merc

joined 2 years ago
[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 41 minutes ago

but that's more of a result of poor material conditions forcing inovations

Well, also Germany was one of the world leaders in science and technology in the early 1900s all the way up to WWII. Just look at the list of winners of the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry and how many of them are German. You could even see this in the recent Oppenheimer movie, where they showed him travelling to the University of Göttingen because that was where you needed to be to study cutting edge theoretical physics. And this was the 1920s when Germany was already suffering having to repay massive war debts after WWI.

What happened? When Hitler rose to power the Nazis drove off all the Jewish scientists, and scared off a lot of the gentiles. It's almost exactly the same situation as in the US today. Even the chaotic Weimar Republic wasn't enough to cause Germany's lead on science to flee. But, when Hitler came to power, the scientists left, and a lot of them came to the US. This was the start of the US dominating science for decades, something which may collapse now due to Trump.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 53 minutes ago
[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 58 minutes ago

Anybody who's interested in Ukraine should follow Tim Mak and his news site Counteroffensive

I'm not sure if he's Canadian or American. He's a graduate of McGill in Canada, but apparently served as a medic in the US Army. He used to work for The Daily Beast and Politico, then for NPR for 5 years. Now he's running his own news organization out of Ukraine. He and his team are reporting on the ground in Ukraine, living through all the drone attacks, then going out to talk to Ukrainians in person. He also covers military issues between China and Taiwan.

Some of the stories he's covered are things like the drone attacks deep inside Russia that destroyed their bombers, but also things you won't get elsewhere like secret apartment concerts in Ukraine.

And if that doesn't convince you, he signs off all his dispatches with his dog of war pics of puppies he and his team run across while reporting on the war.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 hour ago

The city is facing the worse

I think you mean "worst"

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 14 points 2 hours ago

We're basically talking about truthiness.

People fact checked a crazy uncle if the things their uncle was saying weren't truthy. But, if a friend's medical advice sounded truthy, they simply accepted it and didn't bother to check.

ChatGPT and other LLMs are designed to sound truthy. If you asked "What's the biggest planet in the solar system" they could respond "I think that the biggest planet is Jupiter. My information is that Jupiter has a mass of X and a volume of Y. The next biggest planet should be Saturn, which has a mass of Z and a volume of Q. But, you should verify this by consulting these sources..."

Instead, these LLMs are designed so that the answers they provide are incredibly confident. When a user replies that they're wrong, they change their answer and generate a new one that is just as confident. That's the kind of answer that is going to seem truthy.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago

It seems to me that saying that someone does not neatly fit into the category of man or woman is accepting that "category of man" and "category of woman" are valid categories. Rather than fighting sexism, it's reinforcing sexism. If someone truly believed that cultural norms about what's male and what's female was sexist BS, there would be no need for a "they" pronoun.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

some cultures assign adherence to certain behavioural norms to that

Isn't that sexism, something we should be fighting by saying "women can do that too?"

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 hours ago

but they would move more to the suburbs and rural areas, and out of the cities. That still doesn't sound so bad.

It sounds bad for the city cores though. I like cities and I especially like cities with dense cores that combine good walkable areas with great transit. Tokyo is a prime example. Some people still drive in Tokyo, but a lot of people use the amazing mass transit system there. The end result for Tokyo is that mass transit hubs become these amazing walkable areas with all kinds of interesting things to see.

If everybody except the most poor get self driving cars and move to the suburbs, the downtown cores might become robocar hells, where cars have the priority and pedestrians need to wait 5 minutes to cross a street.

Any way, I don't think self-driving cars should replace public transport, but complement it.

Yeah, I agree. There might need to be some kind of government intervention to make sure that people have an incentive to use public transit instead of just going everywhere in self-driving cars. But, if you can make journeys robocar -> mass transit -> robocar that's still an improvement on just full robocar journeys.

As for bikes, I have spent most of my life using a bike to get around. I want Netherlands style bike highways everywhere. But, it's really hard to get any progress with bike-friendly designs in the current climate. What I think some people should do is have some very well developed bike highway plans in their back pockets, waiting for the opportunity to roll them out.

It could be that self-driving cars will take over the roads in a way that was like how cars replaced horses. If that happens, there are going to be a lot of cities that are going to have to make new laws suddenly: what happens to street parking, what do we do with existing parking lots, etc. That would be the time to pull out a big plan and say "ok, first of all, let's install all these bike highways with the room we now have".

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

does not neatly fit into the category of man or woman

What defines the category of man?

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

The quote in his online biography about his modeling career is a bit more detailed:

Dolph took up modeling at the famous Zoli Agency to make some extra cash. 'A bit too tall and muscular for a model's size 40',

Wow. Can you imagine a bigger ego boost than being turned down to be a male model because you're just too tall and muscular?

