Viewing profile — lavelganzu

Meanwhile here in central Austin, it's a 0.9 mile walk from my door to the nearest bus stop that I can use to commute, walking along major stroads some of which don't even have sid…

There is a downside of making buses free, similar to the experience of cities which stopped enforcing "turnstile hopping" for trains, which is that it attracts a small number of ho…

Gwern was skeptical, & noted that an IQ of 75 [1] in this case study is very low. He additionally raises a few points, including that volume loss is not the same as neuron loss. He…

A plug for an old SMBC-comic on this theme: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-02-08

It's been around long enough to have a Wikipedia page [1], which can give you the main facts & demographics. In short, it started in 2006 as a group blog for people interested in A…

Excellent chart on that page. Hurrah for asking their degree of confidence! The plurality of respondents had low confidence, of course, as scientists should pending some experiment…

They do it by correctly noting that there's no such doubling. Conservation of energy is within-world, not cross-world.

Definitions are for math. For science it's enough to operationalize: e.g. to study the differences between wakefulness and sleep; or sensory systems and their integration into a mo…

Another option is to fake a planetary magnetic field by placing a large electromagnetic satellite in mars-stationary orbit. Merely reducing the effect of the solar wind stripping a…

It's a fun idea to explore in fiction, but it certainly didn't happen. The evolution of our species is too recent.

> Can you honestly say you've never had zipper teeth part company with the fabric or never had to apply candle wax or similar to the teeth so they run smoothly? Do regular people e…

At the level of industries and large groups, the chief answer to your "Why?" is the same sort of reasoning as the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": Nobody ever got fired …

On the opposite side of moral hazard, early in my career I worked for a large web security company in tech support. We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all. Often t…

Incidentally, Blackrock doesn't buy homes. Other private equity, combined, own less than half a percent of single-family homes in the US.

One small trick that would greatly improve headlines of this sort: a number. Compare how these two possible headlines affect you: - Three Scientists Call for Ban on Social Media an…

e.g. design a terrible pathogen

Agreed. There are technical challenges that are so basic that a programmer should be able to regurgitate them even under normal-for-an-interview stress, and these are still useful …

I'm impressed by the author's gall in naming his idea an "iron law", without bothering to test how true it is. I suppose it'd get talked about a lot less if he had named it simply …

I for one want new giant stone pyramids. :)

It "allows" people with vast resources to spam only until the moderator removes the account, and it ensures the moderator is paid to do so. But more critically, it removes the prof…

Money is an imperfect but real solution. The simple thing is to charge a small sign-up fee. Obviously this dramatically increases the barrier to entry for real humans. But it shoul…

Isn't this merely a technological change? "A few decades or a century ago", being location-specific was the only possible option for a social club. Now there are more options; loca…

There's a plausible argument for it, so it's not a crazy thing. You as a human being can also predict likely completions of partial sentences, or likely lines of code given surroun…

Correction: "Now something that is also bad, but not nearly as harmful as acid rain, is falling from the sky."

Technically the "due process" clause is in the 14th Amendment, ratified 1868. ;)