pjscott

17 ms·

151.
by pjscott 4y ago
The lump-of-labor thing was called a fallacy by someone arguing that the amount of labor to be done in society is not fixed: if you happen to have people with a bunch of time on their hands, they can usually find something useful to do that
152.
by pjscott 4y ago
They're mainly a fancy butcher shop, and I assume they have positive profit margins on the rest of the products.
153.
by pjscott 4y ago
And they limit the number made each day. If the numbers given in the article are accurate, they're losing about $450 per day on ingredients for this loss-leader -- and for that price, they've bought fame around the world.
154.
by pjscott 4y ago
I checked: it's the same article.
155.
by pjscott 4y ago
> we have nothing on the horizon which can replace the energy density of a barrel of oil This is in the vicinity of a good point, but as written it's false. Uranium has oil's energy density beat by a wide margin. And (at least
156.
by pjscott 4y ago
I saw a copy of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" on the shelf yesterday and couldn't help wondering if there would ever be another edition. It has some great, foundational stuff in it -- but the techniques describ
157.
by pjscott 4y ago
Oh, definitely. Even after MP3 compression came along, MIDI and MOD files were just so much smaller and quicker to download over a modem at my baud rate.
158.
by pjscott 4y ago
English has the phrases “jerry-rigged” and “held together by duct tape and baling wire” which, as far as I can tell, mean the exact same thing and were born out of similar impoverished circumstances. One thing people all over the world have
159.
by pjscott 4y ago
Ignoring the tradeoff doesn't make it go away, and if you don't consciously put a value on a human life, you'll probably wind up far from the Pareto frontier. In this case, for instance, thinking in terms of deaths-per-TWh
160.
by pjscott 4y ago
There are over 3000 satellites in the Starlink network alone. How many anti-satellite missiles are there? Would taking out all those satellites be worth the cost?
161.
by pjscott 4y ago
There’s always a risk that if you increase sample size without addressing selection bias, you’ll just end up with more confidence in an incorrect conclusion. (“Dewey defeats Truman!”)
162.
by pjscott 4y ago
There's a huge problem in many branches of science where, using normal methodology, it's possible to come up with an endless stream of results that are unlikely to have any predictive validity outside of the extremely specific cir
163.
by pjscott 4y ago
Thank you, Apple friends! You’ve made the world a better place, and I salute your subtle bug-fixing acumen. These can’t have been easy to find, and you have my completely unironic gratitude. (I know this sounds extremely corny, but someone
164.
by pjscott 4y ago
I checked LLVM's libc++ source, and it's an inline void function defined in a header, which contains only a call to __builtin_unreachable() when available or std::abort() otherwise.
165.
by pjscott 4y ago
You know what else gets you a lot of harm reduction, for (almost) any given utility function? Hypnodrones.
166.
by pjscott 4y ago
I look at the news and I see almost ubiquitous low-grade dishonesty. It's not that the people writing it were deliberately trying to lie , for the most part; it's that they wanted to persuade , or just push a worldview, and very
167.
by pjscott 4y ago
You’re right. Doom used fixed-point math; at the time, hardware floating-point units were far from ubiquitous on the computers people wanted to use to play it.
168.
by pjscott 4y ago
At the risk of sounding heartlessly numerate: campus shootings are so rare that they should mostly be ignored. The danger level is very, very low. If you must worry, then worry about something boring but important like traffic accidents ins
169.
by pjscott 4y ago
Unintended consequences may not be obvious when you first hear what a law is meant to do, but sometimes they really, really matter.
170.
by pjscott 4y ago
As a fun historical side note, I've heard this one before in a different context! "Make exit impossible so people will have to focus on fixing the broken system they're forced to deal with" was also the stated rationale
171.
by pjscott 4y ago
That one has an actual useful definition in economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital
172.
by pjscott 4y ago
I think what we have here is a terminological mix-up -- it sounds like you're conflating virtues [1], rules [2], dogma (in the non-Catholic sense), and consequentialist [3] utility functions [4]. The post you're replying to is wel
173.
by pjscott 4y ago
IMAP is a protocol that you can only love if you haven’t had to try to implement it. I say “try to” because there are so many incompatible almost-implementations that you will never actually implement IMAP. Replacing it with something more
174.
by pjscott 4y ago
We don't live by bread alone.
175.
by pjscott 4y ago
19 September 2022, for the record.
176.
by pjscott 4y ago
Yes, the study design is able to tell which way the causality points. Not all colleges got access to Facebook at the same time (back before it was open to the general public) so this is sort of a natural experiment: you can look at the coll
177.
by pjscott 4y ago
I urge anybody using a C family language to become familiar with AddressSanitizer [1], a tool that (with support from the compiler) detects an impressive variety of memory bugs at runtime. The scenario you describe would result in the progr
178.
by pjscott 4y ago
Theres a bit of a miscommunication going on here. A more precise (but less punchy) way of saying it would be “When things break dramatically in production, resist the too-easy urge to heap acrimonious blame on whoever was most closely invol
179.
by pjscott 4y ago
Anecdotally: when that guy in Wisconsin ran his car through a parade, I was curious what would happen to him. I looked up the relevant parts of the Wisconsin criminal laws, which had a rewrite some years ago. And holy shit they were amazi
180.
by pjscott 4y ago
(It was fixed shortly after your comment was posted.)

More ›