why_at

Thanks for this. This is something that always bugged me when I see explanations of the three-body problem. They'll say something like "changing the initial conditions just a tiny bit can dramatically change the outcome!" as an explanation for why having no closed form solution is significant.

But that never made sense to me, since plenty of things with closed form solutions also do this.

I've always wondered if we could potentially use genetic engineering to open up new possibilities for food. Would it be possible to make some inedible foods edible this way? For instance, what if you could make non-poisonous death cap mushrooms or nightshade berries?

I'm not a doctor or anything so I could be mistaken, but my understanding was that activated charcoal is helpful for treating poisons/toxins, not pathogens like you might find in bad seafood.

Unless there was a poisonous mushroom or something in your Thai food or your paella, would activated charcoal be expected to help?

Yeah this article is kind of annoying. I've started foraging for mushrooms in the past few months and I've never found a morel but I know they're poisonous when raw. It even says so on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morchella#Toxicity

There are plenty of gaps in knowledge about mushrooms, and there's a lot of unknowns about the ecology of morels but plenty of people eat these all the time.

I get that using lights makes it easier, the part I don't get is why it should be illegal for it to be easier.

It would make sense to me if there was a "hunting league" like the NFL or something which had rules on what you're allowed to use, but why should this be a law?

It feels like making RVs illegal because they make camping too easy. If you want the challenge, just don't use them?

I've never hunted before in my life and I only just learned about "Spotlighting" in hunting, so I'm a little confused.

I get that using a light makes it easier to hunt deer and other animals since they will stay still as you shine it on them, what I don't get is why this should be illegal. Can any hunters explain it?

So far one reason I've seen is that it can disturb wildlife to shine bright lights all over the place which I understand, but it's not illegal to walk around in the woods with a flashlight in other circumstances so this seems odd.

The other reason I've seen is that it's too easy or "unsporting" to hunt deer in this way. I don't really understand this since you already need a permit/tag/whatever to hunt in the first place, so it's not like you'll get too many deer. If someone wants to hunt this way, why not let them?

>In broad strokes you have the majority which are physicalists, which leads to strong determinism.

I'm not an expert in the philosophy of consciousness or free will or anything, but it's my understanding that most philosophers are compatibilists even if they are physicalists. So it's not necessarily true that physicalism leads to hard determinism.

I think a key part is they need less fuel since they aren't going all the way to orbit. Getting to orbit is the difficult part and it's why they need the whole gigantic first stage booster.

When they first developed the second stage they did some low altitude test flights with just the second stage and it went miles into the air IIRC, albeit with no payload. It's possible that once they deliver the payload, the second stage might have enough fuel to fly back to some drone ship or something.

I don't really understand what the difference is between the government owning Starship vs contracting it. Are they thinking they would operate the thing without any support from SpaceX? Would they have their own team of engineers or whatever dedicated to Starship support? Would these people need to be trained by SpaceX?

Once the rocket is launched and full of the US gov's people/satellites/supplies/whatever, what difference does it make who owns it?

Random thought I just had: What are the odds of a rocket launch crossing through one of these laser links on its way to a higher orbit and disrupting traffic for a fraction of a second?

I know space is really big and so the odds of a rocket hitting a satellite on its way up are incredibly low, but now we're talking about lots of lines between each satellite rather than just the satellites themselves. Are the odds still tiny?

Not that it would be a big deal if it happened, just curiosity.

Polls like this are always interesting to me because there's so much that can go into a person's answer to any of these questions.

For instance, per the article most of these "Nones" still believe in God or Gods but don't subscribe to a particular religion. They're definitely not atheists as you might expect from the label.

On the flip side, I know some people who would probably answer this poll as Catholic even though they don't attend church, don't believe that any miracles in the bible literally happened etc.

To add to this even more, there is the lumper/splitter problem of which groups we count as one. As others have pointed out, Christians would outnumber the Nones if they were all put in the same group. But how we decide to slice things up can affect how the results look.

Yes, he logged into the server using the credentials embedded in the app. Since the server contained information from other users, this would clearly be some kind of crime if used this access maliciously or maybe even if he just logged in knowing that he wasn't supposed to be allowed to.

But I think the salient point here is whether or not he could have known that before logging into the server. Since the credentials are in the app, should he assume that the company's security is so bad that this would give him access to all their customer data? He is obviously allowed to use the app, and the app uses these credentials so it's not too much of a leap for him to think that he should be allowed to use them as well.

Regardless, I think the result of this ruling will clearly be bad for computer security. In the future maybe someone who finds a vulnerability like this won't report it out of fear of legal retribution.

