throwaway287391

You might be right (or at least closer to it) if the current POTUS didn't regularly use Twitter to make actual policy pronouncements with significant real-world consequences.

As a pedantic native English speaker, the name "WhatsApp" has always irritated me somehow. It's just not nice. There's an apostrophe missing, it's two words with intermediate capitalization and no space, "App" in the name of an app is redundant, the "pun" is a bit dumb (does it even really qualify as a pun?)...

But it's clearly worked out well for them, so I guess it's a good thing people like me weren't involved in their naming. shrug

You said "similarly popular sitcom". I loved Mythbusters but it's a geeky Discovery Channel (cable) show, it never came anywhere close to Seinfeld ratings...

> That's peanuts compared to a similarly popular sitcom.

Is it actually? Do you have particular sitcom(s) in mind? I tried to look for this myself and couldn't find much (beyond ratings for anything beyond the top ~20 highest rated shows in a given year).

I know very little about this, but I'm a little skeptical because I feel people tend to vastly overestimate how much money the average person they see on TV makes. The stories of the outliers (like the Friends stars making $1M per episode) really skew the perceptions of this -- the vast majority of professional actors (if not regular TV actors, but maybe even then) make less than the median Bay Area software engineer. A salary on the order of $200K a year for a non-headliner regular actor in a sitcom with viewership around 1M people (which I think is more than a typical episode of Mythbusters would've gotten) doesn't sound that far out of the ballpark to me.

Sure, the question is why one would feel the need to point that out and explicitly compare this death to others, other than to feel a bit of smug self-satisfaction. It kind of goes without saying that it will affect you more when someone you care about dies (whether you know them or not) than when someone you don't care about dies. For any given death, most people on earth are going to be in the latter camp, and in polite society those people keep their mouths shut out of respect to those in the former camp.

All the rhetoric about how artists (singers and actors) are "vapid" and the like is also pretty emblematic of the worst of "arrogant engineer" thinking.

It’s a good question — if anything I’d think that a promise is revocable by definition. If there’s no trust involved it’s not so much a promise as...collateral, or something?

Agreed -- the counter-theory for his motivations in the linked essay doesn't hold up to Occam's razor compared to this explanation. (Without knowing anything about the author of the linked essay, it felt like there was a bit of projection going on there...)

Yes, he didn't go to great lengths to cryptographically protect his identity. He's not Edward Snowden, he's just some guy who started writing some essays on a blog, and used a somewhat half-hearted pseudonym probably never imagining it would get popular enough for anyone to look into it further than possibly googling his pseudonym.

> But Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So also says that Scott Alexander is his real-life first and last name.

No he doesn't, he says it's his real-life first and middle name. It would be pretty hard to identify someone from a common first and middle name alone with no other identifying information. Read his post again: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...

Interesting, I didn't know that. Now I wish I'd had a Xanax after my one trip which kept me awake until 4-5 am after taking acid around noon (otherwise it was an incredible day, it was just annoying not being able to sleep).

Don't benzos have some pretty nasty side effects and/or dependency potential though? Maybe this drug is a bit more targeted / less risky?

Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fL9NNm...

Interesting. Thanks for making an actual counter-argument. I have to admit I have a little trouble believing the cultural connotations around college could have changed that much in the time since I graduated from HS (2007), but I'll take your word for it -- I don't have any current connections to kids that age myself.

I'd bet a large part of the reason is cultural. For just about any American high school student who's been exposed to the mainstream culture their entire lives (including myself at the time), the idea of missing out on the "college experience" (i.e. mostly partying) that just about every conventionally successful person they've ever met will have gone through and instead going to "small salary vocational training" would just be completely unthinkable and depressing to imagine, especially if all your friends are following the usual path. I suppose it's possible this may change with Covid-19 but I still don't quite see it.

Edit: could any of the downvoters explain their reasoning? I guess this could have come off as facetious because I mentioned partying or something, but I'm completely serious -- why wouldn't cultural reasons be a major factor?

Sure, but what does it mean for someone to be "way below your league"? I take it to mean they're unattractive to you. Unless I'm misinterpreting that I just don't see the appeal of sleeping with someone who you're not attracted to.

> But they do not see them as equals, as they have been having casual sex with men way out of their league for years.

This is the part of this whole theory that I don't really get -- why would these presumably superficial men bother sleeping with women "way below their league" when they could be sleeping with women in, or at least near, their "league" all the time? Is the novelty of a constant huge supply of new partners really that important vs. having a slightly smaller rotation of people in "your league"?

So it's basically laser tag in the sky? Neat. Is it more or less a perfect simulation or is it just enough to get an idea?

