jmopp

13 ms·

91.
by jmopp 3y ago
Personally I think of food taboos as a cultural thing that depends on where you grew up, but because food is such an important part of life, food taboos have a rather heavy weight. No problem in being squeamish: different cultures have diff
92.
by jmopp 3y ago
If it's the latter, it's happened far too frequently to just be chance. A language encourages the style of development that's most ergonomic for it.
93.
by jmopp 3y ago
I feel like Java was designed in a way that runs contrary to how my mind works. I tend to navigate code starting at the entry-point and going deep. With lots of layers of abstraction, it's hard to figure out what is actually being run,
94.
by jmopp 3y ago
> "Climate change" will tend to increase rainfall as well Yes, through flash-floods and mega-droughts. A bit hard to grow crops when you get your annual rainfall in one go during hurricane week.
95.
by jmopp 3y ago
> We can air-condition our buildings Can we do this equitably on a global scale, or poor people die of heatstroke whenever there is a wet-bulb event?
96.
by jmopp 3y ago
And your point is? Humans evolved in that last tenth of the chart, and established modern society in the last pixel. I'd rather not our extremely fragile global society get disrupted by temperature fluctuations.
97.
by jmopp 3y ago
Right now, trace micronutrients are the bottleneck - hence propsals to seed the ocean with iron to encourage algal blooms.
98.
by jmopp 3y ago
The post specified that the stock market going to zero implies some sort of catastrophic event leading to the dissolution of the US government and economic system - which is exactly what happened in Russia and China. As much as people whine
99.
by jmopp 3y ago
I love how you jumped straight from "people weirdly into eugenics should be disavowed" to "dysgenics is desirable". That is the epitome of black-and-white thinking if I ever saw it.
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by jmopp 3y ago
None of those are really taboo to discuss: police funding has only increased in recent years, Joe Biden has been quietly upgrading security on the southern border since the start of his term, and the supreme court recently ruled against aff
101.
by jmopp 3y ago
> There is no such thing as an extended family unless there are strong nuclear families to begin with. I disagree on that point. It takes a village to raise a child, and a large enough extended family has space for all sorts. Not everyon
102.
by jmopp 3y ago
We in South Africa avoided that particular problem by calling the 5.25" disk a floppy and the 3.5" disk a stiffy.
103.
by jmopp 3y ago
Knowing American prisons, there is no way Malcolm X and Mao's books are in there.
104.
by jmopp 3y ago
Related: if you look at a map of worldwide alcohol consumption, there's a pretty prominent dry belt stretching from North Africa to Pakistan.
105.
by jmopp 3y ago
Why would you want a book that incites racial violence in a place occupied by people who may themselves have violence issues?
106.
by jmopp 3y ago
The likelihood of another Elfstedentocht keeps decreasing every year. In 2001 the Dutch National Meteorological Institute prediced between 10 and 4 events in the 21st century. Given that in the past 22 years the IPCC's predictions have
107.
by jmopp 3y ago
One thing to also note is that the Jews would very much have stood out from pagan Greeks were they to run around naked, due to being circumcised.
108.
by jmopp 3y ago
A maximised ASI could also do the math and decide keeping humans around as pets in a human theme park is less effort than trying to exterminate them.
109.
by jmopp 3y ago
I wouldn't say the brain is magic, just that we still don't know what consciousness and intelligence is. Could the complex emergent behaviour we call intelligence emerge from a statistical model? Maybe. Can we gain more insights o
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by jmopp 3y ago
How do we know that the brain is a statistical model of the world? It sounds like explaining an unknown phenomenon using the technology du jour - just 10/20 years ago, the brain was a computer.
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by jmopp 3y ago
Technically, yes. I believe there is a theorem which states that any neural network can be transformed into a decision tree. Good luck, though, trying to write an OCR algorithm with a bunch of ifs.
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by jmopp 3y ago
> They think the term AI is so important that it must not be applied to systems with limited mundane usefulness Yes? Thinking is hard. People would happily delegate as much cognitive load to a computer as possible - especially if they be
113.
by jmopp 3y ago
We were close to that a few months ago in Lebanon: the caretaker government, led by a Muslim prime minister, decided to postpone the changing of the clocks to after Ramadan, but Christian authorities ignored the directive and changed clocks
114.
by jmopp 3y ago
There is Littlewood's Law: a miracle (defined as a one in a million event) happens about once a month (assuming you observe one event every second and are observing your surroundings for 8 hours a day). There is also the law of truly l
115.
by jmopp 3y ago
Considering how much of our lives is on the internet, it's not a bad idea.
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by jmopp 3y ago
I have heard the argument that as Africa continues to develop, birth rates will fall in Africa the same way that they fell in east Asia - leaving no large regions in the world with growing populations, and thus no pool of immigrants that hi
117.
by jmopp 3y ago
That's why you make your anonymous donation to the "Friends of John Smith" organisation, who is completely unaffiliated with John Smith and is merely interested in seeing him elected to office
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by jmopp 4y ago
> The Bantu reached South Africa at roughly the same time the Dutch did. That's a common misconception because the Bantu expansion didn't reach the Cape. But we have iron artefacts from Natal dating from the 400s.
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by jmopp 4y ago
Also: it is pretty much only the Catholic church that mandates celibacy for priests. The Eastern churches allow married priests, but not bishops - while one tenet of Protestantism is the priesthood of all believers, where everyone should be
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by jmopp 4y ago
Not in all countries. Even though the Tories in the UK are currently very anti-trans, and veering hard-right on immigration, they're not touching gay rights.

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