I mean, it's pretty hard to tell what's going on inside any other creature's brain, from dogs to bees to humans. It's generally easier the closer they are to yourself, so it's easier with dogs than with bees.

I think you are shortchanging bees a bit, based on your description of a dog building a logical model of the world, I would say bees definitely qualify.

>A dog, on the other hand, can build logical models of the world, and then take actions based on that. It can that begging from one person results in treats, while begging from another results in discipline. It can update this logic and behavior based on new information.

Bees are capable of a lot of interesting and complex behavior, from learning to communication with other bees.[1] It's been theorized that they can play around just for fun, which is hard to reconcile with them behaving on entirely pre-programmed instincts.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_learning_and_communication [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/bees-can-...

I think you're leaving out a bit of context there, just before that sentence it says:

> Surely culture has something to do with it. Decades of advertising have told the world that to eat meat is to be powerful and virile, an ideal of maleness in a world where men dominate. (Studies show that meat eaters tend to hold more authoritarian political viewpoints.)

and also includes a link to another article about this. [1]

Obviously we have evolved to eat meat and that's part of the reason we enjoy it, the same reason as sugar etc, but culture clearly plays some part. Different countries eat different amounts of different types of meat. America eats more beef than most, India eats almost none. Most of the world doesn't eat very much horse meat, even though there's no reason we couldn't eat more.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/aug/14/beef-american-m...

It's interesting how the phrasing in the headline leads to different readings of its meaning. I read it as "SpaceX launches [their] first phone service satellites" which is how I think the author meant it. The first sentence clarifies:

>SpaceX launched a rocket on Tuesday carrying the first set of Starlink satellites that can beam signals directly to smartphones from space.

I don't think this was intentionally deceptive. If the headline said "North Korea launches first rocket" it would be clear that it meant North Korea's first rocket, not the first rocket ever

I can see how this could be confusing though if you're not familiar with the existence of other satellite phones, and maybe a journalist should be held to high standards for clarity when writing headlines.

Yeah I agree having a different app for each station sucks, but I don't really understand how plug-and-charge would solve this. For anything that does support plug-and-charge, don't you still need to register the payment method somewhere in advance?

Unless we have some universal payment processor which all the charging networks agree to use I will still need register through an app or something when I encounter a new brand of charger on a road trip.

It seems like the real solution is a law which requires the stations to accept a more universal payment system like credit cards. I think there is already a law like this in California IIRC.

Can you explain why you feel plug-and-charge is so important? I have used chargers with and without it and while it is slightly more convenient to just plug in and go, it doesn't feel like such a huge improvement that I absolutely need it.

I agree that having a different app for every brand of charging station would be annoying, but what about just accepting a credit card the way we do with gas stations now?

Fair enough I guess, this could be total BS. FWIW the dissenting FCC commissioners made similar arguments.

>In 2022, many RDOF recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at all, and they had no obligation to do so

Maybe this is just more spin from people who want to turn this into another political battleground. It's not entirely clear to me, but it seems like there is room for doubt.

The part that makes me question the legitimacy of this decision is the fact that there are still other companies receiving the subsidy.

Quote from the article:

>Starlink is the only company actually solving rural broadband at scale! They should arguably dissolve the program and return funds to taxpayers, but definitely not send it (to) those who aren’t getting the job done

Are these other companies meeting the targets? If not then it seems pretty arbitrary to reject just SpaceX for not doing so yet.

Wow, I stand corrected. I did not think that was physically possible for a person.

Given what I know about humans, Lucia was obviously a newborn. I'm less confident when it comes to dogs so I don't know if Milly was a baby or not. Either way, doesn't including babies throw things off a bit?

I feel like the the difference between the smallest and largest adult dog is much bigger than the same ratio in people, unless there is a person with very extreme dwarfism or something.

Do you know the actual number of employees at each of these services? I'm not doubting you, only asking because I'm curious and have no idea personally.

It's interesting if their headcounts are similar, although maybe not entirely unexpected. It doesn't take that many people to maintain a messaging service, so there shouldn't be that much of a difference.

If I'm being generous to Signal, I could say that most of the extra employees at these companies (e.g. Facebook) don't directly work on Messenger itself, but work on the surrounding data collection/ad tech. At the same time, there is a certain number of employees that any company needs just for people to handle the administrative/business side of things, so that explains the extra people working for Signal.

If I'm being less generous, maybe Signal really isn't that different, and Facebook et al just have so many extra people because they are liable when it comes to content being posted on their services. For example they need extra lawyers and content moderators to handle all the stuff that is publicly posted on Facebook. This is something Signal just doesn't have to deal with.

This is all just speculation though, I don't have any numbers that indicate which is true.

