admiralteal

You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.

I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He’s a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.

Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires – pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.

Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.

Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that’s a highly competitive title.

They also don’t offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they’re intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.

If you’ve ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service… you’d probably be the first.

The user above is just one of those guys who looks at anything the dems do and thinks, look at this bitch eating crackers.

Nothing good can ever be celebrated or praised. It has to always be bad.

I’ll never argue with someone who wants that true, rural/countryside/homestead life. The appeal is there for me too, even if my own calculus says the cons wildly outweigh the pros.

I’m pretty skeptical you’re going to find it 5 miles from a healthy town, though.

Big cities let people find their community because therefore a lot of different ones to try.

You should read the horror stories from so many of those NYC co-ops. Some would make even the most jackbooted HOA presidents blush.

I don’t really think this is unique to cities of some specific size. I definitely agree that it’s going to be harder to find a perfect fit in a smaller town. But it’s also harder to meet people at all in an anonymous metropolis where you have to work 75 hours a week just to make rent.

If you take away anything from what I have written, it’s that I think this dichotomy is bad. We need a compromise. The lowrise old-world city is what worked for our species for at least 5 millenia – it’s only in the past couple of decades we decided to rethink it and force a schism between the fake rural aesthetic of the suburbs and the productive, efficient downtown – and in so doing we destroyed both city life (by making it ungodly expensive thanks to the immense financial drain the suburbs and lack of continuing infill development represent) and the peaceful countryside life (by putting to death small towns in favor of the interstate highway big box store commercial strip). The only lifestyle that has weathered and still works pretty well in this day and age is the homesteader life, and to say that way of living is not for everyone is definitely an understatement.

Also known as a SASSS

This entire question is completely distorted by the poor-qualtiy postwar urbanism that is rampant everywhere.

The reality is, there shouldn’t be much difference. Lowrise cities – 2-4 story buildings/townhomes, small apartments, walkable neighborhoods/mass transit, corner groceries, all that stuff that people think can ONLY exist in big cities should be the norm for nearly all towns.

I don’t think many people would describe a place like, say, Bordeaux as a “big city”. 250kish people in 50 square kilometers is hardly Paris. It’s a small city, or maybe a big town. And it has everything you can want from a city and more. Shows, museums, beautiful multimodal neighborhoods, a robust tram system, restaurants and cafes and bars. All this kind of stuff.

The problem is we’ve all been mentally taught you can either live in island, R1A zoned suburbs which require driving to do ANYTHING or else you need to live in a huge metropolis like NYC. Or else we’ve been trained to think of a “city” like the bullshit they have in Texas, where it combines all the worst features of those island suburbs/car dependence with all the worst parts of city (crazy prices, noise, exposure to nearby-feeling crime, etc).

While a lot of the US big cities are trying to sort out the knots they’ve tied themselves in, your best bet to find beautiful, livable urban-ism is in those much smaller <500k cities that don’t even show up on the typical lists of cities. Especially if they are historic, since the more historic a place is the less likely it got bulldozed in the 60s to make room for more highways (destroying local neighborhoods in the process) Some kind of a big university also tends to be a plus, though it’s a mixed bag. Check for places that do not have an interstate carving through the middle of the city.

We can only get the amenities of modern urbanism in the biggest metropolises these days because of how badly the “suburban experiment” has distorted and destroyed our community life. And there can only be so many metropolises, so they’ve naturally turned absurdly expensive. People can’t afford to live in them because of how much people want to live in them. So they settle for suburbia, since financial poverty feels way worse than poverty of community.

They are very useful for outlining and similar “where do I start” writing projects. They help break the dam and just get some damn words on the screen, at which point it’s often easy to continue and flesh things out to a complete thought.

Gotta account for a null hypothesis.

The null would be that it is a fair die (average roll 10.5). Your test is whether the true result is significantly less than 10.5 based on a sample of 100 with a mu of 8.8. Let’s call it an alpha of 0.05

So we have to run a left tail one-sample t-test.

Unfortunately, this data set doesn’t tell me the standard deviation – but that could be determined in future trials. For now, we’ll have to just make an assumption that the D20 is fair. For a fair D20, the standard deviation should be be sqrt( ([20-1+1]^2 -1)/12) or roughly sqrt(33.25)

We can run that t-test in a simply python script:

import numpy as np
from scipy import stats as st

h0 = 10.5

sample = np.random.normal(loc=8.88, scale=(np.sqrt(33.25)), size=100)

t_stat, p_val = st.ttest_1samp(sample, h0)

print(f"T-statistic: {t_stat:.4f}")
print(f"P-value: {p_val:.4f}")

Of course, I had to randomize this a bit since I don’t have access to the full data from the true sample. That would make for a better bit of analysis. But at least assuming I didn’t make a serious dumb here, 100 rolls averaging 8.88 would seem to suggest that the you can reject your null hypothesis of this being a fair die at a typical alpha of 0.05.

Then again, the way I wrote this script is GUARANTEED to be an unfavorable result since the way I randomized it REQUIRES the average end up 8.88, which is, of course, less than 10.5. Your real world testing would not have this constraint.

Cool, that’s nice. I’m on a different instance than you. It took hours for your comment to even federate, so the implication I’m trying to gotcha you through a self-correction made within 3 minutes of my original post and over 10 minutes before yours is totally bad faith and you know it.

