rcoveson

39 ms·

391.
by rcoveson 5y ago
They trained an ML model that predicts blood glucose based on age, sex, GPS location, and Apple Pay transactions. Just bought a #3 combo at Taco Bell and arrived at home? Blood glucose spikes 15 minutes later.
392.
by rcoveson 5y ago
The issue is that, when you get down to it, it’s just going out into the wilderness and climbing a rock. If you regulate that, you’ve made a wrong turn. Same goes for surfing, or having consensual, unprotected sex. Both dangerous, or at lea
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by rcoveson 5y ago
The idea that my own health is an external cost is crazy. How do you tax a free solo rock climber like Alex Honnold? A 1000% tax on chalk dust?
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by rcoveson 5y ago
> Because our tax dollars pay for Medicare/Medicaid, so for those people who don't have private insurance, they're saddling society with the costs of their choices. This may sound pedantic, but I think it's an importa
395.
by rcoveson 5y ago
I'm struck by the profundity of this loss. It's almost as bad as if something like archive.org were to just disappear. SaaS is so ephemeral. One day, you have access to a version of Google that works absurdly well. The next, it&
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by rcoveson 6y ago
If you can purchase it then so can I, so yes, I would absolutely prefer that. Better than Facebook building up a totally proprietary information hoard. If Facebook knows it, I consider it lost anyway.
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by rcoveson 6y ago
Agreed. If entity A makes billions of dollars by selling everything they know about you, and entity B makes billions of dollars by merely knowing everything they know about you, I much prefer entity A. Entity B and its investors terrify m
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by rcoveson 6y ago
> But I'm not sure looking at the top 100 is a compelling argument. It seems to be very compelling. Most people spend more energy writing about, worrying about, or praising Bezos, Musk, and Gates than they do the rest of the top 0.1
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by rcoveson 6y ago
You can't, because all the websites they're tracking you on are actually helping Facebook by choice. They didn't plant a GPS tracker on your car, they paid a bunch of amoral civilians to monitor your movements through the cit
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by rcoveson 6y ago
> But there's no value in doing so since it is not the original or was never authorized by the creator. So the work has no value in and of itself? It seems to me like an unauthorized reproduction of a work of art has just as much i
401.
by rcoveson 6y ago
I think its a huge problem for Java. Try doing proper string collation (standard library or ICU4J), or regular expression matching, in a context where your strings are all UTF-8 and your output should also be UTF-8. Operations that shouldn&
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by rcoveson 6y ago
> The frequency and magnitude of fraud in the penny stock market is absolutely a factual claim. Yes, that's exactly what I said. However, the article doesn't make any such claim. Or maybe I missed it, because it was "impli
403.
by rcoveson 6y ago
That's not a factual claim, it's a subjective statement. "Some penny stock transactions are fraudulent" is a factual claim, though not a very interesting one. "The SEC estimates that X% of penny stock transactions a
404.
by rcoveson 6y ago
You have so many replies and they're all so low quality. (EDIT: This was probably hasty of me, there are a number of good replies now. I had quoted some bad ones here, but that seems like it simply prolongs their effective life. I&#x27
405.
by rcoveson 6y ago
> For day-to-day operations, believing in such an entity is 'fine', as carrying around some more complicated idea can bog one down. Most of us don't have degrees in philosophy and metaphysics. Newtonian physics and gravity
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by rcoveson 6y ago
The people you know are most like you (the same is true of the people anybody knows), and are a bad proxy for humanity. The number of people who believe their God is "being itself" is vanishingly small compared to the number who b
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by rcoveson 6y ago
> A dead person is no more real than God... I'm unconvinced that remembering dead parents amounts to believing in imaginary beings. Reality is less relative than you're making it out to be. Dead people are "real" beca
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by rcoveson 6y ago
The God I was taught was an entity that actually spoke, or otherwise communicated. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all spoke to him, as did Jesus. He said certain things, which means he necessarily did not say other things. If he said all possibl
409.
by rcoveson 6y ago
> Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. The most typical substitute for Catholic god throughout human history is probably some other god (or group of gods), followed by non-
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by rcoveson 6y ago
Yeah, it seems like we're just talking past each other. I am aware that paying people less than minimum wage is illegal, as I am sure was the original poster to whom you replied. However, pointing out that something is illegal is not t
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by rcoveson 6y ago
I think that bringing up the fact that "there is demand" is not necessarily an argument that it's okay to break the law. I think it's the start of a proposal that the law should be changed. Whether or not we agree, that&
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by rcoveson 6y ago
So, with murder-for-hire, the contract stipulates that somebody gets murdered. In paying somebody $6/hour to deliver packages, the contract requires that people's package get delivered. I think we can agree that the negative side-
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by rcoveson 6y ago
I wonder if anybody has modified their browser fonts with the powerline characters and can actually see the character you've written here. If those people are anywhere it'd be here. :)
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by rcoveson 6y ago
Right. Software diversity (as long as it's real, all-the-way-down diversity and not just different branding of the same tech) is beneficial to overall security for more or less the same reasons that gene pool diversity is beneficial to
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by rcoveson 6y ago
I think you answered your own question. Those `if` constructs are indeed clunky. In fact I'd venture to say it's really just "C-like language Stockholm syndrome" that makes them feel more "maintainable" or &quo
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by rcoveson 6y ago
Sell no point in holding for some paltry sum of money.
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by rcoveson 6y ago
You've got a lot of good replies already, but I think the best example has got to be Black Mesa, the Half Life remake. It even has a better Metacritic user score than the original Half Life. Lots of remakes aren't very impactful,
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by rcoveson 6y ago
It's not the "greater fool" theory. It's more like language. A new word doesn't have to have a real connection to its meaning. The word "cat" isn't structured like a cat, and when spoken aloud doesn&#
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by rcoveson 6y ago
You don’t have to want it, other people want it. You want to have a pile of lightweight, secure doodads that other people want, because that’s easier to exchange than terminal wants like cars and sheep. What’s really crazy is the only reaso
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by rcoveson 6y ago
Keep in mind the expertise required to build that intuition, though. The average person who merely knows how to play Chess should probably think before they move, or else blunder away the whole game by putting their queen on a square threat

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