I think this captures a lot of what I find so frustrating about all the big tech services today. It seems like so many of them could be a similar model to Signal where they have a minimal team and rely on donations or some small revenue stream. Wikipedia is another example of a highly utilized service that uses the non-profit model.

Is there any reason why most social media sites can't be the same way? Network effects account for a lot of it which is why nobody uses Mastodon even though everybody hates Twitter now.

It's just aggravating that you have tens of thousands of engineers working towards things like ads and tracking when those are actively against most of our interests, and the other side of the scale you have fifty people actually working on things useful to users. How do we fix this?

I get what you mean. Whenever I read one of these scenarios that tries to show some absurd conclusion about a moral theory like utilitarianism, it makes me wonder if there is something about the outlandishness of the situation that makes it hard for our mental heuristics to work properly. In this case it's the idea that Bentham is a perfect act utilitarian, that the mugger will 100% follow through on his promise, that it won't affect anything else in the future besides the immediate suffering etc.

That said, I am doing my best to come up with an example that avoids the problem you mention. If we can imagine a utopia society where everyone is a perfect act utilitarian except the mugger, and all resources are distributed in a totally fair way such that any $10 will buy much less utility than saving a finger, the mugger's tactic would be harder to avoid.

I think the problem I still have with this is that it's basically saying that it's possible for a jerk to take advantage of a bunch of nice people, which isn't that interesting of a conclusion.

I can sympathize with the sentiment that scientists should just report the objective facts and not inject their own opinions into what they tell the public. Another comment suggested that this can lead to distrust like with COVID-19.

That said, I think science communication is an art form which takes skill and practice. If you are a scientist doing research on aspartame in mice or whatever, then what the media and laypeople are interested in is what the results mean for their lives. At some point you have to give your informed opinion or else others will interpret the results for you, probably incorrectly.

I think that the scientists are trying their best to communicate their professional interpretations of the data, but it's difficult to do so in a way that will please everyone. Especially when some parties are actively hostile to the message you are trying to communicate, and will nitpick whatever you say using the least charitable understanding.

Have you had any success using that site (vegancheese.co)?

I want to try them but a lot are only available in very specific regions. I found one that was supposedly available at a farmers' market near me (bay area) but when I went there I couldn't find it.

Do any of them deliver?

> Basically, this boils down to a simple means versus ends debate; "preventative" punishment cares only about results, while the author only cares that the "means" (the act) punishment is morally right.

Yeah, after thinking about it some more I edited my comment slightly to emphasize the "means versus ends" idea that I think the author is getting at.

The part that still bugs me is that the author seems to be taking a middle ground where punishing the innocent is okay in arbitrarily extreme cases, but they don't accept that a consequentialist could just use the same trick to say that punishing family members is wrong.

I'm not sure I understand why this is a problem for consequentialists any more than it is a problem for the author's own position.

The basic idea seems to be: In some cases it might prevent more harm to punish innocent people i.e. family members of criminals, therefore consequentialists should endorse punishing family members in those cases.

The author seems to think this logic doesn't apply to their own position because they believe that the reason to punish wrongdoers isn't to prevent further harm, but because the punishment of wrongdoers is justice which is good. The opposite side of this would be punishing innocent people, which would be injustice. This contrasts with pure consequentialism which doesn't care about justice vs. injustice, it only cares about the end result.

The key part is from the definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which says:

> 3. that it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers.

But then, the author then goes on to say:

> What if harming Hitler’s baby was the only way to save the world? As a moderate deontologist, I reluctantly endorse this implication. But only in dire hypotheticals with little real-world relevance.

So it seems like the author also endorse harming the family members of wrongdoers, but for them it's ok because it's only in "dire hypotheticals". This feels like a bit of a cop out to me. It seems like you could just as easily call yourself a "moderate consequentialist" and say that punishing people is only good as a deterrent, but also punishing innocent people is wrong.

Interesting site, but it's not clear to me what they count as a failed launch. My guess is some of the Starship tests since I don't think there has been a failed Falcon 9 launch is a few years.

Also, unrelated: This site is the worst case of hijacking the browser back button I've ever seen

I usually lean towards consumer rights on this type of thing, and the idea of paying a subscription for something like heated seats is annoying to me.

That said I am trying to play devil's advocate here. Other people have mentioned the analogy of locking out some CPUs on a die for a cheaper version of hardware, and I think that kind of applies here, at least for a one time payment.

If I'm willing to accept that, is it so unreasonable that they could rent this feature to me, even if it's only a software switch? After all, the idea of renting physical property isn't very controversial.

Again, I don't like the idea and would never want to rent the heated seats software switch, but I'm having a hard time justifying why it shouldn't be allowed.