Let’s just be clear about what happened here though. I posted something correct about the entire idea of fat-phobia. That is, the way you avoid being fat-phobic is by just not feeling a need to whip out a soap box and tell fat people it’s their fault and they’ve behaved badly to become that way there while knowing nothing about them.

And what did you do? You replied to me, immediately whipping out your soapbox to say that fat people are not “actual” vulnerable groups because anyone who’s body doesn’t doesn’t match your subjective standards can “do something about being fat”.

Then started this absolutely moronic verbal diarrhea about how being respectful of other people is somehow a zero sum game where if you treat one population with basic respect, it somehow waters down another group’s need to be treated with dignity? Idiotic. Just idiotic. That’s the “logic” used by TERFs.

Next time, just shut the fuck up. Seriously, all you had to say was nothing. This is a personal characteristic about someone and you just don’t have expertise in it. You don’t know what effort they have or haven’t made. You don’t know what other medical issues may be linked or causal. You don’t know whether it’s negatively impacting their health, and even if it were, it’s still none of your fucking business. All you know is what you can see. Don’t worry, the fat people already know you don’t like looking at them, so this kind of signaling is unnecessary. Instead, leave them alone and don’t preach about their lives of sin.

You want to talk about addressing things with “external stimuli”? Let’s talk about the entire skin-bleaching cosmetics industry in SE Asia. The vast apparatus of plastic surgery in places like South Korea designed to change Asian-presenting eyelids to more culturally preferred western features. And don’t even get me started about hair care products targeted at Black Americans. The long histories every country and population has pursuing goals to “pass”. Telling people they must change to match the subjective standards of idiots for their own good, irrespective of what harm might be done to them along the way.

But what, all that kind of shit is bad and bigoted, but telling an otherwise-healthy but fat person they should get medical interventions because they look fat is fine? Leave people the fuck alone, dude. If there’s medical problems going on, that’s between them and their medical provider if they so chose.

Here would be an almost textbook example of what I mean when I say shaming people for not putting in the effort, for any onlookers that are curious.

Of course, the actual clinical data shows that it is nearly impossible to make permanent lifestyle changes that reduce weight for normal people – all diets studies have almost hilariously high dropout/failure rates – and that nearly all people who are not fat are not putting in any special effort to not be fat. But this guy’s an expert.

The word “fat” is not a slur any more than the word “black” is. Sure, someone can use it with an intent to hurt, and if the only thing you know about a person is this single adjective you probably shouldn’t be talking about them, but the word is just a description. And just like for “black”, all the euphemisms offer nothing helpful and are largely spread by people who have not lived and understood the experience.

If you’re worried about being fat-phobic the thing to be worried about is treating fat people like shit based on their physical appearance. Up to and including shaming them for “not putting in the effort” or lecturing them about how unhealthy you think they are based on the single point of evidence of their apparent weight.

And I have to say, I’d be WAY more fucking mad at someone calling me “rotund” then fat. Holy shit you have missed the mark on this.

Man, I keep getting this incredibly Mandela-effect like feeling that this entire Vegas tunnel project was something I made up.

Glad to see news that it wasn’t. The idea is just so colossally and obviously stupid compared to actual transit investment that it really FEELS like something a lefty type would’ve made up as a hypothetical to illuminate the kind of idiotic shit happens in American urban planning.

The most noxious ones are the ads for the platform you are served by the platform when using the platform.

Paramount+ plays almost 90s of ads, sometimes ads for the exact show you are about to watch, any time you hit go. That’s just heinous.

Still better than the Peacock app though, for which the sound randomly cuts out for a few seconds every minute or two on a device as uncommon and odd as… a Chromecast.

Highly recommend Volts to everyone interested.

David Roberts is EXTREMELY practical, politically. He’s very no-nonsense, but gives clear and simple reasons for why he categorizes stuff as nonsense when he does. He’s not some techno-wizard optimist, but he’s also clear about how much tech we DO have and how much is achievable on realistic timelines if we just commit. He’s also clear about what the obstacles are, and even sometimes gives useful calls to action.

His most recent episode on nuclear is an almost perfect example of this. A lot of people are VERY enthusiastic about nuclear. He had Jigar Shah from the DOE on to talk about the field extensively – the upsides and downsides, what technologies work and make sense, what technologies are just mis-advertised, what technologies are total vaporware, why it’s so hard to build nuclear in the US (hint: it’s not the anti-nuke environmental lobby), and all that. Fabulous interview.

I definitely trend towards doomerism on all this stuff, but it’s good to be reminder the tech really is there decarbonize a LOT and VERY FAST, and probably even achieve planetary net zero or even net negative within my lifetime. Just have to convince people the juice is worth the squeeze – which it undeniably is when the entire ecosystem is at stake.

RT was founded in 2005.

By 2008 they were parroting clearly-bullshit Russian talking points about Georgia in the 2008 war.

World Tomorrow aired in 2012.

You. Are. Full. Of. It.

Sounds to me like there is a total glut of software engineers.

Which makes it really difficult to fathom why they are paid so goddamn much.

You’re full of it. From the time they were founded, they operated in the same building as RIA Novosti. RT didn’t exist until AFTER the various independent journalists and their associations were ALREADY being rounded up and cast out of Russian society.

They are now and have always been state-controlled. Stop apologizing for dictatorships.

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