Viewing profile — notdonspaulding

> If you live somewhere that mostly burns coal to make electricity, Which is almost everywhere in the world. Fossil fuels make up around 80% of energy production. > But if they sta…

Just a note on your gun death comment. The chance of dying by a gun in the US is very small. Of those killed by guns in the US, less than 3% are killed by anything resembling an "a…

They did not have internet. From the article: > You were in a country that really was sealed off from the rest of the world. No internet or social media. All press and TV (one chan…

I couldn't be talking from a more realistic standpoint. I've lived in places where incumbent ISPs don't invest in infrastructure, places where a private organization built out a ca…

> But that is rarely true for any privatized infrastructure alternative. There is often direct financial relations through taxation anyways, either tax breaks for the company or ou…

> Everybody benefits from infrastructure even if they don't use it directly. ...therefore, by definition, any infrastructure project is to be considered "worth it" and should be we…

I've not personally read "Misquoting Jesus", but I've listened to Ehrman on YT a bit. Based on that, and having spoken with a few biblical scholars who have read Ehrman, the genera…

I don't tend to reread many books in general. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien's fictional series are probably the only exceptions. However, I do frequently reread books from the Bible, typi…

It is and it is. My dad died of a GBM in 2022, 17 months after his diagnosis. If he had had another 19 months, I'd have made him breakfast this morning. I find it much easier to sy…

GBM median survival for humans (according to the article) is 15 months. If the effect is linear, the boost to survival time in humans would be an additional 19 months. With the dea…

...and Hong Kong, until it was returned to communist China.

I see this claimed all the time, but I don't understand why this is assumed to be the case. GDP rises and falls with economic progress and innovation. If new LLM startups make a bu…

Arrive home from where? I've got my AI Assistant writing my code, checking in at the gym, running my poker night, and filing my taxes. (Robot, experience this tragic irony for me!)…

Doesn't it strike you as odd that devs get "lost" often enough to need this "feature"? I've used CVS, SVN, hg, bzr, and git. Why does git stand alone as the only VCS where devs nee…

I came here to mention Dave Beazley's courses and talks. In particular, I recently prepped/ran a week-long, in-house training session of Dave's Python-Mastery[1] course at my day j…

> From start of game to 50 squares left is enumerable. A nitpick, but I don't think you meant to say "enumerable" here "enumerable" means "able to be enumerated, or counted" https:…

> Its the same failure mode regardless if played via everyone paying taxes or everyone paying FDIC... But if everyone is paying FDIC via fees levied against private banks, then the…

Your first thought is completely right. Your second thought sounds like a good idea. Let's have another competitor (government) funded by private entities via debt equity (bonds) w…

Fatal flaw for outdoor games: what keeps this from picking up pieces of gravel or debris from the court? Anything sharp or rough it picks up is then immediately headed for somebody…

> My threshold for "serious news organization" is that CNN gets there, Fox News doesn't. I don't put those 2 channels in different categories at all. And certainly they don't divid…

> > Pattern recognition is not intelligence. > Until we know how exactly our own intelligence work, this is a statement of belief. I would agree, with the addendum that it logicall…

> That's how language models can translate text: they have internal models of understanding that are not tied down to languages or even specific verbiage within a language I would …

> GPT will happily [make a promise to you] GPT will never make a promise to you in the same sense that I would make a promise to you. We could certainly stretch the meaning of the …

But pattern recognition is not intelligence. I asked my daughter this morning: What is a "promise"? You have an idea, and I have an idea, they probably both are something kind-of-l…

I'm not the GP, but I agree with this stance. But the specific policy proposed really matters if this is your goal. Politicians often want to write very narrow regulations which ar…