MarkusQ

Base 2/3 seems tantalizingly close to Collatz.

Ditto for a really positive narrative.

The desperation comes in when you try to keep the chocolate out of the peanut butter, and tell only the side you're trying to push without a hint of the counterarguments. (Or to provide only weak-sauce strawmen.)

There are some drawbacks to the nuclear bomb rocket.

You don't say.

That's half the story.

The other have is that the same press and analysts still desperately construct negative narratives (note, for example, the very story we're commenting on). The point isn't to pump the market up or to crash it (though there are clearly folks out there trying to do both); the real goal is to keep people milling about and keep the money sloshing around, which drives the turbines of finance.

Your realtor makes money when you buy, they make money when you sell. Your lawyer makes money when you sue or when you get sued. Landscapers get paid to put plants in and to take plants out. The only thing they can't profit (much) from is inactivity.

Three more common ways of responding to a problem:

Weaponize it.

Study it.

Blog about it.

Now my computer can sound just like the people that make me turn off my radio!

Thank you!

What would happen if you added a capacitor (to ground) on the base? Could you adjust the frequency?

Like this?

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4

Right. Specifically, "I want the human cancer gone from this planet."

That's a kind of caring, but probably not the sort you were trying to imply.

The trick for paying for healthcare is simple, though no one likes it: we need to start paying for healthcare.

By building a huge byzantine bureaucracy around everyone trying to get someone else to pay for it, we've driven up the cost (now we're paying for the health care plus all sorts of insurance administration and all their lobbyists and so on). By hiding the costs we've deprived ourselves of the ability to comparison shop. By opening the door to third parties we've taken a simple transaction between doctor and patient and added lawyers, private equity, government and who knows who else, and each and every one of them is taking their cut of the money.

I agree trains are cool.

No, it's a specific thing you can do.

You can literally just sit down, right now, and do this.

But if you insist on hearing about a specific example of something I did, here's one that's appropriate. I was frustrated that all the time I spent reading/hearing/watching about other people solving their problems left me oddly dissatisfied. I realized that that was because it wasn't actually solving any of mine (except perhaps assuaging boredom a little). Thinking about it, I realized that that was because I was wasting the impetus to improve my situation on voyeurism.

Ok, here goes:

You could look at your situation, think about it as objectively as you can (ignoring, as much as possible, any media driven mind worms), pick any particular problem you face that looks solvable, and try to solve it. If none of the problems seems particularly solvable, break them into pieces and look at the resulting sub-problems in the same way. Regardless of the outcome, iterate, since it's ultimately a numbers game.

The reason this might help is that 1) you might solve some fraction of your problems, 2) to the extent that you're suffering from learned hopelessness, you'll be unlearning it, 3) regardless of either of the above, you'll be likely to learn something, as this is a very common side effect of trying to do stuff.

Hope that helps.

If there are super bright light sources on the ground nearby that are bright enough to produce a visible reflection off a satellite, you are about to be dead.

Sorry, forgot the "/s"

My view is that anybody is free to give commands if they feel like it, just as I'm free to ignore 'em.

Very nice to see someone actually looking at the issue objectively instead of the unholy blend of clickbait, shoddy "science" and either fear mongering or blind denialism we usually see.

Getting to the point where we're actually able to measure something real is good progress.

"lalitium" -- it says so, right above the text.

Which makes the headline quite clever in this case, since people will assume that means they aren't wrong, when in fact it means they aren't _always_ wrong.

I remember it taking long enough (they had to wait for another project to need a lot of that color) that we wound up using dope to mock it up. (Regular paint didn't hold and just chipped off.)

It would help if the variables were defined somewhere near their point of use. Economists may have dedicated uses for P & Y as well known (to them) as π, but to the casual reader they are...just letters?

Having now read the actual complaint / emails, I'd like to revise my position (if anyone cares).

Prices go up in response to shortages in a properly functioning market, but these clowns were clearly over the line and trying to manipulate the prices in addition to that.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1450281/dl

Reminds me of the Egg Greed Graph.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFa2bQlWcAARYNB.jpg

Why is it people have such a hard time understanding that this is what we want markets to do? If there is a scarcity of some resource, the prices rise and this motivates producers to produce more and consumers to consume less, until an equilibrium is found. On net, this means that we can have more of what we want for less effort over time. Yes, the people doing this profit from it. That's why they do it.

The GP post's point was that, logical as this would be, the IAU definition explicitly states that planets are "in the Solar System". So no, exoplanets are exoplanets, not planets. And Pluto isn't an example of either.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/joke

https://www.merriam-webster.com/simple/fiction

My point was, LLMs always generate fiction (bad fiction, but fiction nonetheless); what they generate is plausible, grammatical text that may have many points of congruence with the truth, but are not in any way constrained to do so. In short, fiction.

If they could reliably generate high quality non-fiction, that would be news.

Are readers generating fiction with AI models?

Why not? Journalists, lawyers and pundits of various stripes are already doing it. Why shouldn't readers?

Yup.

But 1) `dbg!(·)` uses normal syntax and 2) my expository version is two characters shorter. :)

You managed to break out of the trap!

Thank you for this; I'd not seen it, but needed to.

Opioid use comes to mind.