rcoveson

"Eat cells, not substances" is a somewhat similar rule to "limit processed food intake", but the former would seem to encourage both pasta and rice while the latter would discourage pasta if you're being strict about it and rice if you're being extremely strict.

"Reeks" (stinks) not "wreaks" (inflicts). And for any linguistic archaeologists of the future, yes, this is evidence that those two words are audibly indistinguishable in American English in this time period.

> Interesting opportunity to potentially improve things.

...you mean by changing commercial software to collect telemetry more like FOSS tools do, i.e. usually not at all, right?

> Solitary confinement is used in quarantine...

This is just abuse of the phrase "solitary confinement". Yes, people in quarantine may be confined in solitude, but "solitary confinement" as a phrase has a particular connotation that is not applicable to quarantine.

> ...and penal settings without being "commonly" accepted as being torture.

It is recognized as a form of torture, commonly. The fact that you keep saying otherwise doesn't make it not so[0].

> The purpose isn't to cause harm...

That's an interesting interpretation! Valid, I suppose, but certainly not something you can just assert in passing. The purpose of torturing enemy spies is to get information that might stop a war, which on net reduces harm. Really, is the purpose of anything to cause harm?

In my view, the treatment of the child is purposefully portrayed as unthinkably cruel. It stops short of being graphic; they don't flay the child or stick bamboo shoots under its fingernails. But they do actively confine it; it's strongly implied that they will not permit it to simply leave, or even die. They don't make any effort to clean its living space! They kick it for no reason!

Go re-read the passage that describes the child's living conditions again. I don't know how the author could make it more clear that the arrangement is cruel. It's not like the people were given some absurd set of requirements for prosperity involving a confined child, and then did everything in their power to at least make it easy on the kid. Or, perhaps they have done everything in their power to that effect, but the requirements include cruelty itself. Either way, I'm not seeing how you think it is so incorrect to describe it as torture that you felt the need to directly contradict my use of that word.

If I described the conditions on the transatlantic slave ships as "torture", would you go out of your way to reject my use of that word because of the lack of intent to cause harm? Or would you accept the combination of the abject human misery, the sores, the starvation, the wallowing-in-excrement, the confinement, along with the fact that these conditions were inflicted by fellow humans, as sufficient basis for that descriptor? Because all of those things are true of both the Omelas child and the slave ships, and in neither case is it clear that the sole intent was to harm.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement#Torture

So there are people out there, not in this thread, who are wrong when they say things that are incorrect?

If it happens to you:

1. Remain calm

2. Tweet at your 66k followers

3. Briefly wait while the dozens of those that work at GitHub trip over each other getting your account reactivated

Solitary confinement is commonly accepted to be a form of torture, and that usually involves rudimentary sanitation and nourishment. A confined, solitary, starving child living in its own excrement is being tortured, and I defy anybody to argue otherwise.

Also, confinement is not an "act of omission" any more than punching somebody in the face and then leaving them alone forever after is an act of omission.

In terms of hours invested, I don't think going to the movies ever got close to the 50's rate of television consumption. I can find stats as high as 90 million tickets/week, which (if we assume 100% double features) may have been as much as 400 million hours per week. With a US population of 130 million, that's roughly three hours per week per capita. Compare that to television in the 1950s, which nearly reached 5 hours per capita per day. That's over 10x the time investment.

Radio, on the other hand, seems like it may have done similar numbers to those of TV. But I'd be interested how different those modes of consumption were in practice. Certainly some people watch TV in the background, and some people listen to the radio while doing nothing else, but I would bet the rate of watching TV while doing nothing else was far higher than that of radio.

In the original the kid was subjected to brutal, unending torture. Is your complaint just that this one is unnecessarily graphic?

I'm really confused. Did we read the same thing? This is just a "sequel" to the original Omelas that, if anything, suffers from the fact that it doesn't really add anything new.

It's harsher on the city's arrangement. It seeks out and destroys whatever moral ambiguity might have been present in the original. To me it read like, "I read the Omelas short story and I just want to be clear that the correct interpretation is that Omelas is bad, see, look how bad."