Being perpetually exhausted because your celebrity girlfriend keeps bringing back too many girls for the group sex session is a close second though.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ha! It makes it sound like you're saying that young black kids are self-important dickheads and that's why he's a good role model.

But, yeah, I know what you're trying to say. Despite his social media presence, the image that kids generally see is a very positive one. He's a somewhat stylish (in his own way) guy, who clearly has personality, and is a very accomplished scientist. I just cringe any time he comments on something not related to astrophysics.

 

In the most recent Arsecast, Andrew and Lewis Ambrose played a game where they picked a team of Arsenal players to lose. The restrictions were that the player couldn't be played too far out of position, and that they had to have at least 20 appearances for Arsenal in all competitions in the emirates era, and that the team be in a 4-3-3 shape.

It's worth listening to the episode. They didn't always pick the worst players, sometimes it was players who were just bad in a certain position, or surrounded by players who emphasized their faults.

You can see the two teams if you want to skip to the end.

Seems like a fun game, anybody want to post their designed-to-lose teams?

 
  • At least 200 people have died
  • The plane crashed into a doctor's hostel, injuring many people on the ground
  • One passenger survived, with injuries minor enough he was able to walk away
  • The plane was a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner
 

1:20 AM EST

210/266 polls reporting

| Name | Party | Votes | % | |


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| | Bruce Fanjoy | Liberal | 27,220 | 50.4 | | Pierre Poilievre | Conservative | 24,927 | 46.1|

 

Stocks have almost returned to where they were 5 days ago after his latest change to the tariffs.

 

I need some new earbuds, and live in a place with severe winters. I want to be able to access the controls using gloves or mittens if possible.

The online reviews I've seen all assume that you can just touch the earbuds with bare hands, but when it's well below freezing, that sometimes isn't possible. If I have to take off a mitt to use my earbuds my hand might not warm up until I can get back indoors again. Earbuds that work with touchscreen-capable gloves aren't good enough either. I've never seen touchscreen-capable gloves that keep your hands warm at -40C.

Any suggestions?

2
New shirt (sh.itjust.works)
 
 

First time home buyers will not be charged GST (5%) when buying a home, as long as the place they're buying costs less than $1M. This means that people buying a home for the first time will save up to $50k on their purchase.

Edit: Note, GST is mostly only charged when buying newly built homes, so this won't have any effect for people buying used homes.

 

Currently the PM doesn't have a seat in the house. If he visited the house, he'd have to go to the visitor's gallery.

It's an interesting situation. The PM is the leader of the federal liberal party, but he's not a member of parliament. But, does he need to be? Is the PM sitting in the house of commons just a tradition that nobody has challenged yet? Could the PM delegate things inside the house of commons to their deputy-PM and then do things like give speeches, attend diplomatic functions, etc.?

The US has a very different system where the president isn't part of the legislative branch at all. But, typically presidents don't twiddle their thumbs waiting for something to do. Being the head of state keeps most presidents busy. It makes me wonder if technically Carney could choose not to run for office, and just spend his time doing head-of-state things rather than legislative things.

 

"Sports Interactive regret to inform that, following extensive internal discussion and careful consideration with SEGA, we have made the difficult decision to cancel Football Manager 25 and shift our focus to the next release."

 

This sounds like a disaster.

For those who don't know, Football Manager has a yearly release schedule, and the highlight of the release is that it has a database of nearly every professional player in the world, the club they play for, and an attempt to "scout" them, giving all their various attributes from passing ability, to height and weight, to their determination.

By releasing in March 2025, they're going to release the game essentially at the end of the 2024/2025 season right before players start moving to new clubs and the database becomes obsolete. Typically, around March is when they're giving deep discounts on the yearly release because they know there won't be much remaining interest in playing a game that's almost out of date.

They really shot themselves in the foot. They could have released a Football Manager 25 that was 100% FM 24 but with an updated database, they've done it before. They could have called "Football Manager 25" something like "Football Manager Next Gen" and not tied themselves to a certain season. And, if they do manage to get Football Manager 25 out in March, are they really going to be able to do FM 26 half a year later? Will anybody buy FM 25 if they know there's a FM 26 coming out so soon?

 

It's amazing to me that they can even measure a 0.01 XG shot. This comes from James Benge's twitter account.

The XG graph is also interesting. Tottenham has a continuous stream of very low quality shots, resulting in the graph going up in tiny increments. Arsenal has a series of decent chances near minute 17, and then the one high-quality shot resulting in Gabriel's goal.

Arsenal vs. Tottenham XG graph

https://understat.com/match/26640

I'm sure part of it is Arsenal defending in a low block after scoring. But, it also smacks of desperation on Tottenham's part. If you're taking a shot that has a 1% chance of going in, rather than passing and waiting for a better opportunity, you don't believe that you're going to get a better opportunity.

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