ricecake

@ricecake@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like that’s very similar to what I said, including the bit about being routine in most other regards.

  People who spend a lot of time thinking are prone to having thoughts, and sometimes those thoughts are less common.
  The more abstract the topic you’re working with, the more accustomed you’ll be to hearing things that don’t make sense at first.

  Might just be me, but in general the more educated people I’ve met have been more likely to qualify as odd ducks, and the mathy folks tend towards the upper edge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I had hoped I was making it very clear that it’s not a case that all mathematicians are weirdos or even difficult to talk to, because they’re not.
  Thinking about complicated things all the time results in complicated conclusions, so you’ll end up talking to people with very detailed thoughts if you’re talking about work. Probably perfectly normal thoughts on cooking beyond a bias towards using their analytical ability where others might not.
  My point was not that they’re all weird, but that the bar is higher because you deal with more people who have thought about something much more than you have.

  My point with the paper wasn’t that it’s weird to have fun, or that the title was bad. It’s that it was complicated and an example of the field requiring you to deal with profoundly unfamiliar ideas and terminology, potentially quite regularly. To some people “that sounded like gibberish” is a sign you dismiss it. In this case, it means you need to do more research to catch up to the terminology.

  The two that I was thinking of were erdos and diffie. I’ll concede to featuring some of the more notable characters because their stories are more fun.

  The idea being described was a paraphrase of platonic realism and structuralism taken to an extreme to match simulation theory. If the universe is a simulation it means there is, “somewhere”, an equation or algorithm describing our physical reality. Needing that equation to be evaluated to give rise to our universe is an odd perspective since the existence of the equation would be sufficient. An equation describing the motion of a point in a circle doesn’t need to be evaluated to describe that, nor does it need to be written down.

  It’s a notion that I thought fit well with my point of “agree or disagree, it’s not delusional, and it’s not obvious”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  While it’s not true that intelligence is correlated with mental problems, advanced mathematics tends to attract or create odd ducks.

  There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math. One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
  People didn’t notice John Nash devolved into a deep schizophrenic break for a long time because it’s not weird for advanced mathematicians to be talking about very complex unintelligible ideas. Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.

  Another was the uni-bomber.

  There’s plenty of perfectly well balanced mathematicians. You just can’t help but get some weird ideas when your life’s work is to think outside the box about very complicated things all the time.

  If you go deep into math work, you’ll meet people who think the universe is a simulation. You’ll meet others who think that’s silly, because the universe is clearly actually an abstract embodiment of the platonic ideal of mathematics. 7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
  You’ll just nod and concede the appeal because it’s not the first time someone has shared that idea with you.

  So when the mathematicians start saying the ideas are getting odd, you know it’s not just “I don’t understand therefore it’s weird”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2027 gonna be like...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The airplane thing is a bit off. The requirements of a bomber haven’t changed in more than 50 years.
  It’s not like the US doesn’t have the ability to use drones.
  They’re different tools for different jobs. Drones are currently most useful for asymmetrical fighting. If you’re trying to blow up a piece of infrastructure a bomber is more efficient if you have the ability to field one.

  It’s criticizing using a jackhammer when electric box cutters exist. There are places you wouldn’t use either if given the choice.

  They’re plenty of places in the US working on m battery technology as well. Car companies keep working to make existing product lines more efficient, in no small part because the people in charge of the government just decided to make it harder for people to use different vehicles and get off gasoline.
  Battery research isn’t just car companies.

  A cultural sense of momentum around a state of affairs that’s lasted several generations is one thing, but it’s not like we’re all running around in the 1800s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2027 gonna be like...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We don’t actually have much of a model for that type of disaster.
  The biggest issue are civic services, and employment.

  The area damaged by Katrina was roughly the size of the UK. This wasn’t all total detestation, but it was the area declared a disaster zone.
  Now imagine your daily commute was from central London to Brighton if traveling by car, or Manchester if by train, with an average of the drive time to cockfosters or Greenwich. (I’m fully aware no one actually lives in central London , and traffic would be a big issue. I’m only going by the map software since I don’t have a sense for drive times in the UK) Now put about ~50% of the m25 loop underwater for two weeks. Deepest about 6 meters.
  All the water infrastructure is gone, and there is no power or sewer, and no food. The nearest unaffected location is belfast, and most people are evacuating to Dublin or Glasgow.
  It’s been a month and you have not been paid. You have been living off of charity, FEMA rations, and canned water from Budweiser (actually a really good charitable act they do: they have trucks and the ability to put enough liquid in cans and get them to a disaster area by the kiloton).
  Greenwich is basically gone. Cockfosters still has two feet of water. Your employer is dead and the business will never reopen. They think they got most of the bodies out of the Thames but the authorities are still concerned about a cholera outbreak.
  The government has phased out the emergency food and is now giving you vouchers you can use to buy food at stores. This will last another two months.
  You have no healthcare. The military medic who gave you a once over and vaccine booster for tetanus and hepatitis is the first doctor appointment you’ve had in two years.
  Your car is gone, and so is your home and everything you’re not carrying. Your insurance company is denying they owe you anything because your home was damaged by water before it was blown away. You might get resolution in ten years.

