smeej

31 ms·

211.
by smeej 1y ago
I guess you're the first person I've seen use it, so it can't rise to the level of pet peeve for me, but using "urks" instead of "irks" made me cringe on about as visceral a level!
212.
by smeej 1y ago
I just had an "on this day" reminder pop up that told me I've been searching for the answers to two relatively common problems for twelve years with no progress, unless you count ruling out the same damn primary suspects ov
213.
by smeej 1y ago
And yours had nothing to do with TFA or its topic.
214.
by smeej 1y ago
In general, I see a significant difference between "this happens because of me" and "this happens regardless of me," even when whatever happens isn't that big of a deal. The difference between 0 and 1 is significant
215.
by smeej 1y ago
> There's nothing special about the embryo that became you that isn't also true of the specific conditions and precursors to that embryo, and the precursors to those precursors, ad infinitum. Of course there is. The embryo is
216.
by smeej 1y ago
> Problem solved. Not remotely. You provide no defense whatsoever of consciousness as a valid distinction between "you" and "not you yet," so it doesn't matter whether it's present at the beginning of your
217.
by smeej 1y ago
There's a big difference between "killing" and "allowing to die." I don't think we should ever be proud of our ability to kill humans even more efficiently than nature does, at any stage of development.
218.
by smeej 1y ago
In very broad strokes, people have been deciding which categories of people they think deserve to live and which deserve to die from time immemorial. This is just the earliest life stage we've been able to analyze and eliminate the &qu
219.
by smeej 1y ago
Sincere question: Is there any societal change you wouldn't want to survive? I don't have any trouble saying this is a race I'm fine with "losing" because I refused to play, because the prospect of living in such a
220.
by smeej 1y ago
It is not, and never should be, reassuring that we can use technology to kill far more people than nature kills on its own. This obviously isn't true of adults (cf. every "never again" event in history). Why should it be tr
221.
by smeej 1y ago
Do you really see these as equivalent in a biological sense? Like, it's not in dispute that every adult human was originally a specific embryo, with the same DNA the adult has. It is truly universal scientific consensus that it is the
222.
by smeej 1y ago
Consciousness? That seems...arbitrary? How do we know when that even was? I get we can know it wasn't right at fertilization, but when was it? And what level of consciousness matters? There are severely disabled adults who have never b
223.
by smeej 1y ago
Perhaps, but I have hyperphantasia and could easily assemble/visualize a bike in my head without a clue what many of the parts are called. I know the big ones like "handlebars" or "pedals," but I haven't spent
224.
by smeej 1y ago
I have hyperphantasia, and only realized within the last decade or so that most people are not walking around with a detailed virtual overlay on the whole world. This bicycle example really helps me appreciate the difference between how t
225.
by smeej 1y ago
Back when I watched it, I thought it was a dystopian film. I seem to have interpreted it differently than a sizable portion of today's tech elite.
226.
by smeej 1y ago
It has, but in an accidental way, in a, "Shit happens," sort of way, not in a, "My parents looked at me, decided I was faulty, and never gave me a chance," sort of way. This is much more akin to the old practice of leavi
227.
by smeej 1y ago
My point is...exactly what I asked in this thread? What makes one question more appropriate than the other? What is it appropriate to ?
228.
by smeej 1y ago
There is no organism that is genetically your offspring, so no such offspring can have died. Totally true. But I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now. When did something so significant happen that I became an &
229.
by smeej 1y ago
Am I the only one who faces a weird sort of existential lump in the pit of my stomach when I think about how, in the world "we're" creating, I never would have made the cut? I mean, if you'd killed me as an embryo, I&#x2
230.
by smeej 1y ago
This article is only about the survival of children born alive. Not saying that other question isn't worth looking at too. It's just a separate one from the one in this article.
231.
by smeej 1y ago
This is looking entirely at the survival of children after birth. It even normalizes for situations where children are born before full-term. What happens to postpartum mothers is certainly another question worth looking at, but the two que
232.
by smeej 1y ago
It's certainly another question, but the question of appropriateness seems to depend on context. I don't see what would make either more appropriate than the other in terms of "things a data analysis website might assess&qu
233.
by smeej 1y ago
Any time I do select a seat in advance, I try to pick my window seat where someone already has the aisle one. It works surprisingly often to get an empty seat in the row!
234.
by smeej 1y ago
...because they advertise its potential for on-device usage for basic functionality in this very product and I wanted to see how it worked? I'm not sure what you want MW to say. I tested the product because I wanted to know if the prod
235.
by smeej 1y ago
One possible way to get them closer as cheap as paperback books might be to make them per book. Like, if you didn't need an OS or networking or anything but a charging port, because the thing only ran one app and came preinstalled with
236.
by smeej 1y ago
Not really, but I did expect an answer, or at least a non-answer, that showed it understood the question, and that an answer was expected.
237.
by smeej 1y ago
I got it all set up and tested out Gemma3 1B on a Pixel 8a. That only took a few minutes, which was nice. But it was garbage. It barely parsed the question, didn't even attempt to answer it, and replied in what was barely serviceable E
238.
by smeej 1y ago
Hey, just FYI, I did shoot you an email. Just mentioning in case it didn't come through.
239.
by smeej 1y ago
Bank of America decided I really had been in rural France buying tires when I had proof I was at work, at my desk, in Boston at the times of the purchases, and the card was in my hand. It's been 20 years and I still won't ever do
240.
by smeej 1y ago
The existence of wire transfers, cashier's checks, and, you know, CASH undermine your claim that people in payment networks don't desire irreversible transactions. Basically everybody who's ever sold something in person wants

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