samtho

The problem isn’t tricky at all, actually.

Just because the punishment for seeking mental health care is losing one’s entire career doesn’t make these problems disappear, it just makes everyone very good at masking or self medicating.

Law enforcement operates in a position where they “can’t lose” an encounter. This is a major cause of rapid and unnecessary escalation with LEOs and the civilians they’ve stopped.

I’m from Sacramento and I know of people who worked at Sircles. It’s comically mismanaged and run by a comic book villian.

Not every restaurant can handle the deferred payout either. Their business is based on receiving payment at the time of service. The restaurant model operates on razor thin margins, and they don’t buy their food on net 30 terms, but they have to absorb costs as if they do.

There are other issues, but this setup looks a lot like paying the mafia due to the imbalance of power.

From the perspective of the publications, it’s fear-mongering which makes clicks.

Out of control AI is a common sci-fi trope because it’s a convenient allegory for the uncaring systems that determine the quality or continuation of human life.

Of course, investors are loving this because there is no such thing as bad press.

I didn’t get the impression that the author is advocating for removing spinners as a UI concept, rather it’s just being used a shorthand for, “you should not need to send and load the data to and from elsewhere while you are working.”

Guilt by association, then? This is not how any sane legal system works.

The owner of the vehicle may not be the one driving it.

A motor vehicle cannot receive a citation. If law enforcement cannot ID the driver as a particular individual when the infraction or crime occurred, a citation should not be issued.

It’s not about Bitcoin, it’s about perception. Cash carries a great deal of trust and people buy things with it. It’s so much easier to separate the criminal from the means when you use the same means to pay for a sandwich earlier that day.

They would need to remain around long enough for the privilege of failing due to unmaintainable systems.

Just because an SMS originates from a computer does not make it spam. I like to be notified that my drive up order is ready or for a link to check in at the doctor.

It’s funny, if you open a TV set it’s already super modular like computers were before we had standardized parts, ports, and form factors. It’s got the power supply which makes the 24V for the display, 12/5/3.3V for the other electronics, an I/O interface board, the MCU and its peripherals, the sound driver, and the IR receiver/Button control.

They do this so a manufacturer can use the same parts among different products or simply install an upgraded one to unlock more features.

If it were standardized, this would be fairly easy given that they all pretty much work the same but then they would have write actually good software and UI for people to elect to use their specific product.

I don’t think the reaction to everything we dislike should be “let’s make it illegal” because you’re going to end up with unintended harms. If companies are forced to retain public information against their will, many will simply opt not to have a public forum.

If anything, governments should be proactively funding organizations that archive content and governments can archive content of significant cultural or historical value like the library of congress does for physical media.

It’s regressive because banning a vice does not magically make harm from it disappear. The addiction issue needs to be addressed in a meaningful and direct way.

The other problem is that many advocates for a ban on pornography use this argument without actually caring about the issue they decry, otherwise they would have engaged in actual awareness or harm reduction campaigns. Instead, they choose to engage with this argument in bad faith because in actuality pornography just does not align with their morals.

A good ADHD coach can be life-changing, as cheesy and corny as it sounds. As you’re likely aware (but for the benefit of everyone else), the ADHD brain is not extrinsically and intrinsically motivated by the exact same things of someone with a more neurotypical brain.

An ADHD brain is more motivated by external Urgency while a more neurotypical will be motivated externally by Importance. This often leads to ADHD people being perceived as anywhere from flakey, unreliable, to totally unconcerned with problems and/or commitments. In social relationships, they are perceived as being anywhere from touch and go to just unwilling to invest into social bonds. The worst part is that if you are able to mask well in one area, you just don’t have the energy to mask everywhere else. It’s like an unwinnable game of wack-a-mole.

It has taken many years and losing so much to get to where I am and it’s still objectively shit. Knowing that every in the world is not made for how your brain functions and is often made specifically for how the majority of people’s brain functions is depressing.

I’ve found that very carefully selecting work that lets me lean into my specific strengths (good under pressure, able to dive deep on technical problems and pull out results, and being a good business communicator), in conjunction with aggressively automating or pre-preparing parts of my life that suck (laying out clothes/tools/equipment the night before, having a checking “escrow” account all my auto bill pay gets pulled out of) helps me function more efficiently.

It gets better, you can carve newer and deeper neural-pathways by sticking to routines, and finding ways to get that dopamine.

Also medication, that really helps.

Amazon also has mastered the art of getting cities to bend over backwards for them, offering tax breaks and land because Amazon wants to bring X number of jobs that pay over $100K/year to the city. Well, now these offices are vacant and the high paid workers are not even in the city like Amazon promised. The cities that helped Amazon foot the bill for their offices are not super happy and want either the results they promised or for Amazon to pay back what the city had invested.

