pasabagi

17 ms·

121.
by pasabagi 3y ago
All the statements in your comment, except one, are straightforwardly false. You should probably fact-check things you think.
122.
by pasabagi 3y ago
The replacement of external links with inferior in-house versions (the reddit video player is particularly egregious) makes sense if you're trying to maximize profit-per-user. I think there's an alternate timeline where reddit jus
123.
by pasabagi 3y ago
> It's apparent from TFA that isn't happening. I guess for me it's a question of 'where you fix the problem'. In many machines, social machines included, you have a variety of stages where you can mitigate issues
124.
by pasabagi 3y ago
I agree with a lot of what you've said, but as a large, physically confident man, I would hate to have a job where I'm required to occasionally wrestle with people. I think when you've got to the point where your wrestling ab
125.
by pasabagi 3y ago
Sure I dispute it, but that's not my point. You want schools to teach children the values of the society they will go on to contribute to. If you want them to internalize the idea that guys with big arms and gravelly voices have more a
126.
by pasabagi 3y ago
Yeah, a guy who 'might uppercut me' sounds like a great male role model. You could probably get Andrew Tate in for the job, once he's out of jail.
127.
by pasabagi 3y ago
With protest groups, the aims tend to be more political, and less technical - the problem is not what should be done, but rather, how to force politicians to do it. With climate change, the pressing problem is that while almost everybody
128.
by pasabagi 3y ago
I think there's a bit of nuance here: many things like plastics or steel are either high enough value that you can offset the CO2 with tree farming, or not too horrible in the first place. Generally, if you're going to use a hydro
129.
by pasabagi 3y ago
I think you have a bit of an axe to grind. The British were pursuing a fabian strategy which led to intentional destruction of food and food-producing industries. That alone would make it basically impossible to deny that this famine is the
130.
by pasabagi 3y ago
I think your approach could be used to argue that no famines are the result of policy. The Great Famine in China (during the Great Leap Forward) was preceded by several famines of similar magnitude, the most recent being in 1943. One sign
131.
by pasabagi 3y ago
I think people tend to move where the economy is hot. The reasons are obvious: it's not fun sitting at your mum's house, while everybody thinks you're a loser, essentially because the economy is averaging negative GDP growth
132.
by pasabagi 3y ago
I get the feeling that the high sticker price for the donated equipment is more an artifact of western military procurement processes than a measure of how much stuff they are getting. If you consider tanks, for example, the donations tend
133.
by pasabagi 3y ago
From your description, it sounds very similar to how the German system works in practice. As I understand it (not a lawyer, married to one), a lower court will in practice basically never go against the precedent of a higher court. I think
134.
by pasabagi 3y ago
> They are also not binding precedent, so the actual state of the law at any given time can be harder to discern. This seems backwards to me. German law is supposed to be consistent with the constitution, so is, essentially, a logically
135.
by pasabagi 3y ago
... so different formats exist because people want different things out of images, for instance for print, or for web, or for editing, and because all compression algorithms have their own tradeoffs. That's not a web engineer thing. I
136.
by pasabagi 3y ago
Sure. It's just not the norm. JK Rowling is essentially one of a kind. The tech sector is an outlier too, in that it is normal for founders to be significant technical contributors. In most of the economy, rich people become rich throu
137.
by pasabagi 3y ago
Explain to me why you would hire somebody if they lose you money.
138.
by pasabagi 3y ago
Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour. Sometimes, that's to the net benefit of the community, since the value of the labour involved is increased by a superior process. Often, that is to the
139.
by pasabagi 3y ago
$ convert yourfile.avif yourfile.jpg
140.
by pasabagi 4y ago
Well, because populations have grown so much in the last two hundred years, to the extent that a sizable chunk of all lives ever lived are after 1800 or so, I don't think that a long history in pre-modern times would move the needle th
141.
by pasabagi 4y ago
There's a bit of a difference between a religion, and a regime that, in its ten years of power, managed to kill tens of millions and start the largest and bloodiest war of all time.
142.
by pasabagi 4y ago
That was definitely one of the bad ones, but I think the root problem (which continues to this day) is that US foreign policy somehow manages to blend black-and-white moral histronics with an extremely shaky grasp of morality. The US can&#x
143.
by pasabagi 4y ago
I seem to remember the last time this happened the culprit was discovered to be people stealing CFC-containing waste tars from the factories they worked at, then selling them on for use in bitumen roads. Iirc, CFCs are a unintended byproduc
144.
by pasabagi 4y ago
If you ask an idiot what he thinks about something, and he gives you a totally wrong answer, you have still learned at least one fact: a person believes a thing. As a human, living in a democracy, that has some worth. ChatGPT's wrong a
145.
by pasabagi 4y ago
There's a post on /r/askhistorians where somebody asked ChatGPT for book recommendations on various historical topics. Some of them didn't exist. It actually took an expert reader to identify which books were made up, mi
146.
by pasabagi 4y ago
They might do , but what error rate do you think is acceptable? How do you actually measure and test the error rate? It's a use I can imagine in the future, but I think it's really premature to be using 'personal tutor'
147.
by pasabagi 4y ago
Regarding 1., it appears to have about a 30% accuracy rate, and the other 60% is complete nonsense, often complete with fabricated citations. I dearly hope that nobody is ever encouraged to have this machine as their tutor.
148.
by pasabagi 4y ago
World population circa 1950 was like 2 billion. I don't know what the root study is that reaches that 100M figure, but the idea that communism killed one in twenty people on the whole planet seems a bit unlikely. The really high end fi
149.
by pasabagi 4y ago
It's interesting that you can see the one area where the UK welfare state still exists (the 70+ bracket, e.g. pensions), the UK mortality rate has kept a pretty close track to the EU average.
150.
by pasabagi 4y ago
I think there are two interlocking arguments: first, a historical argument: news organizations substanitally misleading the public is basically normal, in most countries and time periods. Second, the structural argument: why exactly should

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