ArbitraryValue
@ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Why do we see Oil as always being here for humans? Isn't drilling like taking water out of a swimming pool? Sooner or later your going to run out of water. 1 week ago:
There’s a finite amount of it, but we won’t ever use it all up. Oil deposits differ in how easy (and therefore cheap) they are to extract. As the easy deposits run out, we switch to more difficult deposits, the price goes up, and eventually the price will be higher than it is for other energy sources with plenty of hard-to-extract oil still left in the ground.
- Comment on It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post) 1 week ago:
Not safe in what sense?
- Comment on Let it sink in. 3 weeks ago:
Instead of assigning each finger the same value of 1, assign them values of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16. Then there’s some combination of fingers that can represent any value from
0to1+2+4+8+16=31. It’s like using digits to count instead of tally marks, except that instead of having ten digits you only have two. - Comment on Let it sink in. 3 weeks ago:
FYI a normal human can count to 31 on one hand using binary.
- Comment on Probably accurate 4 weeks ago:
Imagine if in another 250 years, the USA still has a system of government substantially similar to its present day form, but with a population of tens of billions spread across several planet Earths in alternate dimensions. Most people are wealthy enough to own a personal spaceship. Medicine has advanced to the point where doctors can bring you back from the dead as long as your brain is more or less in one piece. But now everyone judges the people of the 21st century for eating meat - it’s considered pretty much the worst thing that anyone can do. Maybe you’ll be convinced that you were wrong to eat meat, or maybe you won’t. Even if you’re convinced that you were wrong, maybe you’ll think that the people of the future should have left wild animals alone rather than intervening to eliminate predation. But overall you would probably think the future was going rather better than you expected…
- Comment on Freedom isn't free 4 weeks ago:
My dog was a true patriot who would go to fireworks shows with me.
- Comment on I know which one I'm picking! 4 weeks ago:
Is the implication that this is a French cat girl?
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Feud With Delaware May Transform Corporate America 5 weeks ago:
I’m surprised that other states are only challenging Delaware’s dominance now.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
You can be good friends with someone without having the sort of connection that makes discussing some specific issue possible. That doesn’t mean the connection isn’t genuine, even if the scope of it is not as broad as you wish it was. Regarding venting in particular: in my experience, it’s fairly common that people don’t want to listen to heavy stuff that they can’t help you fix. I often have things that makes me sad which I want to put into words even though they can’t be fixed, and I find that for that sort of thing AI can actually be a good “listener” of a sort.
- Comment on I'm just a big toasty cinnamon bun that isn't fatally trapped in a crevice. 1 month ago:
What you’re missing out on. (Not that I’ve gone myself.)
- Comment on Nvidia CEO: Society has no choice but to change. I used to play in the streets. When cars came along, you obviously can’t play in the streets now 1 month ago:
I think the perspective of moral responsibility (“lie”, “held accountable”) is not a useful one here. Punishment is one way of discouraging humans from making mistakes but it can’t prevent mistakes entirely. My field is software development and in software development there is the expectation that everyone, even the best human developer, makes mistakes relatively often, and there are frameworks for managing those mistakes. AI can fit into those frameworks.
- Comment on Nvidia CEO: Society has no choice but to change. I used to play in the streets. When cars came along, you obviously can’t play in the streets now 1 month ago:
I agree that AI is inhumanly good at presenting wrong information confidently and convincingly.
- Comment on Nvidia CEO: Society has no choice but to change. I used to play in the streets. When cars came along, you obviously can’t play in the streets now 1 month ago:
something they know isn’t correct ALL of the time
Neither are humans…
- Comment on One in six Britons think growth of Muslim population is ‘threat to UK culture’, study finds 1 month ago:
It’s changing the culture and whether that change is good or bad is a matter of opinion. I can see where people who think their culture is good the way it is now and don’t want it to change are coming from. I’m an immigrant myself (in the USA) and I think I’m as American as most native-born Americans in some ways but not others. I like to think that my net contribution has been a positive one by any reasonable metric, but I admit that I’m biased towards economic metrics. Someone who values cultural continuity very highly might disagree.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I don’t have the statistics but my impression is that straight women turned on by gay men are actually quite common, and I’ve never encountered men fascinated by lesbian romance the way some women are fascinated by gay male romance.
