Readit News logoReadit News
garden_hermit commented on Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug   derekthompson.org/p/the-s... · Posted by u/zdw
begueradj · a month ago
> Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level.

I'm not sure from where you got this because any documentary/book/article and simply real life experiences related to this subject states the opposite (take a common animal such as a dog as an example)

garden_hermit · a month ago
Have you ever went running with a dog? Dogs can go fast over a short distance but they overheat quickly. People just keep on running way past the time the dog has collapsed.
garden_hermit commented on Data on How America Sold Out Its Computer Science Graduates   ifspp.substack.com/p/data... · Posted by u/haskellandchill
jppope · a month ago
I applaud the courage to call out this as a problem. With that said I believe that there is a lot more nuance on this issue than the article is willing to provide, or more importantly research needed to be done to be rigorous on this topic. There definitely is some truth here about the H1B1 program in the job market. There are some companies who are absolutely shameless abusers too. I think that all of us working in the industry know that a comp sci degree alone is not enough to provide the training for many of these roles.

As an aside, I think there's another equally important issue that should also be raised along with employment. A large number of our graduate+ degrees in STEM go to foreign nationals. The issue is not providing education to foreign nationals in and of itself, but that many of these degrees (public schools) are funded by tax payers, and we are depriving our country of an educated population while educating citizens in other countries who compete with our country globally. Private schools can and should do whatever is in their mission, but public schools should have some accountability to our citizens and tax payers. We all have a right to get value for the money that we put into things like our public university system, which is supposed to be training future leaders of our country.

Of course with that longwinded answer I have to say... Tech is like the weather, just wait for a minute its all going to change anyway, so don't stress all of this.

garden_hermit · a month ago
Generally speaking, foreign students subsidize public universities by paying full sticker price for tuition, whereas US students are either in state (paying less) or often receive scholarships and support.

Foreign students are not stealing “slots” from Americans. If anything, their tuition dollars make more slots available.

garden_hermit commented on Doge Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to "Munch" Veterans Affairs Contracts   propublica.org/article/tr... · Posted by u/afavour
bilbo0s · 3 months ago
I mean, hindsight is 20/20, but that's probably why it's a bad idea to give a gaggle-load of inexperienced tech sisses/bros the ability to do stuff like this.

Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. Drawdowns of the federal government should be measured and deliberate and done by grey haired people not given to rash action. Not by a kid with a python script he thinks is kind of cool.

garden_hermit · 3 months ago
This disaster was exactly predicted by a ton of people, with foresight! To treat this as an unexpected outcome belies the exact lack of seriousness that characterized this whole ordeal
garden_hermit commented on CDC to study vaccines and autism despite research showing no connection   theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/rntn
garden_hermit · 6 months ago
The issue is that head of the HHS has led a years-long campaign against vaccines built atop shit-tier science and outright misinformation, and is part of a political movement that is growing increasingly anti-vaccine.

There is a clear possibility that the results will be cooked or otherwise fraudulent because the secretary will not take "no link" for an answer. Even if such a study is obviously deeply flawed or rigged, the damage it would do to public acceptance of vaccines would be unparalleled, measured in thousands (and likely more) of dead children.

garden_hermit commented on Who's Afraid of Peter Thiel? A New Biography Suggests We All Should Be (2021)   time.com/6092844/peter-th... · Posted by u/zfg
originalvichy · 6 months ago
Most Americans I’ve interacted with think money is a reflection of your intelligence, so unfortunately as long as this guy has a net worth of billions he will be powerful.
garden_hermit · 6 months ago
The thing is that people like Thiel are actually quite smart. The problem is that people really overrate “smartness”. Smart people are often dumb as hell.
garden_hermit commented on A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter   noemamag.com/a-radical-ne... · Posted by u/Hooke
teekert · 6 months ago
As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it, right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness. Just because we don't experience those degrees, and animals can't convey what they feel through language, we assume it is "emergent", or "suddenly there". I think we are too caught up in believing that consciousness must be something really special or some magic discontinuity of spacetime.

