fwlr

66 ms·

661.
by fwlr 4y ago
I don’t feel unconvinced - which is a good thing, because if I did, the suggestion that it would be because I’m some psychological stage of grief would probably feel patronizing or dismissive. “the environment around us has been degrading
662.
by fwlr 4y ago
Your comment seems to imply I am a stealth climate change denier of some kind. That is wrong. If you must put me in some category of ignorance, I suppose you could call me a “climate change alarmist ignorer“.
663.
by fwlr 4y ago
All I can take from this comment is there are several likelihood thresholds and an array of future Celsius values which can be combined to generate arbitrarily many “final warnings”. Sigh.
664.
by fwlr 4y ago
I do wish someone would just acknowledge we’ve been getting “final warnings” as well as predictions of catastrophe every few years for decades now. Just recognize that I have to force myself quite hard to take this seriously. I do trust
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by fwlr 4y ago
Seems like an ambiguity in semver, actually. I understood that to mean you don’t have to break updates into their major, minor, and patch changes. Like if you’re at 7.88.2, you don’t have to put all your patches into update 7.88.3, then ten
666.
by fwlr 4y ago
Note it’s only a “sure loser” bet because Noah is factoring the opportunity cost of 37 Bitcoin into Balaji’s stake, which is not at all a conventional way of analyzing a bet. If we do permit the unconventional analysis, I’ll instead note th
667.
by fwlr 4y ago
I’m glad to hear I managed to provide a better summary of the thinking in that email than the previously-offered “he can’t prove them wrong himself so he has to believe them”, that was my goal with that comment. I think I can sort of see ho
668.
by fwlr 4y ago
More than a decade ago I was hanging out with the CEO and a few engineers from a startup I was working at. I don’t remember why but we started estimating what portion of Google’s revenue came from advertising. We settled on our estimates an
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by fwlr 4y ago
I do wonder - if the AI takes over will it update status pages more promptly, or less promptly? And will it word the outage announcements more weaselly, or less weaselly?
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by fwlr 4y ago
Semver 2.0 on major version: “Major version X (X.y.z | X > 0) MUST be incremented if any backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public API. It MAY also include minor and patch level changes. Patch and minor versions MUST be
671.
by fwlr 4y ago
Turns out people with more experience than I have in using superglue underwater say it does work, I was wrong!
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by fwlr 4y ago
One of the issues that makes an index less valuable is that to make sense of a given rationalist idea you kinda need to have a mental virtualenv set up with most of the rationalist tools already installed (otherwise e.g. when someone says “
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by fwlr 4y ago
Scott has (naturally) written about this phenomenon, of how he reacts to situations where there’s strong arguments for the position, and only invective against: “When I was a teenager I believed in a conspiracy theory. It was the one Graham
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by fwlr 4y ago
No, I haven’t, though I will eventually. In the meantime, some other pieces that always come to mind as being definitely on that list are Weaponised Sacredness by Sarah Perry, specifically the section on egregores ( https://www.ri
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by fwlr 4y ago
Scott Alexander’s opus magnum, and one incredibly important piece of writing. I remember when it first came out, I used to attend a little social gathering once a month. One of the many things we did was function as an informal reading grou
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by fwlr 4y ago
Yeah, you could skip the NFID+hotpockets system and just have adjustable heating elements and use the touchscreen to select the appropriate program. Now if you adjust the heat elements wrongly, you can fail to weaken the glue in some spots,
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by fwlr 4y ago
I don’t know the origins of the term “cement” in glue, but this “dissolves the material so it reforms as a single piece” is the principle of all cement glues, and it’s also why they are all specialty glues - you need specific chemicals to m
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by fwlr 4y ago
No. Maybe you could make it work but I wouldn’t count on it. Marine epoxy is designed for this task, it can be applied and attached fully submerged with no issues.
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by fwlr 4y ago
A good intro to superglue. Here’s some more advice from working in factories and workshops over the years (doing something wrong in front of 50+ yr old engineers, craftsmen, and tradies who’ve been doing that job for 40+ years is a great wa
680.
by fwlr 4y ago
I did App Academy in January 2018, so I can only speak to their curriculum, not Lambda School’s. I have done about 2.5 years’ worth of computer science degrees (mostly the first half, I dropped out and restarted) so I can speak to how codin
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by fwlr 4y ago
Facial recognition tech is basically two parts: detecting a face in an image (“face detection”, often this is done by calling out to OpenCV’s face detection in Python or C++), and then extracting information from that face image and searchi
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by fwlr 4y ago
“Is it necessarily a bad thing if people stop wanting to have children and the human race just gradually disappears?” People can make up their own minds on this, but I don’t think states and governments will want to stop existing.
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by fwlr 4y ago
Buddy, don’t get it twisted, I’m just as worried as you are about this possibility. (“Unconscionable” means “not right or reasonable; unreasonably excessive”.)
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by fwlr 4y ago
We have been trying to do that for a good two decades or so. The article mentions several programs Japan has implemented to try and make not a PITA to be a mother. Doubtless we will also continue to implement more of these programs as the p
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by fwlr 4y ago
Unsurprising. Facial recognition has been good enough for a few years now to check all these photos against arbitrarily large databases.
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by fwlr 4y ago
In times of crisis during war, countries may draft men into combat to fight against their will. If this fertility crisis keeps up, I wonder if we will see a similar kind of draft for women to breed. It seems unconscionable but literal exist
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by fwlr 4y ago
“Cooperating gets you almost nothing while defecting gives you benefit” That is the prisoners dilemma. What you have offered here is in fact an accurate statement of the payoff matrix for the prisoners dilemma in the case where the other
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by fwlr 4y ago
Putting custom tweaks into your drivers that are activated for specific processes is pretty common practice, what’s surprising here is that AMD put in effort to make Chrome run better but forgot to include Chromium. I wonder if the same is
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by fwlr 4y ago
It’s the banks saying “as banks, we know everything is fine. As consumers/depositors/internet commenters, you might think - or even claim - that things are not fine. But you are wrong, things are fine. Oh, you still disagree? Wh
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by fwlr 4y ago
“Cooperate” and “defect” are technical terms in game theory, they don’t carry their usual connotations here.

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