guscost

88 ms·

871.
by guscost 9y ago
> Ads obviously You'd have a better argument if the TechCrunch homepage didn't use 50% of my CPU just to render all the ads.
872.
by guscost 9y ago
Well, technically photons are massless and don't have "volume" in the common sense of that word. Red photons do have a particular energy, but I don't think any photons in the real world have exactly the amount of energy
873.
by guscost 9y ago
It sounds like you've missed my point as well. The analogy is only supposed to illustrate that before actually inventing transportation technology (which for a long time did get faster exponentially), humans had no real basis to unde
874.
by guscost 9y ago
You're basing all of this on one heck of an axiom: > The danger with AI is that it grows in power exponentially This is like saying "the opportunity with mechanical transportation is that it gets faster exponentially" befo
875.
by guscost 9y ago
Yes, in my opinion. Consider the amount of destruction caused by machined metal and chemicals in the 20th century. Now consider how much more destruction (or progress) is possible just by adding "naive" computer technology to thos
876.
by guscost 9y ago
Safety measures which cannot be intentionally circumvented (except by planting a bomb, I suppose) predate Chernobyl by many years. The RBMK was a horrible design which threw away passive safety[0] for convenience and cost savings. https:&#
877.
by guscost 9y ago
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
878.
by guscost 9y ago
Yeah I get your meaning. And maybe this is silly and unfair, but to me "AI" in the context of prepping suggests very particular things. What you're describing should probably be called "social unrest" or "revol
879.
by guscost 9y ago
What a fun question! You go first, though :D
880.
by guscost 9y ago
> very sane people like Musk, Hawkings, and Gates Ehhhh... those folks are smart but none of them would make a top 10 list of the sanest people according to me. > It's not the cliche SkyNet or Ghost in the Shell stuff per se. For
881.
by guscost 9y ago
I'm cynical about a lot of things, like our dysfunctional mess of a government, a Fortune 500 saturated with exploitative bullshit, and the silly summer-camp that college has turned into. And people have been telling me about the decli
882.
by guscost 9y ago
With comments here, I try to maintain an assumption of good faith as often as possible. Meaning I have to allow and even assume that you're sharing these concerns because you honestly think that the risks are serious enough to justify
883.
by guscost 9y ago
Paraphrasing from a comment I can't find anymore: Identity theft is a PR con job. Think about it - the idea that a criminal can "steal your identity" is patently ridiculous. What they actually do is defraud your bank, or a ve
884.
by guscost 9y ago
If you're curious about or skeptical of TypeScript, do yourself a favor and check out the source code sometime: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript It's a work of art, everything is so practical and (rela
885.
by guscost 9y ago
> It will take you 2 weeks of work to make a new React app have the same feature set as an Ember app You're probably right about this. But it's not always the whole story - maintain and grow your app for a year, and you may fin
886.
by guscost 9y ago
This debate seems focused entirely on ethics, but I posted the story because: 1. It's important to call out injustice and fight for what we can improve in our own communities, but it's also important to remember that this is the
887.
Children work in Congolese mines where cobalt is extracted for smartphones(news.sky.com)
175 points by guscost 9y ago|106 comments
888.
by guscost 9y ago
Option A: This crisis is so important that we don't have time to wait for science stuff like falsification. Option B: This crisis is known to serious scientists, and everyone who doesn't agree is a knuckle-dragging moron. You can
889.
by guscost 9y ago
> The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. The enormous effort put toward finding "confirmations" of the hypothesis has al
890.
by guscost 9y ago
TL;DR: Postmodernists don't like it because it abandons locality in favor of determinism. Modernists like it for the exact same reason.
891.
by guscost 9y ago
I'm not qualified either but this is an important point, the energy is definitely available and photoelectric semiconductors are merely one way to harness it. Regarding the practical issues, what happens at night? Does it collapse un
892.
by guscost 9y ago
> These vessels were breached and steam, hydrogen and other gases, together with radioactive material, were released into the reactor buildings and eventually to the environment. Exactly what I described in less alarming words. Steam,
893.
by guscost 9y ago
> If the containment had held, there would have been no radiation release outside the plant. This is not how it works. Containment structures prevent the actual core materials from exiting the reactor, since those are heavy metals with h
894.
by guscost 9y ago
> Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal... Here's an old comment backing this up with sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13349940 > China is deploying s
895.
by guscost 9y ago
Do you have a source about Fukushima containment failures? I've not heard any confirmation that primary or secondary containment structures failed at any point during or after the meltdown. The latest reports seem to indicate that prim
896.
by guscost 9y ago
Speaking more as an engineer than as a contrarian here: If that's your plan, you're going to fail at it.
897.
by guscost 9y ago
> The rest of your post would be shilling only that you disclosed your interest. So I would be shilling in a hypothetical scenario, and that's the problem? OK, whatever. Have a nice day.
898.
by guscost 9y ago
Which part do you have a problem with?
899.
by guscost 9y ago
> the takeover-the-world echo-chambers of ethereum You toss out this pejorative description, and then in the next paragraph : > When talking about engineering on such a critical subject, people should be way more responsible. This is
900.
by guscost 9y ago
This might have been true five years ago. These days most of its perceived value is due to the fact that people around the world trust it to hold value better than other investments available to them. It sounds like nonsense because it is,

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