  So how do you get food? Water? How do you get your trailer in to live in? How do you make money to pay your mortgage, taxes or for medical care and the aforementioned food?
  You might not even be able to sell the land given that no one wants it. You will likely declare bankruptcy and give it to the bank.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Test your might⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Some plastics will melt even on the top rack. Some older plastics will actively breakdown and release junk in the dishwasher.

  Some metal corrodes quickly with hot water, soap, and hot air. It also offends your ancestral spirits.

  On the plus side, it’s pretty straightforward that it can either be cleaned in the dishwasher or in the oven.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rich people don't understand us at all.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be clear, I was most echoing and agreeing with you, and I just had a sudden mental image of the world’s least subtle gal-pal-lesbian that I wanted to put out there.

  And yeah, my “recent” is a pretty long horizon. It was in roughly the 1700s that we started to see people living less in arrangements that we would be willing to call “roommates” in the west. Largely driven by factors relating to industrialization making it so people who lived in proximity were less likely to work in proximity, and making it more feasible to sustain and manage redundant living situations. It was still common though, since the financial perks hit unevenly. Increasing urbanization pushed towards denser living, while doing more to move families into private housing. Hence the apartment with 40 steelworkers in bunk beds image, and the apartment next door with a pair of siblings, their spouses and children and maybe a grandparent.
  This trend continues across a lot of cultures, although the specific arrangements vary. Industrialization being the turning point. Although the soviets had a more unique twist as a result of picking up entire rural communities and dropping them in low cost buildings. You get a lot of the communal living type arrangements we saw through history but stuck in an oddly modern setting, with maybe two unrelated families, a handful of singles and a few couples all sharing an apartment with one kitchen, a complicated bathroom and a bedroom breakdown roughly what we’d expect now.

  One way or another, people throughout history have tended to want to live near family, which included friends, liked having a roof, and usually didn’t bother building more cooking tools than they needed. The specific forms have changed, but the social nature of humans is pretty consistent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rich people don't understand us at all.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Like, yeah. Your great aunt Abigail who was always so bad with money that she and her best friend lived together in a one bedroom apartment for 45 years despite always taking vacations to Vermont and the third largest Greek island to celebrate their favorite poet was almost certainly gay. Maybe. There might be a clue.

  But actual literal platonic roommates have existed for a long time. Like, it’s relatively recent that people started to practice living exclusively with romantic partners and family.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Japanese⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe what they’re saying is you can’t use work assignment to pressure someone to quit as a way around labor protections.

  As with a lot of legal stuff, the intent matters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon visits IHOP⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cringeworthy isn’t Internet slang. It’s been around for decades. It’s like saying “humongous” is Internet slang.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon visits IHOP⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Right? Having the employee repeat it back in their internal words is fine and tells the customer they’ve been heard correctly, but you don’t need to make then customer jump through hoops.

  Coffee shop I go to used to do the Italian thing. Then they switched to small/medium/large. They finally settled on just listing the volume on the menu.
  The entire time you could just say any of them and they knew what you meant.
  If they have no idea what you meant they can ask for clarification. They even have the cups right next to the register they can hold up and confirm.

  Turns out not pissing people off is often as easy as “asking for clarification if needed”. Also offering free espresso occasionally helps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They call me the problem solver⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A cup of drip coffee is 150-200 on average. Multiply based on a pessimistic interpretation, then reduce.

  You could also measure UV light absorbtion in the 260-280 nm band and compare to a calibration chart. That seems a lot more excessive than just estimating and working to reduce, as opposed to targeting a specific number.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California just passed a law forcing mandatory DRM in 3D printers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Did you forget we were talking about 3d printers?

  You compared the people making fun of the drm mandate to people making fun of car registration because you can build a kit car, implying that building a 3d printer was a nearly insurmountable hurdle.

  Being able to trivially bypass the drm is exactly why it’s laughable.

