webnrrd2k

Yeah, benign neglect is a good response for a wide variety of problems. FWIW, I also call it "the healing power of apathy".

I could be wrong, but it turns out that somewhat fatter tires with lower pressure are faster because less energy is wasted by deforming slightly and rolling over small bumps, as opposed to thin high-pressure tire "bouncing" over pavement. There is less wasted vertical motion with the wider tires.

Re: quis custodiet ipsos custodes...

Slashdot has a meta-moderation setup where random users (with at least a minimum tenure and rating on the site) would get to vote on the quality of the moderation for randomly selected posts. I still think that this has a lot of potential for improving moderation, even if it's just used as a way of ferriting out problematic moderation.

Plato said a lot of shit. To be honest, I don't really care. The Bible said a lot of shit, too. I don't need Plato to tell me that in America, black people, native Americans, and all sorts of other immigrants got well and truly fucked for a long, long time. I don't need Plato to tell me that I find this, and other forms of racism, personally offensive.

Also, it's seems suspicious to insist that all Affirmative Action be halted before these race-neutral policies are implemented. It's almost as if it's some sort of cheap justification for more shitty racism. How about we get rid of affirmative action after we get a this baby bonds proposal? And also a bunch of other stuff that creates a more equatable playing field? Again, minorities were fucked over for decades-to-centuries before Afirmative Action, why not just let it ride for a little while before knocking out the ladder from under them?

Again, I object to your characterization of Affirmative Action as wrong or immoral. It was designed to counter centuries of institutionalized racism. I'll grant that the implementation has been imperfect, but what in this world is perfect? It's just better than doing nothing, it's better than wasting further lives, it's better than creating a permanent underclass. Could it be improved? Yes. Should there be an open discussion about it's effects? Yes. But I think the results should be more like "tweaks to the system" rather than an outright ban, or crying and gnashing of teeth about how Affirmative Action immoral.

One other thing, you keep asserting that "correct one injustice by doing a further injustice to an individual who had nothing to do with it." A few comments ago I pointed out some obvious counter examples, which you neglected to address. The important point was that people who had nothing to do with all sorts of problems willing submit to unfair treatment because they believe that they,or people they care about, will be better of in the long run for having done the right thing, even if it's difficult and somewhat unfair. That doesn't make it immoral. It may be a difficult choice, but it's the kind of choice adults make all the time, and that's just part of living in a civilized society.

[EDIT: I made a mistake when I said "A few comments ago" - it was a separate thread in this discussion]

For low dose melatonin, try liquid melatonin. Around here Sprouts carries it, but you gotta look a bit to find it. The bottle says 30 drop equal 3mg. So you can take small doses easily, and it absorbs under your tongue pretty quickly.

I disagree with your charaterization of the problem as exclusively a moral wrong... Was it only a moral wrong? Was the only effect a moral one? Or were there physical or tangible effects, too? For example, were there economic affects?

I'm not claiming to know the solution to the problem of ~200 years or slavery and ~100 years of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and further discrimination. I am saying that doing nothing about it seems pretty fucked. I am saying that claiming that it's immoral to do something about it, which you seem to be doing, makes you look like the worst kind of offensive and racist asdhole, too.

Re: two wrongs/people who had nothing to do with the problem

Obvious counter examples: plenty of people have been drafted and died in wars they did not cause or start. Also, people pay taxes to educate others, which (hopefully) fixes a problem they didn't cause or start. The list just goes on and on. In fact, I think it's a fair argument to say that modern society is fundamentally based on the opposite your claim, that people who had nothing to do with all sorts of problems willing submit to unfair treatment because they believe that they,or people they care about, will be better of in the long run for having done the right thing, even if it's difficult and somewhat unfair. In general it's called being an adult. Yeah, sometimed it sucks, sometimes it's unfair, but generally it's better for everyone in the long run.

Manhattan Project: $36B, 5 years

▫ Apollo Program: $257B, 14 years

▫ Interstate Highway System: $620B, 37 years

▫ AI data centers: $930B, 6 years and still accelerating

From: https://substack.com/@rubendominguez/note/c-244929068

Yeah, but it would be more-or-less in parallel, spread over however many organisms

History is replete with destructive, stupid and failed authoritarian rulers. King John, Ferdinand VII of Spain, etc... just basic research will uncover a lifeline of reading on the topic. Check out Mao's Great Leap Forward killed millions, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Hirohito didn't work out so well, either. The list just goes on and on.

