lavelganzu

6 ms·

1.
by lavelganzu 7mo ago
Meanwhile here in central Austin, it's a 0.9 mile walk from my door to the nearest bus stop that I can use to commute, walking along major stroads some of which don't even have sidewalks, much of the year in Texan heat with no scr
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by lavelganzu 7mo ago
There is a downside of making buses free, similar to the experience of cities which stopped enforcing "turnstile hopping" for trains, which is that it attracts a small number of hostile and malicious riders. An advantage of treati
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by lavelganzu 8mo ago
Gwern was skeptical, & noted that an IQ of 75 [1] in this case study is very low. He additionally raises a few points, including that volume loss is not the same as neuron loss. He also predicts several deficits the case studies didn&#x
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by lavelganzu 8mo ago
A plug for an old SMBC-comic on this theme: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-02-08
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by lavelganzu 9mo ago
It's been around long enough to have a Wikipedia page [1], which can give you the main facts & demographics. In short, it started in 2006 as a group blog for people interested in AI. This was long before LLMs, and it was expected a
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by lavelganzu 10mo ago
Excellent chart on that page. Hurrah for asking their degree of confidence! The plurality of respondents had low confidence, of course, as scientists should pending some experimental reason to prefer one interpretation over another. For tho
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by lavelganzu 10mo ago
They do it by correctly noting that there's no such doubling. Conservation of energy is within-world, not cross-world.
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by lavelganzu 11mo ago
Definitions are for math. For science it's enough to operationalize: e.g. to study the differences between wakefulness and sleep; or sensory systems and their integration into a model of the environment; or the formation and recall of
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by lavelganzu 11mo ago
Another option is to fake a planetary magnetic field by placing a large electromagnetic satellite in mars-stationary orbit. Merely reducing the effect of the solar wind stripping away the atmosphere could lead gradually to a much thicker at
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by lavelganzu 11mo ago
It's a fun idea to explore in fiction, but it certainly didn't happen. The evolution of our species is too recent.
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
> Can you honestly say you've never had zipper teeth part company with the fabric or never had to apply candle wax or similar to the teeth so they run smoothly? Do regular people ever wax their zippers? (ChatGPT says it might be don
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
At the level of industries and large groups, the chief answer to your "Why?" is the same sort of reasoning as the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": Nobody ever got fired for using established performance metric
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
On the opposite side of moral hazard, early in my career I worked for a large web security company in tech support. We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all. Often this meant the only solution was to apply our own, unofficial
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
Incidentally, Blackrock doesn't buy homes. Other private equity, combined, own less than half a percent of single-family homes in the US.
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
One small trick that would greatly improve headlines of this sort: a number. Compare how these two possible headlines affect you: - Three Scientists Call for Ban on Social Media and Smartphones Before Age 13 - Thousands of Scientists Ca
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
e.g. design a terrible pathogen
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
Agreed. There are technical challenges that are so basic that a programmer should be able to regurgitate them even under normal-for-an-interview stress, and these are still useful filters. (e.g. For a front-end web dev role, we asked candid
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
I'm impressed by the author's gall in naming his idea an "iron law", without bothering to test how true it is. I suppose it'd get talked about a lot less if he had named it simply "Michel's Conjecture of O
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
I for one want new giant stone pyramids. :)
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
It "allows" people with vast resources to spam only until the moderator removes the account, and it ensures the moderator is paid to do so. But more critically, it removes the profit incentive to spam, so even if people with vast
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
Money is an imperfect but real solution. The simple thing is to charge a small sign-up fee. Obviously this dramatically increases the barrier to entry for real humans. But it should cut the spam even more sharply.
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
Isn't this merely a technological change? "A few decades or a century ago", being location-specific was the only possible option for a social club. Now there are more options; location-specific options still exist, and locati
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by lavelganzu 1y ago
There's a plausible argument for it, so it's not a crazy thing. You as a human being can also predict likely completions of partial sentences, or likely lines of code given surrounding lines of code, or similar tasks. You do this
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by lavelganzu 2y ago
Correction: "Now something that is also bad, but not nearly as harmful as acid rain, is falling from the sky."
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by lavelganzu 2y ago
Technically the "due process" clause is in the 14th Amendment, ratified 1868. ;)
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by lavelganzu 2y ago
For in-person play with ordinary playing cards and an arbitrary number of players, keep the rules the same except: * Start with 1 deck per each 2 players. Shuffle the decks together. * Deal 10 cards to each player, & set ante at a const
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by lavelganzu 2y ago
Build enough housing & prices go down. It's worked everywhere it has been tried, and it'll work in LA, too.
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by lavelganzu 2y ago
This link isn't specific to the pangolin theory, but it's a readable review of a very competent debate about COVID origins, so I'd recommend it (and the debate it reviews) for those curious about the state of the arguments (a
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by lavelganzu 2y ago
Good catch. RMS (root mean square) error is typical in signal processing to avoid this undesirable cancellation.
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by lavelganzu 2y ago
Banks exist. Get a loan.

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