  Cars, bikes, or your dislike have nothing to do with the DRM mandate being toothless and stupid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California just passed a law forcing mandatory DRM in 3D printers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay? What does that have to do with the drm mandate being easy to get around?
  Is your point that it’s okay to put unenforceable, easily bypassed restrictions on stuff if you think they’re bad?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California just passed a law forcing mandatory DRM in 3D printers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure honestly sure what your point is, because you went a bit too far with the analogy.

  Itty bitty ones, sure. And they take weeks to produce a working vehicle, of substandard quality.

  This was about regulating 3d printers, not guns. A diy printer, a new drm printer and an old not-drm printer produce the same quality output.

  A diy 3d printer is just as durable as a purchased one.

  If your goal is to have an unregistered car, or in this case a drm free printer, the law seems silly when you can get one for cheaper than the “proper” one and have it out together in an afternoon if you have highschool level mechanical aptitude.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California just passed a law forcing mandatory DRM in 3D printers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Making a full on machine gun is literally one of the original cottage industries. They’re hard to design but the actual fabrication can be so dumbed down that you can make it out of non un-common household tools with minimal skill.

  Some of the tricky bits are making the weapon fire slower, so it doesn’t jam or get so hot rounds fire before they’re actually in the chamber. Or just keeps firing because releasing the trigger wasn’t enough to keep the recoil from keeping it going.
  If your goal is to give everyone in the UK too young, old or woman to draft a machine gun to make the Germans regret invading, then a horde of cockney 8 year olds with uncontrolled machine guns and poor trigger discipline is certainly a choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California just passed a law forcing mandatory DRM in 3D printers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It more like mocking car registration because every neighborhood has a few people who can build you a car from scratch in a day, the city already has several thousand car factories that don’t require registration, there’s no mechanism to enforce registration, and the cost of building a new car is a few hundred dollars. The motivation for requiring registration is also to stop people from driving full speed into fast food restaurants is custom built murder buggys. Yeah, you don’t want people to do that but it’s not like it really happens all that often.

  Building a 3d printer from a kit is different from building one from scratch. It’s basically screwing parts together and plugging colored wires into matching slots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨this is so dark, Black Mirror couldn’t have imagined it⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re automating workflows, you don’t get to take your current employers code with you when you leave.
  Are you supposed to just be writing random automations for things that might exist somewhere? Why would anyone think that’s impressive?

  Either you’re showing me something useless you did for no reason, or you’re asking if I want to see some stolen IP. Neither of these is giving me a particularly good impression.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They really hate artists⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And the most annoying part is, even Nvidia isn’t even saying it’ll do that.
  All of the AI based character animation stuff has been about getting characters to move realistically in dynamic cases that your artists couldn’t and weren’t even trying to account for.

  People have been using machine learning for this for a long time. It’s a great advancement, but the ability to make a character crab walk over a bridge doesn’t help you know what they should be doing, what it looks like, that it’s conveying things correctly, or the actual hard parts of character animation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Painful to recover from⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You brought up being successful in a broken system being bad. I pointed out how one can do good in a system that’s broken, acknowledge that which they can’t fix, and not get hung up on it and find happiness. You seemed to take that as an ethical issue, which is why I brought up ethics.
  I can’t think of an ethical system that requires one to be unhappy while doing good where they can simply because there still exists suffering.

  doing good in terms of being generally happy (your interpretation) while seeing the world suffer is the opposite of being empathic

  Are you mistaking the word “good” for “well”? Are you thinking I’m saying it’s okay to smile at misery? Because what you said was my interpretation doesn’t even parse right.

  If someone has done everything they can to help those it’s in their power to help, and they’ve done stuff to make a living like “teach astronomy”, I don’t know how you can say it’s worrisome that this person plays with their children at a park, or enjoys a birthday party. I’m not talking specific feelings of happiness at specific moments when contemplating specific news items or aspects of reality, I’m talking general life satisfaction.

  The EU drowning thousands of refugees isn’t cause for me to have clinical depression. I’m sad when I think about it, but it’s beyond my control entirely.

  You’ve still never given any actual examples of not problematic behavior by your metrics, or clarified if you’ve ever felt happiness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Painful to recover from⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gotcha. So when was the last time you were happy? I take it you simply do not do things you enjoy?

  And when did I say anything even remotely like not feeling empathy for suffering, or that caring for people disappears after doing a good deed? Empathy isn’t an ethical system.

  I’m actually curious what behavior you think would be non-problematic, and if any human actually does that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Painful to recover from⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gotcha, so doing good where you can makes you evil unless you’re mired in torment over things beyond your control? By that metric everyone in the world is evil.

