tigen

Adjust the nature of the service to balance costs and revenue.

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/usps

listed on https://sapro.senate.ca.gov

This committee is the following seven people:

  Senator Anthony J. Portantino (Chair)
  Senator Patricia C. Bates (Vice Chair)
  Senator Steven Bradford
  Senator Brian W. Jones
  Senator Sydney Kamlager
  Senator John Laird
  Senator Bob Wieckowski

> The people who read the thought experiment this way don't understand it. In the thought experiment neither the computer program (no matter how powerful the computer is) nor the man and the room understand Chinese.

Who says the computer doesn't understand Chinese, though? In this case "the computer" is the system. The program, being the code, isn't a process. The man is acting as a mechanical piece of hardware. But the computer running the program is an active process with state.

I heard a lecture by Searle on this. He mentioned the idea that "the room understands Chinese" and simply dismissed it as absurd without considering it. This is exactly the problem with his argument. Well, that and the casual conflation of the man with the computer as if the CPU hardware is the system.

Also: repeatability. Can others reliably invoke YHWH to combust beef? Can Elijah perform it under controlled laboratory conditions? Can the other priests of YHWH? If not, perhaps they too should be taken to the brook and slaughtered.

People have played Russian roulette and survived. Clearly then, Russian roulette is harmless.

Well, 1 out of 2 people has below-average intelligence. And the comments you see online vastly amplify the opinions of a small few.

Heck, not long ago you'd find a lot of humans saying this about other humans.

What I find is that a total lack of clouds can make the sunlight feel overly bright and intense. The dryness can also lead to a bit of dust in the air.

This is pretty minor nitpicking overall, but the middle of the day can feel a little harsh for these reasons. The landscapes also get dried out.

This is more noticeable in the south bay than SF and thereabouts

It's just because those first couple of Star Wars movies were just so exciting/imaginative etc. The universe was so lived-in and fantastic.

Trek has its moments, but it's just more boring. A lot of talky talky and slow and/or repetitive sequences. Even if it's more intellectually interesting as a whole, story-wise.

Even Star Wars was kind of slow by modern standards but the audiovisual design was just monumental.

Yeah for home use, futzing with the stove and rubber gasketed contraptions seems pointless. Pourover works well.

I used to use aeropress but the rubber plunger degrades and builds up grime, I also find pourover more fun to use.

Having a source of hot water ready to go makes it even easier.

Even in English, in certain contexts, blue-green middling shades are treated individually (turquoise, cyan). Of course there are many color names in paint/art, but even in everyday situations there is a pretty clear concept of turquoise being its own distinct color.

Yeah the activated carbon filter in my commercial purifier is just a sheet that sits in front of the filter. You can buy one and duct tape it to the DIY solution. It has to be vacuumed regularly and eventually replaced.

Also there doesn't seem to be any need to worry about sealing the filters as the author's experiments showed, and because the stuff you're filtering is already floating around. It would matter in a vacuum cleaner or some such pollutant-kicking stream.

> there isn't enough people around who have the skills and are willing to work there at any price

I don't believe it. They could easily expand their hiring if they were sufficiently motivated. There is a combination of mismatched incentives at the team level and inefficient interviewing processes and requirements.

It's often in the interest of employees to be inefficient in this regard.

weatherspark.com.

And arsenic in the food supply

The US outsourced virus research to this lab. The US will share some blame, because gain-of-function research is stupid in the first place.

Is this part of the misdirection? Both sides do not want to know. Or let's say powerful interests on both sides.

Why do you think "war with China" is a potential outcome of determining it was a lab leak?

This is not a strong argument.

Regardless of all these wild pontifications, those who have run interference on the truth need to suffer the reputational consequences.

It's not irrelevant at all, you mentioned them yourself, and he spent more time discussing lithium metal. What's irrelevant is your nervousness.

Exactly. Why are these spirits completely irrelevant, and "communicate" only thoughts one could already have?

The basic premise of minds as being independent from physical brains is desperate fantasy in any case.

No, the NFTs are a separate thing which apparently has some sort of sentimental value. The digital artwork is still whatever it was before. I could sell an NFT for my cuckoo clock. It has nothing to do with my cuckoo clock.