I don't see how it misses the point of the original. It just kind of shouts in agreement with the original in an unnecessary way.

> In what way does Ursula roll in her grave?

Who said she was rolling in her grave? I searched the linked page for any mention of "roll" or "grave" or "Ursula" and found nothing.

Under what conditions would you call this behavior "desire"? Would we need to demonstrate the impossible, that insects have a sense of self and free will?

Do insects desire food, or does the intensity of certain smells simply compel their mouth parts to start moving in a certain way?

Stay on track: Cloud storage. Not a buffet. Cloud storage.

Lots of business need gigabytes. Lots of business need terabytes. That's a 1000x difference. That ratio is not very buffet-like!

People who need terabytes of cloud storage are not like people who try to scam buffets by taking home food in their pants. They are not like people who do unspeakable things to the free bathroom. They are just people with lots of data. There are business that have lots of data. It is a common business problem in today's world.

> Extreme usage threatens the business model.

Right, and not all commodities have workable "unlimited" business models. The fact that somebody wants it to be a business model doesn't mean it should be one.

It's possible to offer honest unlimited plans. The all-you-can-eat buffet is one example. Just write it down somewhere that there's a time limit and that each individual person has to pay, and just like that you've imposed a practical limit without imposing a literal one.

Google Fiber competes with Comcast in my area, and they're happily able to advertise "unlimited gigabit Internet". Which is awesome. It's good marketing, and not dishonest: Their competitor imposes a type of limit which they do not impose (a monthly consumption limit of 1 TB). Of course, we know that there is still an effective limit in place: You can still only consume at the rate of 1 GiB/s. It's right there in the name of the plan.

But "unlimited storage" is just dishonest, especially when you're selling to businesses. Some businesses need cloud storage for documents, others need it for storing RAW video. There's nothing unreasonable about a few hundred TB unless you're just totally oblivious to the cloud storage business.

Essentially I think you're defending a somewhat dishonest marketing technique. What is lost by putting a 10 TB limit on the plan? I guess it wouldn't sell as well? Because it's not a lie? Maybe it's less "flexible" (i.e. Google can't just go change it whenever they feel like it). It's not like I can't see why that's good for Google, I just can't see why it's good for their customers. If there's a limit, just say it. Your customers would certainly appreciate knowing. And for crying out loud I do not care that being just a little bit dishonest about it makes customers excited and gets more sales.

My point is that it is easy to tell in the restaurant, and it is not easy to tell in a cloud storage context. We're not disagreeing about the former.

I actually have cloud storage customers at my company. If you asked me what an unreasonable amount of cloud storage consumption was, I would have a really hard time coming up with a number. A petabyte, I guess? We have customers that store kilobytes, and others that store many terabytes. Frankly we'd love a petabyte customer, because we actually charge people for storage, like any sane B2B storage offering. Some things are not meant to be unlimited.

The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced to make a U-turn and lose some face in the process.

These types of businesspeople should be fired urgently and with prejudice.

What's subtle about it? In the dog whistle analogy, who are they who cannot hear the whistle?

To me this is more like yelling "ROVER! COME HERE BOY!" at the top of your lungs.

If the prompt wasn't somewhat sexual, divisive, or offensive it would be wide open to the chorus of "still not as good as midjourney/dall-e/imagen". Freedom from restriction is one of the main selling points.

It's not a big deal, but it's not a trivially small deal either. It's sufficiently annoying that there had better be a good reason. In the case of "slave", there's at least a good argument. "Master" is ridiculous. You cannot speak this language (or Spanish, or Italian, or any other latin-related language that I know of) without that word. We've got master's degrees, master copies, Let It Be (Remastered 2009), and mastery. It has no reason to die, and it will not die in our lifetime. The master->main pain is just performative pain for its own sake.

Yeah, there probably won't be any second-order effects.

- John Riccitiello

If your baby's needs don't allow for a monitor that might fail, then don't put your baby to sleep in a different room.