I don't believe it is. Somewhere inside our brain there is some perception of self related to the outside world. So we can project self into the future using information from the now and make better choices and survive better ("Information is that which allows you [who is in possession of that information] to make predictions with accuracy better than chance"- Chris Adami). Why do we need all these difficult words?

I bet animals also have some image of self inside there somewhere, and make decisions based on simulated scenarios. Perhaps to a lesser degree, perhaps because of a lack of language they experience it in a different way? Not being able to label any of the steps in the process... Who knows?

Perhaps when we get to simulate a whole brain we can get some idea. But then there is the ethics. We do attribute great value to organisms that have this image of self.

garden_hermit · 6 months ago
tbf, many materialists dislike the "degrees of consciousness" idea because a theory that posits "consciousness is on a spectrum" is one that starts to resemble panpsychism, which they consider magical woo.
garden_hermit commented on Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone   discuss.systems/@ricci/11... · Posted by u/luu
Mathnerd314 · 6 months ago
Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains. For example, lots of stories in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629714. Now certainly the Trump administration could have been more careful, but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
garden_hermit · 6 months ago
Thats fine for a sofrware startup because it fundamentally doesn't matter. Who cares if your silly website fails after you experiment, no one gets seriously hurt.

Shutting off the government means that things can be irreparably damaged. Losing a generation of scientists because of random cullings at the NSF will have effects for decades.

In the worst case, "moving fast and breaking things" with the government will kill people. For example, many patients were kicked off clinical trials during the NIH funding freeze. Abroad, the end of PEPFAR could kill untold numbers of people.

garden_hermit commented on Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts   thedp.com/article/2025/02... · Posted by u/strangeloops85
rayiner · 6 months ago
Well that makes it sound worse than I thought. Why should it be any higher than the pro rata allocation of the project’s actual use of university facilities (lab space, equipment, etc)?

Even in the defense industry, a cost-plus contract with a 10% margin is a lot. And it’s a federal crime to include costs in the overhead amount that aren’t traceable to the actual project.

garden_hermit · 6 months ago
The indirect is a negotiated flat rate that covers costs that would be too numerous or difficult to account for in the direct costs. Like how would you as a researcher budget a fractionalized portion of access to a supercomputer cluster in each and every grant you need? You would need to hire new accountants just to handle this! The indirect rate is basically covering the whole infrastructure of research at a university. In theory all could be put into direct costs but…again…we get to tremendously difficult accounting
garden_hermit commented on Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts   thedp.com/article/2025/02... · Posted by u/strangeloops85
SJC_Hacker · 6 months ago
But they can use the interest.

A $20 billion endowment at a 5% ROI is $1 billion per year

garden_hermit · 6 months ago
The interest is already what they are using. That is what all these scholarships and endowed chairs and so on are paid with.
garden_hermit commented on DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes   nytimes.com/2025/02/21/up... · Posted by u/belter
EasyMark · 6 months ago
his cuts are max 0.1% of government outlays, yet the MAGAs are acting like it's slash and burn and worshipping at the idol of their cult of personality(ies?) . Anyway it's so obvious to anyway who steps back and turns off the political blinders. Just look at the sheer number of lies coming from Musk and Trump about the "savings" ,about millions of people over 100 getting social security checks, that the few million of probably waste of money USAID was spending is evidence to cut without any other proof the entire USAID organization, even though it's a $50 billion dollar outlay. It's so effing sad that people fall for this, and that our education system is such a failure on probably the most necessary modern skill other than literacy--critical thinking.
garden_hermit · 6 months ago
The insane thing of all this is that the 1% being cut is almost entirely in investments: money for research that drives economic growth, money for the USAID that provides the US influence around the world, cuts to CDC staff that could help mitigate expensive pandemics…the list goes on.

So not only is the DOGE affair not reducing the debt, it is setting the country up for less wealth and more expenses in the future.

u/garden_hermit

KarmaCake day290August 24, 2020View Original