EntropyIsAHoax

At least in large cities, lots of (mostly young) people are already fully on board with a largely car-free future. It's increasingly common to dream of not owning a car at all, instead of having a dream car. All of my american friends my age have some resentment that they're practically forced to own a car even in dense cities. So urban planners just need to enable a car-free lifestyle, and the shift will happen on its own.

Contrast in European and Asian cities, it is already extremely common to not own a car. In my city, even the people I know who own cars only use them for long journeys or when public transit is insufficient. And these bike/trike EVs are the dominant method for deliveries (mail, packages, food, etc... all use electric bikes) since they're cheaper to drive and maintain, drivers don't need a special commercial license, and they can be faster than traffic a lot of the time.

It's a lifestyle shift, but it's definitely doable to sell this idea.

It looks like the outboard "wing" is on the windward side. Is it actually a counterweight to prevent the vehicle from tipping over in the wind? I would have expected it to be more like a sideboard on a sailboat being a sort of leeward stabilizer.

Regardless this is absolutely crazy, hard to believe they think they can go even faster. And 22 knots isn't even that unusually fast wind (over water, speed records have more like 25-30 knots) I wonder if on land the speed improvements are more about material sciences and preventing the vehicle from breaking apart or tipping over

Wealthy landowners are not a marginalized group

No. Communists are not nazis. Communists do not advocate for the extermination of any marginalized group. I made it very clear that the opinion being expressed matters here, so I'm not sure why you'd think this is inconsistent?

So you suggest that everyone can express any opinion, no matter how inflammatory, without any repercussions? To be honest I find an absolute stance on that ridiculous. The questions I would ask are:

- what kinds of speech are unacceptable?

- what reaction does society take when someone crosses the line?

To continue on the Kanye example: essentially he lost his job, and I think that's perfectly acceptable. His employers/contractors found his speech disgusting, and fired him/ended his contracts. You can compare that to what happened with your grandma, and the only reason I think it's wrong is because I think pro-capitalism should be an "allowed" opinion, even though I disagree with it. To me the difference is that her opinion was a matter of political opinion, Kanye's directly targets jews, a marginalized group (note: in your grandma's case, "anti-worker" is no targeting a marginalized group since in a communist country the workers are definitionally not marginalized).

Every country I'm aware of (even the United States, for instance bomb threats are illegal) agrees that some speech should be prohibited. Where they disagree is what is prohibited and what the punishment is. In Germany, you can be jailed for denying the holocaust. Is that just? I don't really know but most of the Germans I've met agree with the law in this case.

Ah yes. A famous best-selling author featured in the BBC is completely censored and her career is wrecked because... she got some angry tweets? What are you talking about?

Do you have a source on that?

If someone is convinced that black people are inferior to white people, I want them to be afraid to express that. I don't care about hearing evidence on certain subjects, and I want there to be societal repercussions for disagreeing about things like that.

While I do agree "cancel culture" in the way of "someone misspeaks once, so the twitter mob digs up their entire past and puts them on trial for every shitty thing they've ever said" is toxic and unhelpful, I'm perfectly in agreement that deplatforming bigots is actually helpful. As a concrete example, I'm very happy Kanye West has lost essentially all of his contracts and a lot of his supporters; he thinks "Jews secretly control the world" is true and wasn't afraid to say it, maybe others will be now and will self-censor.

> Not every thought that goes through a person's mind the need be put out into the open immediately. > Straw man.

Doesn't sound like a straw man to me. What is self-censorship if not thinking through what you want to say before speaking? Generally when I speak I try to think about what effect my words will have, and if they would have what I consider to be a bad effect either on myself or others, I self-censor.

How so? I personally prefer to live in a world where expressing certain opinions in public is socially unacceptable and will make you an outcast. For example, I don't want to hear anyone's transphobic opinions, as is the case with this author. I really wish she would self-censor like she claims is such an epidemic, instead of being featured in the BBC doing the exact opposite.

Obviously in general I don't want someone to face violence for expressing an opinion, but I don't want to hear bigotry like this being echoed in the news, in social media, by my friends, etc... because I like living a peaceful life.

No it does not. Just another generic "person with huge public reach complains about being criticized for their bigotry" article from the BBC. Somehow these people never see the irony about articles like this being in the biggest news outlet in the UK.

