vertexFarm

12 ms·

61.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
That's kind of reductive. The medium matters for any activity or information. You can't just discount the medium. Whether for good or bad, the existence of phones has changed the human condition. Perhaps irreversibly. It's no
62.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
It will also drop the userbase below a useful threshold. Sure, there will be the technical possibility of still managing to use it illegally and undetected--but there will be no herd immunity, there will be no effects of scale that make the
63.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Controversial opinion incoming: decentralization isn't going to be a silver bullet that fundamentally solves anything. These services are still going to depend on large amounts of expensive hardware and infrastructure that must exist i
64.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Wait, so sanctions against a country should affect all people who share the common ethnicity in that country regardless of citizenship status or location in the world? So essentially it's a sanction against an ethnic group, not a state
65.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
If there's one thing I've learned about our own human nature, it's that we'll sacrifice anything in the future for even the slightest increase in convenience in the present. It's bonkers. The convenience these machi
66.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
This is one of the most quintessentially American paragraphs I've read. Jesus.
67.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
The field of economics certainly has lots of problems with replication and pseudoscience and pigeon superstition, but I'd like to point out that when large-scale events naturally take decades to play out it's a common effect for p
68.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Better in every regard including -immediate- costs, maybe. If we go worst-case climate change in 40 years, not putting massive development into fission and fusion power will clearly become the most costly mistake we've ever made as a s
69.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Kind of squirrely phrasing going on here. "If they believe some other nations are threatening their own ideology, the should build defense or sometimes offenses to counter that." They "believe" their ideology is threaten
70.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
You could say the same about a credit card skimmer on an ATM. It's passive, right? It's just a sensor that sits there and absorbs people's data. I don't think this argument makes a lot of sense. The point is, there needs
71.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
That has a very bad impact on the economy. When lots of people (it's a systemic problem, it's going to be LOTS of people) who are a part of this society start to become infirm, die out prematurely, leave the workforce, undergo rad
72.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Good question. It's a very strange method of motivation or coercion that we've all just kind of accepted into our lives, and we feel lucky to even have that. Well all of us in the US, anyway. For some reason it doesn't work t
73.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
There's so many mixed signals and contradictory studies about eye strain and computer displays that I'm almost forced to conclude as a layman that it's totally subjective and up to the user. I've read about blogs and app
74.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
I think they get that, but it's a kind of carrot-and-stick tactic. You don't really get an option; you get a guarantee that you either vote for 1: pure, eldritch evil, 2: milquetoast status quo with vague promises of reform that y
75.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Good question. But it could be that the hype cycle is a natural part of idea development and it may even hide beneficial effects to the timeline of refining a concept. It's kind of hard to say because we can't go back and do an em
76.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
"Individuals with a large amygdala are more sensitive to fear...which, taken together with our findings, might suggest the testable hypothesis that individuals with larger amygdala are more inclined to integrate conservative views into
77.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Security should be the default. I don't think it will cost much more to make them secure relative to what medical hardware already costs; adding encryption to the microprocessor in a state-of-the-art implant isn't going to be a he
78.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
When an article such as this mentions hacking, they don't mean your version of hacking. They mean the spooky news definition of hacking where there's a stock photo of a guy wearing a hoodie (and a balaclava for some reason??) typi
79.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Maybe you could even use it in conjunction with something like a laser particulate sensor, to scope how effective it is and track its progress from day to day. Kick it on when it detects a nasty bunch of filth in the air, and kill it once i
80.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Oh yeah. I remember modding Quake and Unreal and such back in the day--after a lot of practice and experimentation, one learns to read a map like a book. Gameplay is built right into the structure of the world. When the map is made by an ex
81.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Same here. It's a rather extremist view these days, but lately we're seeing just how damaging advertising can be to society. They are terrible because they certainly do work, and they're being vastly improved over time. The p
82.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Number one sounds about right for the most part, but you may be misunderstanding the second point. I don't think that progress is meaningless because we all die. I don't think it's necessarily a bad or unhappy thing that ever
83.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Did you read the whole article? It goes on to talk about people who actually have sexual encounters with partners.
84.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
I think it would be more strange if our elections were not hacked--given how lax our election security is, plus how much there is for nefarious actors to gain. Maybe not hacked to the point of outright ballot stuffing, certainly not 100% of
85.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
If you can't be happy with a life of mediocrity, you are simply not going to be happy. The extreme majority of people are mediocre, and that is exactly what defines mediocre. It's a simple statistical guarantee that most are not g
86.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Lots of ways. By contributing to society, perhaps? This advertising model hasn't been around for very long. It's baffling how suddenly nobody can even conceive of how the world would work without malicious advertising and culture-
87.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
You've essentially proven their point. Outside a few problem areas, water in the US is remarkably safe and clean. The US population minus "nine to 45 million" definitely qualifies as "most places" in America. And th
88.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy Still irrelevant to the subject. It doesn't prove or disprove anything.
89.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
Unpopular but entirely correct. The study used power up to ten watts per kilogram. Your phone uses around a watt or less compared to your whole body mass. Let's say the average of 62 kilos. Your exposure is less than a fiftieth of what
90.
by vertexFarm 8y ago
This type of uncontrolled self-experimentation is extremely fraught with bias and is not a reliable way to reach a conclusion at all. For example, you discount all the times you get a leg twitch and your phone doesn't ring. You probabl

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