  I can’t fathom an ethical system that requires you to be unhappy about things beyond your control once you’ve done the good that you can.

  What constitutes “good character” to you? What constitutes “success”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Painful to recover from⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re not wrong, the guy did have a lot of privilege in his life. He’s well educated, has a demeanor people trust and enough money to have a backyard garden in a house in a not ideal part of town. He opted to use that privilege to get his neighbors to join their backyards together to have a community garden, and then used a city/state program to use their pooled money to buy an empty lot and an unoccupied house to finish the block. Instead of selling the house for profit, they opted to give it to someone in need.

  I’m not sure what full story you’re looking for. Dudes a community college astronomy professor who spent some time maintaining billing software.

  My point isn’t "oh my God, everyone in the US is a saint!” it’s that the notion that “because the US has fundamental structural problems, anyone who isn’t a miserable failure is inherently evil” is just profoundly misguided.
  Either your definition of success is setup such that it says more about you than other people, or you just fundamentally haven’t encountered many people.
  What’s your definition of “success”? How many Americans do you think are engaged in “evil bullshit”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Painful to recover from⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can take away the qualifiers. :) and it’s not instinctual, just practiced.
  The notion that athletics doesn’t require intelligence draws away from the understanding of exactly how much practice it takes to hone the skills to that level.

  And, for a fun reference, the typical NFL player has significantly more traditional education than the average person.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Saw this at the store this morning, took a double take⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fruit juice naturally has around 0.5% alcohol. It’s just a side effect of wet sugar.

  There’s no legal federal limit, it’s all state law. Some states go by that 0.5%. others go by a definition that includes “things sold as beer” essentially.
  "You are holding a container. It is labeled beer. Do not give it to anyone under 21.”

  Other times stores just assume and card everyone because it’s waaay easier than nuance and you’re not legally required to sell non-alcoholic beverages to minors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Saw this at the store this morning, took a double take⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  … That’s everything at home depot. I don’t know that they have a product that isn’t able to be weaponized, and not just in the most literal sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Saw this at the store this morning, took a double take⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s common and they were already in place when prohibition ended.

  So after a good chunk of time with all the breweries becoming unavailable, they were fast to start selling and it just became a common brand.

  Having the three key elements to an alcohol consumed for social purposes rather than taste also helped: cheap, available and cheap.

  We’ve got others around, but they’re generally not everywhere.

  I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone say they like the taste though. I think the closest I’ve heard is someone saying they like how it’s cold.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Saw this at the store this morning, took a double take⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The real reason is you don’t. Not in every state. Some defined it by a strict measurable standard. Others defined it to close off what’s depicted in this image. Others defined it to describe what was banned as oppressed to what you measure, so that if you’re selling beer you can’t sell it to kids. No checking labels, no “well, it’s my home brew so I don’t know”. Is it beer? You can’t sell it to kids.

  The last one is almost funny because you can almost feel the confusion about why the concept of non-alcoholic beer even exists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Saw this at the store this morning, took a double take⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Technically the drinking age isn’t a national law at all. Setting the state law to alignment is a precondition for national highway funding. A state can set the age to whatever they want, but the federal government wouldn’t give money for road maintenance.

  As such, different states define a prohibited beverage in different ways. Some set the limit based on a set alcohol limit. Others based on intent or similarity, essentially so that they can prevent advertising alcohol^free^ beverages to kids and getting them in the habit at an impressionable age.

  Most common is the abv limit based on what’s typically found naturally in juices and such, with limited exceptions for religious ceremonies, parental supervision, or accidental ingestion and such. (Technically speaking, if you call 911 because your 3 year old stole a canned alcoholic beverage off the counter and drank a bunch before you noticed and you’re scared, they would be required to also give you and the child legal penalties without that clause).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Painful to recover from⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gotcha. So would you rank yourself as mostly unhappy, destitute and unwell?

  Can you think of anyone in our society who’s doing alright within the confines of a broken system, or do you think that everyone’s existence is inseperable from the context of that existence, even if the means of changing it or it’s impact are outside of their reach? Somewhere in the middle?

  I met a guy who helps manage a homeless shelter and food bank. Stand-up guy. Makes ends meet, is doing what he can where he can. Generally happy guy with a family. Pretty twisted right? Or my former coworker who let his gardening hobby get out of hand and ended up running a community garden that retrofitted two houses to donate to families in need.

  People exist in their circumstances, but they’re not defined by them. How you react to those circumstances speaks to your character, not that you exist in them.