Eh, old people can be weird and stubborn. (Or people in general.) Some don't really believe in something and might even be having early stage dementia (i.e. memory loss).

My own mother had a dismissive attitude towards dietary intolerances and even basic hygiene sometimes.

I don't agree with Apple here but I also don't feel too outraged either, I can see both sides and it's their store.

I actually think Windows/MacOS should build the most commonly used sleep-gating functionality into the OS. (On Windows there's Coffee and Milk, where Coffee helps you keep it awake and Milk helps you figure out why it doesn't sleep. Seems like basic modern OS stuff to me.)

"Now you got a big problem, because neither Intel, AMD or Nvidia are going to license their intellectual property to Dell or HP for them to make an SoC for their machines."

This isn't quite correct. AMD and Nvidia have made custom SOCs for game consoles for years now; they could create customized SOCs for PCs if this was a critical issue. But I don't believe it is. The PC workloads and use cases follow well-known patterns and market segments and you don't really need a lot of different custom accelerators, or be on a single SOC for that matter. Video-related processing has been part of GPUs for many years.

For that matter, making RISC CPUs is not actually a huge obstacle for these guys. (Nvidia does.) Yes even Intel.

The article also seems to entirely omit the M1's heterogenous core strategy, where 4 of the cores are high performance and the other 4 are optimized for power efficiency. A deeper analysis of this and how software manages them would be more interesting.

At least weight saving is easily measurable and indisputable. Audiophilia focuses mostly on areas that are not so easily quantifiable.

Ray tracing also uses standard APIs, the effects are not going to be limited to one brand of GPU (in general).

The culture starts at the top. It's the CEO who is accountable whether the org large or small.

With a sprawling org like Google I sometimes wonder how you could ever expect the CEO to be fully engaged on all of it. It is probably just impossible. The best companies seem to involve a certain passion and enthusiasm on the part of the CEO.

Yes, even today the billionaires have set things up so that their children inherit most of their wealth, and these families kill all the other humans.

"humans were far too heavy to fly and in any case lacked feathers"

Science has certainly not "marched past" the issue of life (or health) extension. Knowing that it is related to cancer or whatever does not end the story. That is like saying we now know humans don't have feathers.

Regarding agency, the story the humans have no real choice in the matter because the dragon will kill them all otherwise. Ending aging would be much more valuable than ending war. Wars do not kill billions of people. Of course, it is possible to destroy all life on the planet in a war, but this is orthogonal to solving other problems.

"You are hilariously naive to think about solving one problem when there is another."

“With this achievement, the estimated number of galaxies in the universe had multiplied enormously — to 50 billion, five times more than previously expected,”

It seems that current estimates for this are higher, such as 100 billion in a 2020 article I saw. Anyone have an authoritative scientific source for the best current estimates?

50 billion galaxies (or 100) somehow doesn't actually seem so many. Considering that's on the same scale as the number of people on our tiny space rock. Yes each one has billions of stars inside, but still, we're talking about the entire universe.

Somehow, intuition suggests there must be more "stuff" beyond our observable universe.

A potential improvement might to split the scope of duties across more independent government entities. It's actually similar to how corporate management tends to plan management roles: things like end-to-end ownership of clear (and relatively limited) responsibilities. These days, the federal government's scope is massively larger than when the constitution was created.

One approach to splitting things might look something like this:

government A: education, taxes, social services, abortion, immigration, ...

government B: electoral issues, telecom/internet, mail, privacy, utilities, workplace regulations, ... basically, mundane areas that are more about boring competence and finding smart solutions. Or at the very least, serving the public will more directly.

This way, the boring yet important stuff can be done by B without being drowned out by the divisive stuff in A, where people become polarized into thinking they just need to vote against particular issues and there's no real accountability for the rest of it.

You might think that state-level government provides more accountability by being smaller, and this is true in some way, but for the most part I see the exact same thing happening where state government elections are mostly not providing much accountability in a lot of government domains because they aren't contentious enough to be the deciding factors in elections. But they are still important nevertheless.