pdonis

8 ms·

121.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> Why? Um, because it's the prime meridian and that's how UTC is defined? > It's nearly impossible to have your local time match your local solar noon. Which is why I specified on the prime meridian, which is the pa
122.
by pdonis 3mo ago
> This means the atomic clock is behind the solar clock by 37 seconds? If anything, it's the other way around. A UTC day is defined as exactly 86400 SI seconds. But an actual mean solar day is a few milliseconds longer (although t
123.
by pdonis 3mo ago
Hm, yes, laziness is also a powerful force... :-)
124.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> Is 99.9% of all websites. Not at all. You named eleven. Even if I'm generous and raise that by a couple of orders of magnitude, it's still a miniscule fraction of all websites. Of course it's close to all big tech p
125.
by pdonis 4mo ago
You're assuming that platforms that tried age verification in order to show people targeted ads would lose enough users to make that business model no longer viable. While I would fervently like to believe that's true, I'm no
126.
by pdonis 4mo ago
You're looking at section 102 of the bill, which is a different part than the one I was looking at (and that the EFF article is referring to). The bill is a mismash of several different proposed bills all squashed together into one. Ti
127.
by pdonis 4mo ago
But there are also other requirements in section 201 for a "covered platform", which advertising-funded sites that aren't "social media" most likely don't meet. For example, a typical personal blog, even if it
128.
by pdonis 4mo ago
That's true, but the bank also already knows my age. Also, a bank would not satisfy section 201 (B), (C), or (D), so it wouldn't be a covered platform anyway. (I should have left "bank" out of my original post, I was rea
129.
by pdonis 4mo ago
Would this website (HN) be a "covered platform" according to the bill? As far as I can tell, the answer is no, because it doesn't do what's described in Section 201 (E): "Uses the personal information of the user to
130.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> in that scenario, our standard model would say there was one electroweak particle No, it wouldn't. There would still be four; they would just be called W1, W2, W3, and B. The electroweak vector space doesn't change when the
131.
by pdonis 4mo ago
And then they reversed course with Wickard v. Filburn and said it was perfectly OK for Congress to regulate, not just commerce within a single state, but farmers growing their own food on their own land for their own use. So FDR ended up ge
132.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> W and Z bosons, photons, etc have fixed masses, charges, interaction strengths with other particles. But you can form a continuous set of linear combinations of these things, just as you can with gluons. Indeed, what the article call
133.
by pdonis 4mo ago
Yes, because it's lower in the sky so more of the UV in it gets absorbed by the atmosphere before reaching the ground. For example, in Florida in the summer, the sun is close to directly overhead at noon. In Scandinavia in the summer,
134.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> I fail to see how your scenario is qualitatively different than mine. It's different because in yours, humans produce nothing at all of value, whereas in mine, they do. So in yours, humans are, as I said, at the mercy of the mac
135.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> We are looking at a foreseeable future where machines do all the work. That's not the future I was talking about. I was talking about a future where machines do an even larger fraction (approaching 100 percent) of the work that
136.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society Says who? I think there is a valid statement to be made that the work required for basic necessities (food, clothi
137.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> we should not have to work to eat It takes time and effort and resources to produce the food you eat. If you aren't expending that time and effort and resources yourself, either to produce the food, or to produce something you c
138.
by pdonis 4mo ago
The way the IRS uses technical terms has nothing to do with the ordinary lay person's concept of what is earned and what is not. (The main function of the IRS definition of "unearned income" is to define what kinds of income
139.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> No CEO is going to accept zero salary, just because the value of his stocks will increase Maybe not zero, but PG's "ramen profitable" basically means the only "salary" the founders take is enough to cover the
140.
by pdonis 4mo ago
The exact threshold doesn't matter. What matters is that the companies shift away from "make something people want", which is what PG says justifies the money that's made.
141.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> Is this not a contradiction? No, because AOC claimed that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. Not that there are ways to make money other than earning it, which of course there are, but that there are no ways to make tha
142.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> I would have liked the essay more if PG had actually engaged with AOC's claims. I don't see why he should have engaged with them any more than he did, because AOC's claims are BS. He gave them more attention than they
143.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. No, we can't say that at all, because most businesses are small businesses, owned by the people who run them, and capital gains are the owners' income from runni
144.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> But one every 2 million? I think that was a figure of speech, the intended meaning of which was "nobody is really fit for it".
145.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> unlike the caricature seen in the movies I agree that the movie portrayal was totally unlike the Denethor in the books. > He knows Sauron is trying to manipulate him To some extent, yes. But I'm not sure he fully realizes w
146.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> who is the trueborn king today? Of course there isn't one; the notion of the "rightful king" in Middle-Earth does not have a real world counterpart. Tolkien might have believed it did, since he was a Catholic and might
147.
by pdonis 4mo ago
And yet we continue to give people such extreme power in the real world. What kind of sense does that make?
148.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> The actual lesson was that you need to be the trueborn king who can claim the palantiri by birthright if you want to use them for good. Not really. Denethor was the trueborn steward, whose ancestor had been officially appointed by th
149.
by pdonis 4mo ago
Well, Aragorn used the information he got from the Palantir of Orthanc to make a correct and very important strategic decision, to take the Paths of the Dead so that he could stop the Corsairs in time to save Minas Tirith. So the lesson is
150.
by pdonis 4mo ago
> I'm not fully convinced that consciousness isn't built out of words Richard Feynman told of a time when he made the claim that every conscious experience came down to words--basically that you talk to yourself to describe y

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