fromthestart

our white collar workplaces have become highly mentally taxing and employees need judgement-free resources provided by employers to deal with them

Seeing what people in other countries go through, willingly, sacrificing for their families and persevering in relative poverty, I can't help but feel that sentiments like these come off as weak and entitled. If anything it shows that life in the first world is too comfortable, which understandably makes it hard to appreciate how easy we have it, even in the "roughest" of tech jobs.

Or perhaps men and women are innately different after hundreds of thousands of generations of sexually dimorphic evolution, and this affects the manner in which they socialize?

It seems we've brainwashed an entire generation into believing that all differences in male and female are purely social constructs - which is total nonsense.

which I never understood the backlash against toxic masculinity" that I see from (male) friends whenever the term comes up. Who said it's supposed to be toxic only for others?

Because toxic masculinity is an exaggerated catch-all boogey man used online to shame men for their innate nature, taking for granted that society functions better if we act more like females.

Conversations around toxic masculinity typically implicitly deny thousands of years of sexually dimorphic specialization by blank slateists. What's more, it's men who get the blame for the socially reinforced aspect of this so called toxicity, with the conversation universally denying the role that female sexual selection plays in reinforcing these behaviors - women are innately drawn to masculinity, and to a large extent what is and is not culturally masculine is not limited social pressure. Men and women evolved with differently shaded psychologies. Why do you think male and female norms have so much overlap across almost all cultures? And have for thousands of years?

The abstract of the paper you linked begins with this sentence:

There is no consensus on whether climate change has yet affected the statistics of tropical cyclones, owing to their large natural variability and the limited period of consistent observations.

Which is exactly what I was pointing out, and exactly what laymen have come to totally disregard in their rush to blame everything on climate change while believing that "this isn't rocket science." Just like denialists and snowy winters, only in reverse.

This is on the scale of rocket science - in fact in some ways it is more difficult than rocket science, because it is fundamentally an empirical and non-experimental science, and it takes decades, if not centuries, to collect enough evidence to refine/reject theory.

The net result is you are seeing once in 1500 year floods happening every year.

This is the same kind of cherry picking that denialists have been using for decades. Locally rare events appear frequent if you gather trials from enough localities. The fact is that there has been no increase in storm intensity or frequency over the last 100 years which correlates with greenhouse emissions. There was an increase starting in the 1980s [1] but this is simply not enough data for climate prediction, which normally changes on scales of hundreds of years at the quickest - even if you assume that we are expecting catastrophic temperature increase over the span of a century.

Its worrisome that proponent hysteria is driven by the same kind of fallacious reasoning as that of denialist.

1. https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/historical-atlantic-hurricane-and-...

Disclaimer I believe in climate change with all my heart

Ridiculous that the subject has become so dogmatic that one must prostrate oneself before stating anything even potentially critical

Bayer knowingly sold antihemopheliac factor contaminated with HIV.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/24785997/

You think the archtype of the edgy, rebelious youth is fictional? If you were too far removed from those groups of kids in high school, perhaps you should spend some time on 4chan.

No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people.

It absolutely does, because edginess is appealing to many teenagers/young adults. Not only that, but laws to this effect against blanket "hate speech" are regularly used by white supremacists and the like as evidence of, for example, Jewish people using laws to unfairly elevate themselves with the priveleges of a protected class while simultaneously suppressing thought that can lead to dissent.

Holocaust denial laws lead to increased suspicion with the justification that scepticism is banned to preserve a false narrative and prevent the lie from being discovered. It's easy to see how preposterous this is while the atrocity is relatively fresh in our collective consciousness, but what happens in 10, 20, 30 years when all survivors have been dead for some time and people rightly start to wonder why investigation of an event is illegal?

This is a weird form of puritanical censorship and the unintented consequences to society are far worse than any imagined benefits. You have no right to control thought in your image.

Edit: also, your hyperbolic mention of incest and necrophilia doesn't quite support your claims, as sexual arousal is quite strongly linked with taboo for many people, as evidenced by the wealth of voyeur, BDSM, and even incest pornography. It seems like these kinds of authoritarian proposals tend to come from sheltered minds.

agree that "crunchy Karen" is a dismissive sexist tropE

So we're not allowed to use labels to draw attention to the fact that the majority of people who believe in [1] and spread information about things like spirituality, crystals, anti-vax, anti-gmo, etc are women?

Often times x-ist tropes are rooted in reality. Dancing around these associations doesn't do anyone any actual good beyond cheap virtue signaling.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/01/new-age-bel...

There are people who would put Das Kapital the same category of unacceptable speech as others would Mein Kampf.

You have no right to quarantine information like you would a virus, because there is no way to agree on which information is "bad". Further, even overall hateful or dangerous content can have meritful parts - not everything Hitler said or did, for example, was unreasonable or evil.

Another example, what about the Unabomber Manifesto? Yeah, he was a terrorist and he wrote some arguably hateful things about liberalism/leftism, but there was also a wealth of thoughtful observations regarding the human condition in his work.

All information should be free for study by anyone.

Washing clothes without a washing machine, scrubbing dusty floors, cooking on charcoal stoves.

