etangent

21 ms·

151.
by etangent 10y ago
> It prompts me every now and again to congratulate people on job anniversaries--maybe people do that but it's a weak play when a company reaches to those depths. So what? Facebook prompts me to congratulate on people's birthda
152.
by etangent 10y ago
What I find interesting is that the health benefit (or non-benefit) of milk for adult humans is completely irrelevant to the discussion. Autoimmune disease (the topic of the original article) develops at a very early age.
153.
by etangent 10y ago
> Name one mammal besides humans who drink milk as adults? I'm sorry, but your comment is completely irrelevant to the discussion. The original article is about autoimmune disease that develops at an early age. Whether you drink mil
154.
by etangent 10y ago
> Is there any evidence at all for the beneficial effect of bioactive dairy products on the gut microbiome, beyond yoghurt commercials for middle-aged women? 1) Considering that the original article is about autoimmune disease, it's
155.
by etangent 10y ago
It's possible that kefir contains the necessary bacteria, or that children at an early age have exposure to them through kefir.
156.
by etangent 10y ago
A wild hypothesis here. One thing I noticed in "pre-Western" diets that's absent from modern ones is unpasteurized dairy. All milk sold in Western countries is pasteurized (treated thermally to kill most of its bacteria). If
157.
by etangent 10y ago
You think it'd be better if Saharawi learned Chinese instead?
158.
by etangent 10y ago
I should have qualified "compute". I meant single- and double-precision floating-point operations that are not graphics. Yes, AMD GPUs outperform NVIDIA on cryptohashing benchmarks which require high integer performance.
159.
by etangent 10y ago
> is the vendor lockin not a problem? It so happened that almost nobody in the (previously tiny) industry specialized for using GPU cards for computation had used any cards other than NVIDIA early on. NVIDIA had listened to that niche ma
160.
by etangent 10y ago
While it's good to examine hidden assumptions---if you're on this site, you're probably an engineer, i.e. a knowledge worker, i.e. an occupant of a profession creation of which was made possible by the advent of large and com
161.
by etangent 10y ago
> However, voicing these concerns will get eye rolling at best. It's because most people intuitively understand that while a few of the concerns your express could be legitimate, a vast majority of them are histrionics peddled by me
162.
by etangent 11y ago
> Propaganda exists not to convince. Propaganda exists to define what the rules are, so they can spot people who deviate Exactly that. Surprising how many people misunderstand this; but then most of us live in a free country (so far).
163.
by etangent 11y ago
Yes, we agree that living processes are special, but part of what makes them so special is because we believe them to be unique and rare. My whole point was, what if we discover, at some point in the future, that life in the universe is not
164.
by etangent 11y ago
My question was "what if we realize that life isn't special?" -- not "what if we realize that humans aren't special?". The fact that three commenters misinterpreted the former for the latter is only a proof of
165.
by etangent 11y ago
Alternative dystopian scenario: we eventually find evidence of (sometimes extinct) life on all planets and moons that had encountered specific chemical conditions for a long enough period of time. We realize en masse (more than we realize n
166.
by etangent 11y ago
Yes, medical data is expensive and hard to obtain. But that's not (at least in the direct sense) the reason why so many medical researchers want to keep the data to themselves. The actual reason is that there is a whole cottage industr
167.
by etangent 11y ago
Also Shanahan's "Embodiment and the Inner Life" is well-written http://www.amazon.com/Embodiment-inner-life-Cognition-Consci...
168.
by etangent 11y ago
Also see Andrew Gelman's post where he reanalyzes data from this paper and shows that, after adjustment for age, the morbidity increase has been happening among female population http://andrewgelman.com/2015/11&#x2
169.
by etangent 11y ago
Out of curiosity (and possibly a dumb question), what is the main constraint preventing modern (subsonic) bombers from carrying CIWS-type defense system against missiles? Is it size, weight, recoil, aerodynamics, or special radar requiremen
170.
by etangent 11y ago
He's sort of right, but not in the way this article is going to be interpreted domestically (see comments in this thread for an example). Oil revenue in the Gulf countries has enabled wealthy elites to sponsor madrassas around the wo
171.
by etangent 11y ago
Thank you. I share your view that logic/reason is superior to emotional appeal. However the two are often orthogonal. When dealing with public, it is possible not to sacrifice any logical soundness whatsoever while also ensuring th
172.
by etangent 11y ago
Am finding your comment a bit difficult to read, and don't really have time to discuss this further, so I will only remark that I'm not at all offended by anything you said -- my mention of "sensitivity" was only to advi
173.
by etangent 11y ago
"Vestigial" is the wrong/insensitive word. If I make an appeal to evolutionary biology, it is because I am also a geek, not because I have some overarching pseudo-Darwinian worldview. When applicable, its not wrong to refer t
174.
by etangent 11y ago
"Correct" is not the issue here. The issue is that the behavior exists, is powerful, and must be accounted for. If you have a country-wide fascist freakout against a minority group, it doesn't matter whether the source was &q
175.
by etangent 11y ago
> But there are people (like myself) who can look at the numbers, realize that you are MANY times more likely to die by slipping and falling in your own bathroom That's another example of a wrong argument often used. All animals (an
176.
by etangent 11y ago
I am probably the only person in the observable universe who thinks both that (a) a full ban on encryption is stupid and unenforceable, and that (b) leaking details on how surveillance is done in 2013 by certain Mr. S. was an incredibly stu
177.
by etangent 11y ago
1) If you were good at detecting terror attacks, wouldn't you want to keep it secret from terrorists about how you actually do it? This is such an obvious point (a direct counterpart to Dr. Strangelove's "the whole point of a
178.
by etangent 11y ago
IMO, there exist good arguments against surveillance. But why are supposedly rational geeks so irrationally prone to putting forward very bad arguments against it? See almost every reply in this thread to prove my point, but I will list a f
179.
by etangent 11y ago
As others pointed out, font hinting is solving a completely different problem from the one that Apple faces or that you describe. You describe the problem of displaying small text on a low-resolution grid. Font hinting is indeed a passable
180.
by etangent 11y ago
> What seems far more awful is using these apparently-highly-intelligent animals for laboratory experiments, against their will. So I take it you would have released Ava in Ex Machina?

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