I've always loved math, but one class I didn't expect to like as much as I did was The History of Mathematics. The mathematical content was usually very basic of course, but putting all the things I was learning in my other classes in a historical narrative was eye opening and magical.

It also gave me a way better understanding of why we do math the way we do today. Of course mathematical truths are the same regardless of notation and method, but even simple things like the prevalency of the "=" sign are choices we made along the way in history. Today algebra is almost synonymous with math for many people, but it didn't even exist as a branch of mathematics until al-Khwarizmi he just wrote his equations out in words! But we made a concise notation over time and we're all much better for it.

And some parts are just funny. Like math "duels" over cubic equations in 1500s Italy

As a fellow ADHD-er, the way I handled this as a student was to customize my note-taking system. My whole life people had told me how to take notes in an extremely structured way, and insisted they must be detailed. That required so much focus like you that I couldn't learn. So when I was allowed to stop taking notes, I did, and my grades slightly improved.

Then in university it was too much information to not take notes, and I started on my own again, in my own way. Most importantly there was almost no structure, and very little detail. Never take notes in full sentences, just keywords that are semi-digestable to you, and in math there were lots of equations and diagrams. Secondly I got a tablet with a pressure sensitive pen. This allowed me to still take hand "written" notes that looked and felt like my real handwriting, but I didn't have to deal with trying to organize my notes in real space, which inevitably would end up crushed at the bottom of my backpack or strewn around my room; digital notes are self-organizing.

I don't mean to say the devs have any ill intent. Just pointing out the reality it has trouble with feminine voices. Like veidr points out in response to my comments, implicit bias is a big issue. Probably they originally trained the wakeword model entirely on American cis men, so naturally it has trouble recognizing any voice outside of that norm. It's not an accusation, this is a very well documented pitfall of machine learning.

I'm very grateful to the Mycroft team because I love smart speakers but am not willing to sacrifice my privacy to such a degree as I would have to to use a google home or Alexa or anything like that. That does not mean I won't point out its flaws.

They are: https://mycroft.ai/blog/hey-mycroft-listen-to-me/

Although it hasn't gotten better from my perspective. But until I searched for this, I was totally unaware they've provided an easy way to train your own model for the wakeword! https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft-ai/customiz...

I will have to try that and if I remember I'll update here if it improves my situation in a few days

This is actually how Mycroft handles it, more or less.

The wakeword ("hey Mycroft") is done on-device, but everything you say after that is sent to a speech-to-text API. That text is then routed to the appropriate skill to handle. So when you're writing the skill you only worry about the content of that text

https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/over...

Yes. It reliably responds to the wakeword ("hey Mycroft") from men, and only responds about 50% of the time to women.

When my sister visits, it almost never responded to her for example.

And in my personal experience, I used to have a very deep voice and it always responded to me. I decided I would rather have a more androgynous voice and did some voice training to accomplish that and use a pretty neutral pitch. Now it only responds to my normal voice about 50% of the time, so I intentionally drop my voice an octave whenever I speak to it.

But somehow it's not just about pitch either. I have friends who are trans men, and speak in a deep voice but they still have trouble getting Mycroft to respond.

Depends on what it's used for imo. I've got the same setup and--apart from some sexism in the voice recognition--the basics work flawlessly. Once it's up and running it's trivial to set timers, check the weather, do basic unit conversions, etc...

Maybe once a month it freezes and it just needs to be restarted, anyone can do that who can get used to talking to a robot in the first place.

The more complicated stuff, I agree is not fit for people who aren't comfortable with a terminal. I also use it to control my lights and play spotify, but I'm only able to do that because I'm comfortable messing around with it and have the skills (and desire) to debug it when it breaks every other week.

It's nowhere near as polished as Alexa or similar, but it's good for the basics or for hobbyists who don't want to be spied on.

having had the flu a couple times in my life I know that it sucks but it's still only a couple of days of misery

Because you've been lucky. The flu can and does kill healthy young people. I cannot understand why you would value your anecdotal experiences above population studies and your own life. Anecdotally, I've had friends my age and healthier than me end up in the hospital with pneumonia after getting the flu. A classmate of mine died from H1N1 when I was in middle school. Even if I didn't have those experiences, why would I not take such a simple action with basically no risk to protect myself from a very real threat?

I make an above median software dev salary, I definitely spend time considering $100 vs $0. Also, I now live in a country where I don't pay for most healthcare, so the default is free, which means when I encounter unexpected costs in healthcare I spend a little bit of time thinking about it, even if it's only a small amount of money.

