strken

They keep buying ten of the houses I want to live in, knocking them down, and building a single tasteless McMansion on the combined block, and then lobbying for building and zoning regulations that won't let me build another house.

Presumably if we're all unemployed or employed in jobs that have zero economic worth to them, they'll buy all of our houses, build a bunch of big grey boxes for us to live in like a human zoo, build even bigger and more tasteless McMansions for themselves, and pass legislation that makes it illegal to live near them or inconvenience them.

The quality of life for the bottom 90% of the world has been getting better because they were so desperately poor that they could rely on economic growth to help them. At some point they're going to be rich enough in commodities that they start looking to buy things like houses or start businesses, at which point they'll find that asset prices are rising faster than their own wealth because of growing inequality, and they will look at their big grey boxes full of shoebox apartments and start to become unhappy too.

I disagree in some cases. Code is a means of communication. Sometimes it's more efficient to write code and bring it to your team than to discuss it in the abstract.

An example of this might be adding load shedding. You could spend hours talking through it, or you could say "I'm going to add a load shedder to the blah service as a proof of concept" in standup then take an hour to implement it, and have the team critique it from there.

I agree that whether they're a useful gate is debateble, but they can be a useful means of expressing an idea to be approved or rejected.

It sounds like you work at a company where the responsibilities of engineering are split across at least three separate roles, things move slowly and in a structured way, there's a large amount of coordination work, and a PR is a methodical translation of some step-by-step process. Perhaps you have bi-weekly meetings to review RFCs or similar.

At a much smaller company, you might find that a single person does part of the job of a BA, PM, and engineer, that they can produce a PR much more quickly as a result, and that it's more common for a PR to prompt the first detailed discussion about how something will work. A small team has quicker turnaround time on PRs and design, and can thus position in-depth reviews later in the process because less work will be thrown away in the case of a rejection.

Land is a little different from shares because you can meaningful affect the value of your land by spending your life improving your community if everyone else does too. You can be a good neighbour much more easily than a good shareholder.

I picked up some rubbish from the street on my way home yesterday. That act probably raised all our property values by some microscopic fraction of a cent. Then global macroeconomic conditions affected the property value by a huge amount more. It would be incorrect to attribute any gains to picking up rubbish, but it would be a very understandable human mistake, I think.

From my cursory look at this last night, the US doesn't like that the definition of "harm" is so poorly defined. They either don't care about the broader concept of opting out of an algorithmic feed or aren't willing to criticise it.

I've been disappointed by the coverage because none of it has helped me understand the legal context behind why they don't like this one specific thing.

What picture do you think is being painted here? I'm pretty sure that actual self-identified Marxists would be insulted if you accused them of believing in profit or thinking Adam Smith was correct.

It's not Marxist at all, otherwise it'd be talking about the labour theory of value and wouldn't admit that profit through innovation is possible. It seems to be Georgist.

I was under the impression that if you go back far enough to a millennium ago, peasants weren't trading for iron or having a miller grind their grain, and they were definitely spinning their own yarn.

I would welcome correction.

Speech writers and shadow writers in general are writing on behalf of other people, but they're not writing the same thing. They can't! Usually they're writing something better, with the proper voice and authentic to the views of the person, but still not the same as what they would have written.

If horoscopes and homeopathy can generate tests, then call me a Pisces and pass me the singular molecule of deadly nightshade toxin.

Seems like you're thinking of "extra care" as some sort of life extension, while the GP thinks it means things like help showering and cooking, and the GGP is ambiguous and could believe anything.

The inevitability of death is a philosophical question. I read the GP and maybe the GGP as talking about the more practical question of whether it's moral to let broke old people die from bedsores and starvation or whether we pay for nurses.

Not for out of copyright work, right?

If you have 100k people who don't smoke cannabis and 100k who do, 1000 of the non-smokers and 1400 of the smokers will have schizophrenia.

How do you detect schizophrenia in the 400 people in the non-smoker category? The answer is that you can't. They don't have schizophrenia. This is what it means for something to have an environmental trigger.

I get that you're making a point about ableism and environment, but in order to do so you're confusing two things: the onset of autism (at a very early age or even before birth and triggered by who knows what), and the occurrence of any specific symptom of autism (at any age and triggered by things we generally understand).

No, but per my earlier reply, it's one behaviour typical of severe autism, among other forms of self-harm. Pretending that broader society only wants to reduce the severity of autism symptoms for their own convenience is ignoring the very real suffering that's happening.

That study measured a drop from 83% to 17% in severe autism, and one behaviour typical of severe autism is slamming one's head into the wall, among other things.

