ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
2d ago
Are you reporting a length as 11 16/32" if that's what you measure? If not, then it's plain worse communication than 11.50" because it's ambiguous with 11.5". Reduced fractions (e.g. 1/2") is a horrible system, and expanded fractions (e.g. 16/32") is almost as bad.
Also, the multiple levels of measurement was the first thing I dropped when I did construction: everything was in 1" or 1/8" increments, and we didn't use feet (so something might be 135" or 135 1/4", but never 11' 3 1/4", 135 5/16" or 135 1/2" from that measurement). Same with the manufacturing I'm doing now: it's 1/16" (reported as 1/16ths, so 8/16 is the proper format) or 0.001", and never feet when it is imperial.
ulyssessword
2d ago
That's almost always false precision.
Weather reports (never mind weather forecasts) simply aren't good enough to report single degrees, regardless of whether it's Celsius or Fahrenheit.
ulyssessword
2d ago
It's easier to remember historical trivia and perform the unit conversion than just "5 km/h is walking speed"?
ulyssessword
3d ago
I've never understood the argument the US customary units are "human-centric".
Is 0.00731x the weight of an average man really that much more intuitive than 0.0161x? How about 0.588x the historical average height vs. 0.0149x (or was it 0.179x)? Is 2.63 just-noticeable-temperature-difference-intervals worse than 1.46 of them? (I'm not going to bother questioning the zero point of Fahrenheit. Freezing is much better.)
I can tell the difference between 1/4", 5/16", and 3/8" head hex screws from across the room, but that's just because I've seen tens of thousands of each of them. There's nothing intrinsically human about any of my intuitions, it's just what I've learned (and no, I haven't learned metric to the same degree).
ulyssessword
3d ago
Space is a black void with a few resources we can mostly find on earth. It can never replace the Wild West, the frontier. It is empty, and it can never be home to us. This is where we have evolved to live, and to die.
The Earth vs. Moon and African Plains vs. far Arctic are differences of degree, not kind. Both the moon and the arctic are inhospitable environments that will quickly kill unprotected humans, and lack easy access to essential resources. And yet, with sufficient adaptation and technology, we've managed to create self-sufficient populations in the far north.
We've gone beyond "where we have evolved to live, and to die" once already. I wouldn't count us out yet.
ulyssessword
8d ago
I feel like that would immediately escalate.
The power of lawyers to practice law comes from the bar association, but the power of bar associations to license lawyers comes from the government1. I suspect Trump has a bigger stick if they want to pick a fight.
1 the provincial government in my case. I'm not sure what it is in the States.
ulyssessword
9d ago
Sorry, I can't tell what you're trying to say. Your link appears to be broken, therefore I couldn't possibly draw any conclusions about your intentions.
Could you clearly and explicitly lay out every step of your reasoning, as is the standard in every discussion?
ulyssessword
9d ago
Some technical challenges still exist, but more importantly they are legible. Regulators (and voters) can point to specific deficiencies and failures, which are used to justify stronger regulations and delays.
If we said that a self-driving system would be treated equal to a human driver (mandatory insurance, pass a driving test, etc.), then I bet we would have several competing companies, all of which would pay lower insurance rates than average humans because they would crash less.
Instead, we have ridiculous debates like "should it swerve to hit one pedestrian, or brake to hit five jaywalkers" holding up the process.
ulyssessword
9d ago
What did I say that sounded like...
Not sure about them, but I read your comment as a rhetorical question, not a request for information. My reading was:
- (First comment): Trump wants isolationism.
- (Imagined bridge): This is bad because...
- (Your comment): It will increase the risk of genocide.
- (Imagined conclusion) Therefore, we shouldn't do it.
ulyssessword
9d ago
I plugged KLMMTOP into Copilot, and after asking it to guess, it said:
Let's have some fun with this one too! KLMMTOP could stand for a variety of burger toppings. Here's a creative guess:
- Ketchup
- Lettuce
- Mustard
- Mayo
- Tomato
- Onion
- Pickles
This combination definitely covers a lot of the classic burger essentials. Who knows, maybe KLMMTOP is a secret code for the ultimate burger experience! 🍔😄
If you have more questions or another topic in mind, feel free to share. I'm here to help and enjoy the conversation!
LLMs are pretty good at their jobs.
ulyssessword
9d ago
...and those that left for Europe have demonstrated that they don't respect the law.
Countries can set whatever immigration/refugee targets they want, but their selection procedure shouldn't be "whoever is most willing to lie and cheat". They may not have written that policy down anywhere, but that's what happens when you don't enforce the rules.
ulyssessword
11d ago
The vendor gives him his order, and the monk hands him a $20 bill. The vendor takes it and turns to the next customer. The monk yells "Hey, what about my change?" "Change must come from within."
ulyssessword
12d ago
That's somewhat of a middle ground. I can detect that something is off in the pictures linked above, but I can't necessarily describe it in any particular way.
ulyssessword
12d ago
[Edit 1: I was thinking of this at the time, but too lazy to go back to the ACX post to incorporate it - this is similar to how an artist friend of Scott's discribed how she identified an AI-generated image as AI art and why she disliked it. Once you see it, can you unsee it? Does it change how much you enjoy the image?]