As for your question: at least for me, sexual attractiveness seems like a property only women can have. It might sound silly, but a part of me feels sorry for straight women and gay men because they’re attracted to a category of people which is so clearly not attractive. Intellectually I know that attraction is subjective and other people can experience attraction to men the way I experience attraction to women, but on some level I can’t quite believe that. So, in short, two women together are two attractive beings. A woman with a man is an attractive being with a non-attractive being.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
It’s not actually ridiculous in principle.
Let’s say I start out owning a bank with ten billion in assets, and the bank’s value comes entirely from its assets so it’s worth ten billion.
The bank loans its ten billion to you, and you pay me those ten billion for the bank. Now I have ten billion in cash instead of a bank that was worth ten billion, and you have a bank worth ten billion to which you owe ten billion. No one’s net worth has changed.
You default on your loan to your own bank. Now the bank is worthless (its worth came entirely from the loan) and you have no debt, so your net worth is still zero. Effectively nothing has happened.
- Comment on You seeing this? 2 months ago:
A life form perfectly adapted for hitting below the belt.
- Comment on Colby Light 2 months ago:
It’s a type of marble cheese, specifically Colby-Jack.
- Comment on Colby Light 2 months ago:
Nothing wrong with eating cheese for dinner.
- Comment on Just say no 2 months ago:
While I agree with your general sentiment, I think you have chosen a metaphor that is almost maximally unpersuasive to your target audience.
- Comment on iHave a Lovesick Teacher 2 months ago:
You don’t need calculus to do this. Neither one is accelerating, so just calculate the velocity of one in the reference frame of the other by subtracting the vectors: from the point of view of the boy, the girl’s velocity vector has a component of -5 ft/sec north and 1 ft/sec east, so the magnitude is 26^0.5 ft/sec.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
I worked somewhere once where we were literally locked out of a system - the door control computer stopped responding and we couldn’t get into the room it was in to reboot it.
- Comment on Future 3 months ago:
I wouldn’t mind being able to start my washer remotely - I want it to run while I’m not home because it’s noisy, but I don’t want the wet laundry to sit all day like it would if I started it and then went to work.
- Comment on Anon needs a good response 3 months ago:
I consider myself very, very lucky that my ex-wife and I did not have any children.
- Comment on Anon needs a good response 3 months ago:
Yeah, that’s the problem. Once I married a woman I had known for six months, because that whole time she was crazy about me. I was the center of her world. It felt great - I wasn’t used to getting a lot of attention from women, and here was one literally begging me to marry her. I went for it. But for whatever reason (maybe God thought it was funny) there are people out there who flip between over-the-top loving someone and over-the-top hating him, for no external reason. My ex-wife kept the crazy under control before we got engaged, but after that about a couple of times a week she would flip out. I ended up divorcing her after six months of marriage - the last straw was when on my birthday she flipped out because I wanted to celebrate with my family and not just with her. Normal social interactions don’t prepare you to deal with a person like that.
- Comment on The difference is real 4 months ago:
Well, criminals generally don’t like law enforcement officers…
- Comment on Why conservative men repeatedly crash Grindr 4 months ago:
But what about the people with strongly felt but incoherent world-views, like the ones who voted for Sanders before voting for Trump? They need memes too!
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 4 months ago:
I think that most Trump voters support isolationism symbolically. They want a leader who prioritizes them rather than perceived others, but they don’t actually have a strong opinion about specific foreign policies per se. Attacking Iran does challenge that symbolism, but in the absence of direct effects on their own lives, their trust in Trump’s established “America first” reputation will go a long way.
- Comment on Anon blows his dad's mind 4 months ago:
Do male mice have nipples? Why?
That was my take-home exam from a somewhat eccentric developmental biology professor back when I was in college. I remember that the answer is no (although they still have mammary tissue and can get breast cancer) but not why.
- Comment on spoopy figs 4 months ago:
Most vegans do. The general idea is to avoid exploiting animals, but the wasps are living out their natural life cycle.