Is this incredibly obvious or did I miss the part where they specified the rules of the game? I assume they're not actually going to have the drone fire actual missiles at the manned fighter...right?

I don't mind Calibri, but I've always thought it was a surprising choice as a default since whenever MS Word switched to it. It just looks too "friendly" for "serious business" to me. I think if you interpolated between Helvetica and Comic Sans you'd get something like Calibri on the way. (PS I know nothing about typography.)

> Slicing in Python always create a new object.

Since you said "always", I'll be "that guy"...

For the builtin types, yeah. But not in general; user code can do whatever it wants:

    class MyType:
      def __getitem__(self, *args):
        return self
    my_obj = MyType()
    my_other_obj = my_obj[3:7]
    assert my_other_obj is my_obj

> This example illustrates how difficult AGI is and how far we are from it.

Does it? AGI is very difficult, but I think this example only illustrates that Siri is kinda bad, given that DDG, Google, Alexa, and Bing all got it right.

Ah, thank you. I didn't understand that and now this all makes a bit more sense to me.

Right, I'm just trying to understand the notion that stock buybacks are somehow particularly bad in this regard.

Agreed, but then it seems to me that the buybacks are kind of besides the point, and the real underlying issue is that they don't care about their workers (and/or aren't incentivized to), no? In terms of future flexibility / robustness to unforeseen emergencies, sitting on a big pile of your own stock doesn't seem that different to me from sitting on a big pile of cash, except in terms of the risk profile. (In contrast to paying a dividend, where they really can't recoup the cash if they need it.) I could easily be missing something though...

I don't know how this whole buyback thing works really, but could they not just do a "sellback" of some of the shares they still own if they now need the cash? (Of course they might have to do so at a bit of a loss.)

Not to defend the word choice by King, but IMHO the original sin was the definition of the generic-sounding phrase "open source" as anything other than "publicly readable source code". It's quite counterintuitive to anyone who knows what the words "open" and "source" mean in English that "open source" means anything beyond "the source is open". Perhaps it's a losing battle and a different name should be chosen?

My behavior is completely different depending on the tab UI. I'm a minimalist on my desktop: as soon as I'm unable to read at least 10 or so characters of each tab title I start feeling a little restless/cramped and go through and close all the unneeded tabs. This usually happens a couple times a day. I feel a tinge of stress whenever I look at a tab collector's browser window.

OTOH on my phone where the "tabs" aren't prominently shown in the UI I have hundreds of "tabs" going back months/years. (Occasionally I'll look back at them and it'll bring back some memories of when I was researching a certain topic or on vacation somewhere, which can be nice...)

Yeah. I'm pretty introverted but the number of good friends I've made in my life that I didn't meet through either school or work is exactly 0. I've never quite understood the anti-coworker-socialization sentiment here. For some people it seems to go beyond that they've given their coworkers a chance and they just don't like them; rather they seem determined not to socialize with coworkers as a matter of principle. Why would it be more likely that you're going to enjoy socializing with your neighbors or your disc golf teammates than your coworkers?

It's interesting that it's apparently the problem that laid the foundation for modern graph theory, but the problem can't actually be specified as a graph under its usual modern definition... can it? At least not without some shenanigans that would make it more complicated than "node = landmass, edge = bridge", as it's depicted in the standard diagram shown on Wikipedia.

A graph is usually defined as a set of nodes and a set of edges, where an edge is a pair of nodes (an ordered pair if it's a directed graph). The "set" of edges (bridges) of the "graph" in this case contains duplicates -- there are two edges with the same pair of vertices, two bridges crossing between the same pairs of landmasses. And the two pairs of duplicated bridges are essential to the problem setup. So AFAICT it can't be fully specified as a set of edges; it would have to be a multiset.

(I've seen this problem before but only just noticed this when reading Wikipedia now -- let me know if I'm missing something.)

Thanks, hadn't considered any of that. The exemptions of government expenditures and exports do seem inherent to any VAT, now that you mention them, but I wouldn't think the capital goods sales credit for businesses would necessarily have to be, would it?

Ok, but your previous post said "even if you are very optimist and assume that he’ll get exactly as much as he expects in taxes", so I was operating under that optimistic assumption. Was Yang planning to exempt any part of the GDP from his VAT? Genuine question but I didn't think he was.

Speaking of which, I googled Germany's VAT and it seems there are quite a few exemptions ("food, books, hotel accommodation, cultural services and other goods and services") that only get VATed at 7%, which is much closer to the 6% they apparently collect in practice. But sure, they probably do fail to collect quite a bit of what they theoretically could.