Seriously, read about the Roman emperors, or the Crusades, or, for a more modern example, how's Putin doing on setting up his country for long-term success? How's Trump doing with America?

Re: movies and elite perspectives, I watched They Cloned Tyrone a while ago and it had a solid "hero movie from a lower socioeconomic class" vibe. I enjoyed the perspective shift and I think it might be a good example of your point.

There's a pretty good chance the Elon Musk, plus Russia and China have had more-orless unrestricted access to American's data since the DOGE dismantling of US government. Plus, by intentionally removing security and accountability mechanisms it makes it impossible to accurately determine how bad the damage actually was.

What's stopping you?

It's not Lamborghini, but Lotus had the $40,000 Elise a while ago. I don't remember how it worked out in the end, but a lot of people were excited about them at the time.

Edit lot -> not

I think it's a reference to the Butlerian Jihad

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

As far as I can tell, according to the article, the "science" is get feedback and listen to it. Ok, that was perfectly fine advice, I guess.

There's a book that ties into this sort of thing - Gold Warriors [1]. It about how, post WWII, the US recovered a bunch of Gold looted from China and used it to set up an anti-communist slush fund.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249237.Gold_Warriors

This is more me thinking out loud than a fully formed theory, but I suspect that a really large context might be useful when LLMs control more physical things. The huge context could be used to help encode the huge amount of implicit knowledge that ~4 billion years of evolution has crammed into our bodies. Plus all the junk we learned growing up, too. Stuff like vision processing, object permanence, all the unstated common-sense stuff humans are good at. Right now LLMs are used mostly for textual or data-processing tasks, but they will do more physical stuff, too.

It seems far more likely that it would all get baked-in to the LLM during training, but maybe it will turn out to be really useful to train up a "generic robot controller LLM" and pass in a huge number of tokens to better optimize it.

I don't know, this seems pretty weak... I am certainly no expert, but there have been a lot of studies, and in reputable journals, that show at least some benefit from fish oil. One study showing that maybe there is a problem with fish oil in special cases (like confusions) doesn't seem like it's worth worrying about.

Also, fish oil is well know to help with brain development. I know that a concussion is a different thing, but it seems a little suspicious on the face of it.

I'd think that electronic drum heads would provide a good prototype. I really know nothing about it, so I could easily be wrong, but the basics are all there... They are percussive, and the sound varies by how hard they are hit, so there has to be something like a power meter going on.

Maybe someone else knows more?

It looks like a Plastikov uses a lot of metal Kalashnikov parts that you'd need to get from a kit or machine yourself or something, so I don't think it's really fair to call that gun a 3D printed gun. It uses printed parts, but the barrel, trigger, etc... aren't printed.

I'll put in a vote for the Panini Sutra (Aṣṭādhyāyī) [1], which is a sort of "Backus–Naur form" for classical Sanskrit grammar. I don't understand Sandskrit, but I've heard from people that I respect that the Panini Sutra should be considered as one of humanities great intellectual achievements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...

Press gangs are back

I don't think anyone is asking for perfect, I think they are asking for "good enough".

If I may be blunt, it sound more like you might have some self-esteem issues, or shame, or just plain immaturity.

Just as an FYI, if anyone is into reading some good poems, I'd recommend "Good Poems", an anthology edited by Garrison Keillor. It's a great book to start reading poetry.

I had a friend who was reading it, and she loaned it to me, and it got me much more into poetry. I read the intro and was hooked. The whole series is pretty good, too.

Yes, and cigarettes, asbestos, lead in gasoline, and a few others, too. Clearly there is a place for education and coordinated action among the common people.

Yeah, that should have been in the contract too -- no using our software to overthrow the government or to implement a fascist state.

Bond to what -- that's the real question

”Mr. Potatohead is on the loose!” is my favorite, iirc from an fedora linux distribution.

What, like penicillin?