that is worth adding a dependency.

Imagine a democracy in which you vote your IQ from an official test. If your IQ was measured at 114 your vote counts 114 times, etc. This seems obviously unfair. But would it improve the results? My intuition fails me here, I can't predict.

I wonder if that rule would have swung Brexit the other way? That would give an idea of the magnitude of the difference.

> Heckler's veto

Often motivated by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome.

I was once on a mountain top composed almost entirely of rocks like these. I'd like to give a sand castle artist this excavator and ask them to turn it into a fairy tale.

See for example the Seattle "tips to recycle right"

  * Empty, Clean, and Dry
  * When in Doubt, Find Out
  * Keep Bags Out

The page goes into detail on each. This isn't unusual in my experience.

https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-a...

Here's an online tool to help people identify the various kinds of recyclables and direct them correctly. It isn't easy and I doubt few Seattle residents know all of these.

https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-a...

If everyone started sorting and cleaning according to these rules the fraction of usable recyclables would increase a lot.