I think it's overly dismissive to summarise a drop in these behaviours as just "less obvious and disruptive to non-autistics". I can't imagine slamming your head into stuff is pleasant regardless of whether you have autism.

Schizophrenia is known to have genetic factors that can increase its likelihood, but is also linked to environmental factors like cannabis use and stress. The group without the environmental factors has a lower incidence of schizophrenia, so it's generally believed that the onset of schizophrenia is triggered by them.

Male homosexuality is believed to have a small genetic component but is also linked to birth order. One theory is that in utero testosterone from older brothers can affect the sexuality of a younger brother.

I disagree that it makes no sense for environmental factors to lead to the onset of autism, on the basis that environmental factors can make someone gay or schizophrenic. That is to say, they can influence a personality and a mind in complicated ways that don't seem intuitive.

The Twixxer thread seems to be arguing that an AI can't do research into novel pathogens without people, which is probably true. I haven't met anyone who is worried about that and I think it's either mistaken or a strawman.

I've mostly heard "what happens if the next ISIS or the next Jim Jones can modify ebola to be waterborne or create super-MRSA because AI simplifies the process?" which is why I ask what it would take to create a more virulent virus on a shoestring budget. Not do novel Nobel-worthy research, just copy some existing paper from ten years ago.

In Australia I had to get into a genetics program, which happened automatically because I was the only applicant from my school, and take a four hour train ride to one of the local universities.

Definitely worth it though! We did gel electrophoresis too, and some other bits and pieces.

I don't know, but I bet it would look neat.

I'm confused by this. I remember genetically modifying E. coli to glow in the dark in high school. You can apparently buy a kit to do it online for $39.99 USD.

I'm not suggesting that making bacteria glow in the dark is the same as making arbitrary changes to a virus. At the same time, do you really need $100M of automated freezers and cell culture rooms? Do you need to synthesise a whole virus? Presumably you could just find a building in the desert, shoot anyone who goes near it, feed the past decade of gain-of-function research into Qwen, splice stuff into viruses based on the most promising leads Qwen gave your biologists, then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.

I would have thought the main thing stopping people is that this is a clearly stupid thing to do and offers little strategic advantage. But at some point it'll be cheap enough for you or I to do it with a little AI assistance, right? Or at least within the capabilities of an Aum Shinrikyo style doomsday cult.

I'm surprised they don't just run their own Project Gutenberg-style downloads for out of copyright digitised works. Seems like it'd be good PR.

If university is truly miserable then multiple years of it are going to give you lifelong issues with learning and set you up for failure later in life.

I'm not saying it has to be sunshine and rainbows all the time, but if you actually genuinely hate it then that's a worse outcome than being a blank slate. A blank slate can pick up a book at 25 and go follow their interest down the rabbit hole, maybe even go to uni. If you had a bad first experience then good luck unlearning all of it and getting back to the point where you're excited about art history or whatever. I also don't believe you can find something miserable the entire time and come out smarter for it.

If you're as baffled as I am, FLINTA is apparently a German acronym meaning anyone who's not a born and current man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLINTA*

They don't. They want to let people opt out of social media feeds for the same reason they currently let gamblers self-exclude[0].

Politicians do not believe that casinos are popular despite the gambling and they do not believe that social media is popular despite the feed. They want to protect the general public from addiction.

It's all fun and games when you download Tiktok. Then one day you're scrolling while your kid is in the pool, the lifeguard jumps in to save her, you realise you would have let your daughter die because you're addicted to watching dance videos on the fent rectangle, and you decide to quit.

[0] https://www.betstop.gov.au/

I think the literal interpretation is correct here. It's a way of saying "you, dear reader who runs this combination of things, might be very kind, but some of your compatriots will be unusually unkind and will turn up in my issue tracker and on my socials to complain".

In Australia where lamb is more common than in the US, it'd be pretty easy to keep the fat after roasting a lamb shoulder, or to freeze the fatty offcuts from forequarter chops and render them after I had enough.

I was going by foreign currency reserves, which feature CAD and AUD in much greater quantities than CHF. Also I swapped in SGD for GBP, whoops.

Global reserves continue to hold USD in greater quantities than anything else. A movement away from the USD still means a relative loss of faith in the US. If there's nobody who can guarantee trade then you still need to hold reserves, right? You just have to hold a broad and shallow pool rather than going deep on one currency.

In a way, the bond market tracks international central banks' confidence that this will continue to be true. If they lose some of that confidence, their stock of bonds moves from USD to RMB/EUR/JPY/AUD/CAD/SGD/etc.

Good thing we all had the ADA to protect us from free educational material distributed for cynical reasons.

They could have, but they didn't, then they got sued, and now kids in Kenya can't watch world-class lectures. Thanks, disability advocates! Thanks, UC!