I can't unsee the incoherence of that image, but I also didn't learn the skills that Ilzo used to call it slop.
I can mentally rotate the objects that are shown in pictures, and therefore I can notice perspective and lighting errors. AI is getting pretty good at that. I can not mentally repair, repaint, and restore a gate, nor can I place it in a geographical/social/historical context, therefore I didn't notice that the paint and carvings are incoherent or that it never could've blocked the canyon. This is one aspect of "AI slop".
I think that is a failure on my part, and I would enjoy good art more if I had the level of discernment that Ilzo demonstrated. I can't use an image as a portal to another world in that way.
I probably won't do anything about it, though.
ulyssessword
14d ago
since Musk already had a 20% stake in the company, he already had sufficient incentive to meet the benchmarks. But beyond that, he never gave any indication that he'd leave the company or dedicate less time to it without additional compensation.
Heading off on a bit of a tangent, why the fuck are the courts giving legal advantages to fickle mercenaries? The last thing I'd want to do if I was creating a legal system is punish people for being dependable and committed, but here we are: Musk was dependable and committed, therefore he didn't have the right to as much compensation as an outsider would have.
ulyssessword
14d ago
That sounds reasonable, but I'd be disappointed if you were right.
They decided that possibly tracking "a person who likes certain visual settings" was too invasive...so they're pushing users towards actually tracking them as a specific individual.
ulyssessword
15d ago
At launch, Patreon was focused on bundles of $1 payments to each creator. Then it focused on bundles of $10 payments. Then individual $10 payments, billed separately. Now it's largely the same as any other content hosting/discovery/payment platform.
ulyssessword
15d ago
Credit card processing fees are about 25 cents, IIRC. What are they going to do "If you pay the credit card company $0.15, I'll pitch in another $0.10 and let you read the article."?
This was also the idea behind Patreon: a 100 fan to 100 artist transaction would take 10000 payments normally, but Patreon could reduce it to 200 and some internal accounting. (That didn't last too long, though.)
ulyssessword
15d ago
I'm on one device, and don't clear my cookies. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia is the only website that consistently forgets my preferences (regardless of whether I log in or not).
Thanks for the addon recommendation, I'll check it out.
ulyssessword
16d ago
The information in question isn't exactly secret
I wouldn't be too sure about that.
At work, we manufacture, assemble, and resell widgets, and our suppliers are considered sensitive information. If our big customers knew who our suppliers were, they'd try to cut us out of the middle. (Our small customers want to order parts by dozen instead of the thousand, so they wouldn't necessarily care.)
ulyssessword
16d ago
But have you ever met any cops? Did you know people in school who grew up to become cops?
Yes, a few regular cops, a campus cop, and a couple conservation officers. (All have arrest powers with varying jurisdictions. I'm using a slightly-broad definition, but nothing too crazy.)
I'll pit my anti-authoritarian anecdotes against your vague implications any day.
ulyssessword
16d ago
What's with Wikipedia's new (2022) appearance, and its refusal to remember my preferences?
I've told it half a dozen times that I like wide column size and small text...and it keeps on reverting to the "modern" crap that doesn't even show half as much information on the screen.
I'm tempted to do the same thing I did to Fandom.com in order to make it a persistently readable website, but I'm hoping there's an easier way.
(No, I won't reward their arbitrary restrictions and poor UI by making an account. That way lies madness.)
ulyssessword
16d ago
Lesswrong has "cleaving reality at the joints" and "clusters in thingspace" for that concept.
ulyssessword
18d ago
...new party line that "Kamala never ran on trans issues, so it's unfair to say she lost the election because of trans issues." They keep repeating the same "debunk" that Kamala never uttered the word trans in the last 3 months of her campaign or whatever.
Is anyone supposed to be convinced by that? What's next, "The New England Patriots didn't play on the far half of the football field, so it's unfair to say they lost the game because of that."?
The pundits are claiming that she abandoned a powerful and convincing topic because...why, exactly? The fact is that Trump did run on Kamala's stance on trans issues, and got some easy wins from that.
if you govern a certain way, even if you don't run on it, the other sides gets to beat you upside the head with your record.
Yes, 100% this. I've largely stopped paying attention to election campaigns because the major parties have extensive track records on exactly the things I'm concerned about instead of a proxy measure like how well they can focus-group and make promises. I still check up on independent candidates and the individual representatives, but it hasn't shifted my vote yet.
For the unfamiliar, it's a temporary suspension of the Federal sales tax on this subset of items.
It came into effect three weeks after the initial announcement, and will end two months later. Retailers are responsible for categorizing children's LEGO (intended for those under 14) separately from adult LEGO (intended for those 14+) because only the first is tax-exempt. Or they could choose not to participate, in which case they would collect and remit the tax, and the customer could file to have the GST they paid on exempt items refunded (like anyone is going to do that).
It's a horrible amount of effort and confusion for a tiny amount of tax cuts.
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