astazangasta

13 ms·

91.
by astazangasta 7y ago
The oversight is a joke. The CIA tortured people throughout its history, including following 9/11; what oversight did they face as a result? What were the consequences? More funding for running their drone program?
92.
by astazangasta 7y ago
I have been reading Tim Weiner's excellent "Legacy of Ashes", a history of the CIA. Everyone should read it; it won a national book award and is generally well-researched and sourced. What it indicates is that the CIA is esse
93.
by astazangasta 7y ago
This was my thought too; there doesn't seem to be a way to verify this isn't happening.
94.
by astazangasta 7y ago
24901.5 mi is the number i memorized for circumference as a wee bairn, before i knew about oblate eccentricity.
95.
by astazangasta 7y ago
The potency stuff is such garbage. So before people smoked an entire joint to get as stoned as they now get off a few hits. So what? People titrate their intake. Whenever i see this line i just stop reading because i feel the author is not
96.
by astazangasta 7y ago
The difference is the ability to privilege a medical establishment that is in control of the clinical setting. Doctors don't like competition. There's really nothing inherently better about randomized control trials as a way of kn
97.
by astazangasta 7y ago
No, repetitive work is what machines are best at. Meticulous implies attention to detail and nuance, exactly where machines fall down.
98.
by astazangasta 7y ago
As the article indicates, the problem is not necessarily technological but economic; trying to find a market-based solution to a notable market failure might be a sign of a pathology of our times.
99.
by astazangasta 7y ago
The hate bubbles up inside me when I read this. I read an article by the late Robert Parry, describing the meticulous work he did combing through records in presidential libraries to uncover important stories. Then to read the assertion tha
100.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Zizek is too in love with that sort of thing; I think he just enjoys the shock value of embracing soft bigotry to scandalize his Left audiences.
101.
by astazangasta 7y ago
This is about one of my best friends! He is an amazing local historian and a staunchly wedded empiricist, a resident of SF in the deep, old way. I highly recommend taking one of his ThinkWalks if you want to learn about local history, ecolo
102.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Nearly all medical advance goes like this: 1. Administer treatment to some patients. 2. See benefit. 3. Try it on more people. 4 (optional). Do research to understand mechanism. By and large medicine is not a "science" in the sens
103.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Exactly my question. I have seen a bunch of these OSs, all useless because there is no build for my phone and no described path for making one. I would love to get the T-Mobile spyware off my phone. What do i do?
104.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Dependencies are different than source code. You can write FOSS that runs on Windows, which is a dependency and not FOSS.
105.
by astazangasta 7y ago
I was going to answer in this vein. What are the units of productive work?
106.
by astazangasta 7y ago
What's really broken is all the allegedly smart people reading the Economist, which regularly tells us capitalism is still great no worries, who then can't figure out why people keep voting for populists.
107.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Yes! Thank you. I had the same thought, and then, "Well, no one else is paranoid enough to have this complaint."
108.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Hmm, news to me. In any case the point still stands that you can do SNP sequencing without being CLIA certified.
109.
by astazangasta 7y ago
This is for CLIA tests, i.e. clinical tests. 23andMe is explicitly NOT this as they can't make medical claims. Just getting a piece of DNA sequenced does not require this kind of retention; GP is right, this is a viable business plan.
110.
by astazangasta 7y ago
They are definitely not random. Sequence context matters a lot - e.g. in humans CG mutates about 10x more often than other dinucleotides. Other contexts also contribute - genes that are expressed more are more mutable, and so on.
111.
by astazangasta 7y ago
What is this garbage visualization? What is the root of the tree meant to represent? Why does it seem to originate at 15 companies per year? What does the color mean? Why are there multiple strands per year if the X axis is "per year&q
112.
by astazangasta 7y ago
I'll say this gets causality backwards. Intellectual humility is a luxury of the obviously skilled. In a room of smart people where everyone is competing for influence and attention, admitting your lack of knowledge can be a real handi
113.
by astazangasta 7y ago
This seems like hooey to me. I mean power laws are everywhere, not just in phase transitions, and they seem to be struggling to identify what the "phases" are in the brain that the "power law" they claim to be observing
114.
by astazangasta 7y ago
It isn't impossible. It just isn't Slack. Slack is a service offered by a private company. You want to have it easy by consuming a service; I want to slog through the mess of setting up things. One of these things is on the path t
115.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Yeah, we get it, you're lazy, can't be arsed, you want someone else to do the work. We like configurability, decentralization, freedom of choice. We are different people. We will never agree. I suspect your kind outnumbers my kind
116.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Every surveillance system will be used to persecute innocent people who the surveillers do not like. Moreover, it has long been argued that surveillance itself is a form of persecution. See Bentham, Foucault etc.
117.
by astazangasta 7y ago
To repeat the basic premise of the article, the lack of money is not the problem, the lack of investment opportunities is. That lack is due to insufficient demand in the economy. You can stimulate that demand most easily by increasing the i
118.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Ironically the best thing they can do to create new investment opportunities is pay their workers more, but they never will because they are too short sighted.
119.
by astazangasta 7y ago
I'd like to point out that this sort of story vitiates the Popperian tale of how scientific knowledge is created, i.e. it was "known" well in advance of experimental evidence that something is true, and the confirmation is se
120.
by astazangasta 7y ago
I was thinking about this the other day when trying to imagine a way to produce texture shaders through some kind of optimization. The connections between various nodes in a shader might be modeled as mutations, since they can't easily

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