andrewla

22 ms·

361.
by andrewla 2y ago
What do you use on the PC? Plex? Something else? I'm curious about this because it sounds appealing but I've found the software to be clunky and unreliable and often neglected by the streaming services.
362.
by andrewla 2y ago
+1 for Roku as a general thing. Fast UI, very broad app support, good cross-app search capabilities. The downside, and I think the trend is unfortunately in this direction, especially given the article's comments about Roku's pote
363.
by andrewla 2y ago
My TV is old and dumb and I love it. But the majority of my streaming is done through my Roku, and increasingly I am bombarded by advertising and attempts to sell Roku's own streaming service. Ironic because the reason that Roku exists
364.
by andrewla 2y ago
I have a 56" Panasonic plasma TV of the same vintage. It's great -- dumb as hell and displays images and turns on right away (not as fast as an old CRT, but compared to a modern TV fuggetaboutit). Its internal input switching is j
365.
by andrewla 2y ago
> FBI says they're rotary and fixed-wing drones, White House says they aren't foreign adversaries, Pentagon says they aren't USA military Do you have sources for these? Not challenging the assertions, but all I see in the
366.
by andrewla 2y ago
What does homeopathy need to move forward? What does perpetual motion machinery need to move forward? This is not totally fair; it is possible given certain independence assumptions. But they are likely not physically realizable. It is almo
367.
by andrewla 2y ago
Yes, this is exactly what it is doing [1]. The area of research is Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum, and has arisen specifically to prove that quantum supremacy is possible in practice. It is currently the focus of pretty much all quantum c
368.
by andrewla 2y ago
Even if that is the case -- if he has no hats, then the statement is technically true, and regardless of whether he intended to lie or not, he made a true statement.
369.
by andrewla 2y ago
This is yet another attempt to posit NISQ results (Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum) as demonstrations of quantum supremacy. This does not allow us to do useful computational work; it's just making the claim that a bathtub full of wate
370.
by andrewla 2y ago
I think asking people to put a value estimate on a thing is a hopeless task. The idea of having some sort of structured market for it is even more hopeless. Better to just have a fee structure that starts off as the price of a carton of egg
371.
by andrewla 2y ago
I think the appeal is that it sounds simple -- you say "I bought my house for $1M, and I don't want to move, so I set the value at $2M, so I have to spend $20,000/yr to keep it, or someone can give me $2M and take the house.&
372.
by andrewla 2y ago
They are saying that when an author is looking to sell the rights to their work, the price of that work is discounted based on the expected lifetime of the author. So in a parallel universe where the same work is written by a 20 year old an
373.
by andrewla 2y ago
Over time I have become more and more skeptical of Harberger taxes, which I first encountered somewhere in the works of Heinlein. The idea is that you are taxed based on your own estimate of the value of a thing, with the estimate being pub
374.
by andrewla 2y ago
This is how I got started, from a DikuMUD. I had met a couple of other people on Medievia and we decided to give it a go. I knew a tiny bit of C from an old pirated copy of Borland TurboC and just jumped right in. Great stuff -- I remember
375.
by andrewla 2y ago
Playtesting, like usability studies, is not really going to solve the problem, because it isn't a creative process. You need to have a proposed solution in order to playtest or evaluate, and if you start in a bad place you're not
376.
by andrewla 2y ago
As long as this article is histrionically exaggerating the risks, let me make a histrionic exaggeration of my own. Nonsense like this is why the public health establishment has almost zero credibility in conversations about low risk events.
377.
by andrewla 2y ago
> It's when technological progress outpaces the capacity for any person to control or understand what's happening This seems very imprecise. I don't know how literally to take this. We passed this point just about 10,000 y
378.
by andrewla 2y ago
I'm of the school of thought that says that the Singularity Theory is just fundamentally unsound. In particular the "futurism" school which tries to extrapolate existing trends to the future. To me it seems pretty clear that
379.
by andrewla 2y ago
I don't think so -- the comment in context was not about the "normal distribution of statistics" per se, because when we're talking about Bernoulli trials and the law of large numbers, it clearly is not necessary to assu
380.
by andrewla 2y ago
From my admittedly cursory reading, this does not appear to be accurate. The antecedent organizations to the modern Charleston police department, notably the Town Watch and the City Guard, were both dissolved in the aftermath of the civil w
381.
by andrewla 2y ago
The article you point to is explicitly debunking the idea of slave patrols evolving into police forces. > The claim that modern police originated from slave patrols is a dangerous slur designed to delegitimize policing ... Bad policing m
382.
by andrewla 2y ago
For the warehouse guards, to summarize, you're saying that night watchmen and city watchmen were de facto warehouse guards before the formation of professional police forces? That seems a far cry from "evolved out of warehouse gua
383.
by andrewla 2y ago
> They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols. This is not accurate. The timeframe is not wrong; it is true that the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in
384.
by andrewla 2y ago
What the heck is going on here? This feels very ZIRP-ey; private equity chasing disruption in the hopes of the next acquisition. Is this just a race to the bottom as all these delivery companies burn cash to subsidize their failing model an
385.
by andrewla 2y ago
This is a much more interesting question, and this is what I mean by an operational definition of life. In your first question, "alive" can have useful operational definitions -- whether it is viable outside of a cell, whether it
386.
by andrewla 2y ago
I think we're in agreement then -- this article is not about "did mitochondria evolve from absorbed viable organisms as opposed to evolving directly", which is an interesting question that impacts our understanding of evoluti
387.
by andrewla 2y ago
Whether or not mitochondria were once viable independent organisms that were absorbed by early eukaryotes does not depend on whether we call their modern descendants "living" or not. If we determine that they did, then we still do
388.
by andrewla 2y ago
So the theory is that if we don't accept them as alive, then we can't experiment with implanting cross-species mitochondria in human cells? Why not? What stops us from doing this?
389.
by andrewla 2y ago
But the definition of a word is not knowledge. Knowing that mitochondria have their own DNA is knowledge. Knowing that they reproduce independently of their home cell is knowledge. Learning whether they evolved from a separate viable organi
390.
by andrewla 2y ago
The two halves of the divided cells will usually both have mitochondria. Not always, though; sometimes cell division leaves one cell without any mitochrondria. That usually results in a non-viable cell, but sometimes the cell can survive wi

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