I would argue these are still distinct meanings: one has speculative implications the other has tangible results. Announcing a marital engagement may be important, but the marriage is not formal until the marriage certificate is filed. In the context of news, its important to get right.

> […] I was put off by the product due to the now-mandatory paired subscription ($200/yr with purchase, annually paired only, can cancel after) […]

It is both confusing and fascinating how some companies manage to put out a product with a subscription, the existence of which defies logic and consumer expectation, and yet they manage to find a group of people who tolerate it.

The rise of services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA have actually allowed people to discover information about their parentage that they would otherwise not have had access to, basically they find out that one or both of their parents are not biologically related to them. Individual situations range from extramarital affairs, closed adoption, in-familiy adoption (teen gets pregnant, her parents raise the child as a sibling), and those who’s parents chose to conceive with donor gametes. In many of these cases where it is a surprise, the parents have either actively chosen to withhold the information or didn’t know.

In cases where the user is trying to find their parent, it’s statistically unlikely that their parent would have taken the test, but 2nd cousin matches are very common. These seem like a huge distance away, but you can work backwards and build a family tree up to their great grandparents and fan out from there.

Depends on how you define helpful or how much of a requirement for content to actually be “helpful”.

A strict definition might require content to have academic or intellectual value (implied by the remark about it being shown in an academic context) but this would also exclude a vast majority of non “obscene” content. Further, if you could swap the obscene elements for non obscene elements, I would argue the “value” of the content, as measured by its helpfulness, stays the same.

This all moot, however, as it’s likely not the right conversation to have. There is more useful discussion to be had on harm caused as a result rather than any sort of value judgement.

Supposing the premise that these things were entirely unhelpful to society, I would argue that the obscenity specifically is not what makes these things unhelpful.

Yet humans have fared mostly fine as a whole with even a moderate level of those things, legal or not, consistently happening throughout history and cultures. The biggest problem we have is when these vices are driven underground so the vice itself is conflated with the additional risk of having to put one’s self in a dangerous situation to engage with it.

Looking at western culture (the only one I feel confident speaking about), we are still bound by puritanical values that were imposed as control mechanisms but managed to sneak their way into a set of cultural norms as a moral code despite their actual value to us not being evaluated and actively selected.

I am not sure how you got to this slippery slope that doesn’t have a good reason to exist.

This movement is not about filling capsules with powdered ginger to treat something that it’s unable to. The goal is to synthesize molecules that have been studied and that we know work as a replacement for having to pay a doctor to get permission to buy them.

In some ways, the gatekeeping of healthcare should be met with more resistance than repair an item that someone else made but you now own.

Your body is something that belongs to you, you technically manufacture, yet you are legally forbidden from applying known and often the most effective remedies to your own body if you don’t engage with a giant government-sanctioned system that can charge you whatever they want.

To top it all off, the rules are not even consistent and are motivated by reasons other than what is best for the patient.

For example, taking more than the maximum dose of Tylenol at can cause long-term or permanent liver damage. This is still available over the counter with no restrictions whatsoever.

On the other side, we can see that the DEA was created to enforce drug policy (or rather racism and classism via drug policy) which has the effect of making access difficult for many people who are prescribed scheduled substances. Yet we have a opiate crisis that managed to appear within this draconian regulatory environment.

Then we have situations like the FDA which been aware of the dangers of high sugar in diets, but the sugar industry’s dollars into “studies” managed to convince them that “dietary fat” is the problem.

The “for your own good” argument only works if they actually acted for our best interests, but time and time again, it’s shown to us that this is just a big game in which we have no say in, yet we are all subjected to.

We should have the right, as an informed human, to independently decide what we want to do to or put into our body, just as we should have the right to choose what we wish to do with our possessions.

I am legitimately unsure why you felt the need to make this comment.

If you were uncomfortable posting this it here because you think that someone else might take it an endorsement, then why did you post it? People post things they find interesting and disagree with all the time. What are you afraid of?

This is very reductive and gross misrepresentation of split brain experiments.

Humans have various level of memory (working, short term, long term), the ability to experience meta cognition, and the autonomy to make a decision - all of which (and much, much more) informs our behavior and are also things that an LLM fundamentally does not have.

These “studies” are painfully naive at best and are at worse an intentional misinformation campaign used to bolster the value of LLM past what they are useful for.

Ghost, but only if your primary focus is blogging (rather than a CMS or e-commerce platform).

The user you’re replying to asked how to solve a practical problem and you responded with philosophy.

While I don’t disagree with what you said in principle, being able to fall-back to TIA for removed/deleted images would probably solve the issue 95% of the time.

They are starting to care about it after catching on to out how overstated the real world capabilities of AI are to actually replace headcount.