Not to mention that it isn't even really free! You're still paying for it with your taxes/insurance premiums.

That's a ridiculous way to look at it, I pay the same amount regardless of whether I get the flu shot or not. Therefore getting it is free.

probably only worth getting if you're especially vulnerable

I also grew up in the US and came away with the exact opposite impression. Every year from when I was in grade school through university there was a massive push to get everyone to have the flu shot. I didn't hear the phrase "flu vaccine" but the reasoning was always exactly the same as for the covid vaccines: herd immunity, less chance of getting the flu, less chance of dying from the flu.

Now as an adult with no health issues, I go get my flu shot every year. Why not? It's free, it takes barely any time out of my day, and I'm less likely to die.

Do you have ADHD? I don't know if there's actual evidence whether it's related, but I often hear this from people with ADHD

This paper casts doubt on the current evidence for "completely reversible" as well as their efficacy without really providing evidence of the opposite. I would invite you to read further studies showing that puberty blockers are safe, reversible, and extremely important to trans youth's health:

- https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.01.20241653v...

- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...

- https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2017.0052...

For example. There's definitely still studies to be done, but there is good evidence that puberty blockers are safe and reversible that this author seems to have missed

Also this is a source from 2021 estimating the regret rate for gender affirming surgery is ~1% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8099405/

From 2021 (more recent than 2018 as your #4 source) and not paywalled

From number 3:

increased time since last gender-affirming surgery was associated with reduced mental health treatment (adjusted odds ratio=0.92, 95% CI=0.87, 0.98).

In this first total population study of transgender individuals with a gender incongruence diagnosis, the longitudinal association between gender-affirming surgery and reduced likelihood of mental health treatment lends support to the decision to provide gender-affirming surgeries to transgender individuals who seek them.

Okay seems to agree that gender affirming surgery is a good thing, thanks for agreeing.

[edited because I mistook which of your sources is which]

Number 4 is behind a paywall so I can't really comment. But to be honest I doubt that their methodology is valid, and the summary includes no statistics so it's likely the conclusion is overblown

With regards to money: this is true of every major health issue in our society, as long as capitalism is at all involved in our health care system there will always be this incentive and we should aim to minimize it. Can you provide some evidence that there is more corruption in gender health care than in other health care?

And with regard to Littman, you can't honestly expect me to take the founder of the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" nonsense seriously? She and her "research" methods have been so thoroughly discredited I don't think that even warrants a response. If there's a reputable figure who has similar concerns, this would maybe cast some doubt on more common detrans statistics

Are you trying to say that people under 18 should never receive any surgery because they can't consent?

This comment chain is about gender affirming surgeries and _doctors_, not DIY HRT so I won't respond to that

It is hard to find good numbers on detrans minors, simply because there are so few minors who transition in the first place. But here's one study showing that the regret rate for gender affirming surgery in general is ~1% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8099405/

Detransitioners get so much media attention simply because it's good transphobia fodder. All there is to substantiate these claims is anecdotal stories from a handful of individuals. These cases should be investigated of course, everyone has a right to make fully informed decisions about their body and it's problematic if that wasn't possible for some reason. However, it is simply untrue that there's a systemic problem with this at the moment.

Again anecdotally, among the (few) detrans people I know, all of them agree they made their decisions fully informed, and take ownership of their decisions rather than blaming doctors.

Except that people undergoing these surgeries do so willingly, face massive barriers to ensure they are thinking clearly and understand the consequences, show minimal regret rates, often have to undergo extensive psychological counseling beforehand, etc...

Except for everything it's exactly the same.

And the supreme court is set to severely weaken the Indian Child Welfare Act within the next year. We are likely to see even more native children basically kidnapped like this as a result

It's seemed pretty obvious to me that the military's recruitment issues are just because young people morally object to it. I (25) grew up in the shadow of 9/11, seeing the US invade other countries on false premises for oil, somehow that didn't motivate me to serve. Then you combine that with growing awareness for how inadequate veteran services are, and how you're essentially abused as a military member even if you don't see combat. Why would I join an organization that goes against my morals, is more likely than not to give me PTSD, and then when it's all done all I get is a lifetime of untreated mental illness along with 4 years of "free" college?

Almost everyone I know my age who's joined either did it to escape poverty or because they come from a military family. I think any kind of perks are only band-aids on a collapsing militarized nation.