This is my baby monitor setup. It uses a GoPro (already owned) and a BeagleBoard. If you have a webcam lying around this is a lot cheaper than any baby monitor out there. If you have a webcam and a raspberry pi or something lying around, it's free.

Point-to-point encrypted video from a sender with a GoPro plugged in with a USB cable to a receiver at 192.168.0.2:

Sender:

    curl http://172.29.114.51/gp/gpWebcam/START?res= # Put GoPro in webcam mode
    ffmpeg -nostdin -threads 1 -i 'udp://@0.0.0.0:8554?overrun_nonfatal=1&fifo_size=50000000' -f:v mpegts -fflags nobuffer -vcodec copy -acodec copy -f rtp_mpegts -srtp_out_suite AES_CM_128_HMAC_SHA1_80 -srtp_out_params ${FORTY_CHARACTER_PRIVATE_KEY} 'srtp://192.168.0.2:5005'

Receiver:

    ffplay -srtp_in_suite AES_CM_128_HMAC_SHA1_80 -srtp_in_params ${FORTY_CHARACTER_PRIVATE_KEY} 'srtp://192.168.0.2:5005'

Windows 9 was the only one worth using.

This is ridiculous. Of course Windows 12 won't require a subscription.

It will only be required if you want to disable the native data collection and advertising.

It's not financing. You'll never own those panels. You now have a permanent, physical relationship with the stupid solar company. Business models like that normalize two things:

1. Everything should be absurdly, suspiciously cheap or even free.

2. You don't own things you buy, you just own the right to use them according to your lengthy legal agreement with the real owner.

These have become very popular ideas! So popular, in fact, that if you object you're stuck paying for specialty items that are dramatically more expensive than they would be if they could be produced at scale.

The unfortunate truth about living in a big economy is that everybody merely exercising their free choice really does affect everybody else. So we reserve the right to talk shit about annoying business models, in the hopes that we will make them at least a little bit less cool and less popular so the competitors with "purer" models (like, "build a thing people want and trade full ownership of that thing for money") have more of a chance to scale up.

Don't worry, your neighbors next door and across the street will participate for you because they "don't see the problem with it".

If all you do is browse (default) home or all, then sure, it's just a stupid echo chamber obsessed with hating the things its cool to hate. That's not where the value is on reddit, and it's not what people are referring to when they say the search reddit for answers. If you're looking for product reviews, it's not perfect but it's tough to find anywhere better unless you happen to know of exactly the right hidden gem of a forum to visit for your particular subtopic (and the link to that hidden gem of a forum is probably easier to find on the relevant subreddit than it is on google).

> imagine the cost of Probe getting increased from 50 minerals to 60

Yes, please.

- T, Z

I don't think the fact that our 90th percentile capabilities have been known to decrease at times in history refutes the idea that the broader trend is dramatically upward, in such a way that any absolute measure of skill is very likely to give you ridiculous results if you pick it based on the standards of year X and then try to use it in year X + 1000 or X - 1000. Was Pythagoras a first-rate mathematician? By what measure that wouldn't also capture millions of people--most of them not even self-described mathematicians--alive today?

I think you'll find that if you set an absolute bar on most skills you'll end up with zero people above the bar in the past and a growing percentage of people above it in the future. The first person to run a four-minute mile was Roger Bannister in 1954. Now, that achievement is basically table stakes for college-level competitors. Similar effects can be observed in chess, piano performance, and just about any other activity you can measure. Making "first-rate" an absolute bar results in all sorts of crazy answers to the questions "who is first-rate now" and "who was first-rate 70 years ago". If you set the bar such that only the top 10 players of this year cut it, neither Bobby Fischer nor Michael Jordan would be first-rate.

"First rank" is the phrase from OP's link, not "first-rate", but in both cases it is not obvious to me that it is wrong for there to be mathematicians with that descriptor in every age. They sound like relative adjectives; "first rank" undoubtedly so, "first-rate" to a lesser extent.

"Who are the first-rate/first rank musicians of $YEAR" does not seem to me like it could be answered with "there were none in that year".