Smoking causes cancer.
Readit Newspictureofabear commented on What if there was no spacetime? sorhed.substack.com/p/wha... · Posted by u/atemerev
Can this model of physics predict physical events? Show me an example.
pictureofabear commented on Possibly a Serious Possibility kucharski.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/samclemens
Interesting. Two things that jumped out to me were 1) why do the regions of the standardization line not overlap or at least meet? And 2) What's up with the small but clear minority of people who took all the 'unlikely' phrasings to mean somewhere in the realm of 90 to 100%? My guess would be they're misreading the question and that is their estimate of unlikelihood?
Because many people cannot or will not accept ambiguity. Charitably, I suppose this comes from a desire to logically deduce risk by multiply the severity of the consequences by the chance that something will happen. Uncharitably, it gives decisionmakers a scapegoat should they need one.
pictureofabear commented on We See Colors Differently davidmathlogic.com/colorb... · Posted by u/ibobev
When I was a kid I noticed that if I laid on my side for a bit, the colors in one eye would be significantly red shifted.
I also noticed that closing your eyes for a while on a perfectly clear day, you could notice the blue tint on everything outside.
You also lose color vision when oxygen deprived (hypoxia). As oxygen returns, it returns beginning in the center of your fovia and expands outward like a jagged, slightly asymmetric ripple, color returning with it.
pictureofabear commented on Why is printer ink so expensive? digitalrightsbytes.org/to... · Posted by u/throw7
Wait you are missing an instrumental point.
The “razor and blades” pricing is (as the market demonstrates) a dominant strategy. The other pricing strategy (cost-plus) is preferable for the customers printing a lot, not for customers who print little. Then add some customer myopia: I need a cheap printer, where cheap is initial out of pocket, not total cost of ownership. And there you have it: all suppliers ‘must’ follow the dominant pricing strategy because the myopic customer demands it. The twice as expensive printer up front just won’t get store space.
Brother might be (or, was?) somewhat of an outlier for the informed consumer. But who buys a Brother right? HP and Canon dominate the market.
General point is that individual suppliers in a multi supplier market have to take the dominant pricing strategy as a given, or differentiate along other axis.
"who buys a brother" eyes shift left
A really good book on this topic is Byron Tau’s Means of Control. His contention is that this surveillance data has made NSA warrantless wiretaps old news. Cops don’t need to do the spying themselves, they can simply buy the info.
I am of the opinion that at this point, Americans only believe we are less surveilled than people elsewhere. It’s not visible so people forget about it. Yet it is so deeply embedded into the government that it will never be removed.
Not just police... the NSA as well.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/tech/the-nsa-buys-americans-i...
This appears to be the press release the article is based around: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2708
Which appears to have absolutely nothing to do with crypto mines, and everything to do with controlling what foreign people own real-estate near military installations. The only link to crypto currency is the same rule was once used to remove a Chinese company that bought land close to an air force base, and happened to be using that land (at least ostensibly) for crypto mining.
This appears to be the executive order that removed that Chinese company: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
To the extent that the order relates to crypto currency, it appears to be that the company was bringing in non-standard electronic equipment built in China (unsurprising for a crypto mining company), and the US wasn't confident in their abilities to set up a program to monitor it and ensure that the equipment only did what it said and wasn't actually (also) surveillance equipment.
Strange paragraphs like
> Cryptocurrency is a computer intensive process, running trillions of formulas every second, and generally requiring the use of supercomputers. Having one next to a military base that's owned by an adversary is problematic.
appear to be entirely an invention of this article. This is, of course, not the issue with having farms of adversary controlled electronics next to an air force base.
That's right... CFIUS has long been monitoring and regulating foreign countries purchasing land in the United States. This article is attempting to turn the status quo into news.
pictureofabear commented on Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022) sohl-dickstein.github.io/... · Posted by u/feyman_r
I would claim in a completely informal way that the optimal degree of utilization is ln(2)=0.693, around 70%.
This stems from the optimal load of self-balancing trees.
A little bit of slack is always useful to deal with the unforeseen.
And even a lot of slack is useful (though not always as it is costly) as it enables to do things that a dedicated resource cannot do.
On the other hand, no slack at all (so running at above 70%) makes a system inflexible and unresilient.
I would argue for this in any circumstance, be it military, be it public transit, be it funding, be it allocation of resources for a particular task.
Where e^-X and 1-e^-X intersect is 0.69. Mumbo? perhaps. Jumbo? perhaps not.
The author seems to be confused about inductive and deductive reasoning. He writes, "To that end, this hypothesis represents the last idea considered, only after all other possibilities have been falsified (see Image 1)." This to me sounds more like abductive reasoning.
Either way, this seems like a great opportunity to hijack this post by giving an excerpt from Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig.
"Two kinds of logic are used, inductive and deductive. Inductive inferences start with observations of the machine and arrive at general conclusions. For example, if the cycle goes over a bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over a long smooth stretch of road and there is no misfiring, and then goes over a fourth bump and the engine misfires again, one can logically conclude that the misfiring is caused by the bumps. That is induction: reasoning from particular experiences to general truths.
Deductive inferences do the reverse. They start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation. For example, if, from reading the hierarchy of facts about the machine, the mechanic knows the horn of the cycle is powered exclusively by electricity from the battery, then he can logically infer that if the battery is dead the horn will not work. That is deduction.
Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences that weave back and forth between the observed machine and the mental hierarchy of the machine found in the manuals. The correct program for this inter-weaving is formalized as scientific method."
A fundamental misunderstanding of the West is that these countries will, with time, align philosophically against the West's enemies. They are concerned with preservation of their regimes and their ways of life. They recognize that they have no foundational shared story with the West (religious or otherwise), and that without such shared origins and culture, Western people will not fight to save Arabs when resources get tight. So what do they do? Hedge their alliances so that they always have someone to turn to.