Your anglocentric view severely overestimates the similarly between our standards of cleanliness and theirs. I doubt these women are washing loads of clothes daily, if they even have more than a handful of items of clothing, or mopping dirt floors with any frequency.

Cooking on charcoal isn't that much worse than cooking over a modern stovetop.

You also seem to imply that men are just sitting around all day, based on the context of the message this is responding to - but I don't know enough about the culture in these remote African areas to say if that's wrong.

I don't understand this habit of bending over backwards to show that women have it harder everywhere. Aside from hauling water from long distances, the work you describe is hardly grueling - and says nothing of what the men in these areas are experiencing.

If you want to talk about gendered violence and lack of rights as second class citizens, that's one thing, but there seems to be a tendency to exaggerate as a signal of virtue or something.

Unless we as a society return to a simpler lifestyle of living, I see this as an unsolvable problem.

There's no reason to presume that it isn't possible to retain our current standard of living while also solving the problem through technological innovation - we've arguably had the solution for decades in the form of nuclear, and we're inching closer every day with developments in non-nuclear renewables and outside of the energy space with innovation in farming (outdoor and indoor/vertical, GMO) and material design.

Despite the doom and gloom, talk along the lines of 12 years before irreversible runaway into catastrophe is really a worst case estimate. Chances are we will have plenty of time to develop technology to slow climate change and adapt to its effects in the coming decades, particularly given that it is a rising concern among citizens the world over.

Honestly, given how much of our infrastructure is dependent on fossil fuels and environmentally unfriendly materials, it simply isn't practical to make the kind of radical transition you're advocating for - our entire food chain, for example relies on modern plastics and ICEs for delivery/storage. The waste you describe from e.g. Starbucks and packaging is probably a small percentage of the waste that our modern civilization is structured upon, even if you convinced everyone to drastically lower their standard of living overnight. Balancing risk with cost, this is a transition that cannot happen overnight anyway.

This isn't implicitly true. If it were, Iceland wouldn't have had to pass a law to make unfair salaries (based on gender)

This of course presumes that any discrepancy in pay among genders is based solely on discrimination.

This has been true of most American "journalism" for at least a decade now. Activist journalism has become so common that editorialization is just taken as normal - I doubt that the average person even understands the degree to which news is editorialized. It's next to impossible to find an objective mainstream source these days - for both left and right leaning media.

Probably related to the modern polarization of the nation, though which is the chicken and which is the egg is hard to say.

So call it virtual experience training for first responders. That way you implicitly emphasize that this is more than just classroom training, it's much closer to, well, real experience.

Make VE the next buzzword.

Do current patent laws and regulations regarding inventorship need to be revised to take into account inventions where an entity or entities other than a natural person contributed to the conception of an invention

Well, this seems a little dangerous. I would argue that any invention or innovation generated by an AI should be made public domain.

As we rapidly approach the possibility of genuine AI, the gap between the haves and have nots will increasingly be defined not by accumulation of capital but by accumulation and control of information. If the explosion of technical progress we've seen in ML recently continues, it's quite likely that future designs and breakthroughs will eventually come from neural nets themselves - and if we define these innovations as IP and afford the usual legal protections to the nets that generated them, as the question seems to imply ("other than natural persons"), then I imagine by proxy the ultimate owner of the patent is the owner of the net. Which forms the foundation of a dystopia defined by unprecedented "wealth" inequality where one or a handful of first movers become irreversibly entrenched as the gap between AI powered innovation and human powered innovation will widen exponentially once that door is unlocked.

I think much of the progress in the ML explosion is owed to the beauty of open source and open access publishing on arxiv, and I can't help but feel like getting neural network designs mixed up with patent law would stymie the iterative collaboration that defines ML research.

I don't know that I can find any sources to cite but I once wrote some code for an anthropologist analyzing prehistoric tooth scans, and he mentioned that modern dental carries are substantially more common now than they were in the past because acid producing bacteria thrive on refined sugars that weren't used in modern quantities until fairly recent history.

Is it really hard to beat them when they only cover one's eyes?

I understand your point, but GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead. If you're not using batteries, supply during dark or windless hours is inelastic, because there's nothing being generated - in other words you're not solving the problem and you can't really charge anyone anyway because there's nothing to deliver.

I don't think forcing people to use electricity only when it's available is a practical solution to the availability problem with wind and solar.

I'm afraid you misunderstand the way embeddings work - at least for BERT based models, which are currently state of the art.

BERT embeddings, after training change with context. In other words if you feed a paragraph about bank robbers and look at the encoding for bank, it will be meaningfully different from the encoding for the same word produced from a paragraph (or sentence) about river banks.

We use BERT at the startup I work at, and one of our tests was the sentence "the bank robbers robbed the bank and then rested by the river bank". BERT was able to generate three different semantically meaningful encodings for the word bank in this sentence. The first two instances were much closer to each other in vector space (euclidean distance) than the last.

This is huge, because it is arguably the first step in building an AI which can perform basic reasoning about information encoded in text. For example, if you average up the encodings of a paragraph of words, you can create an "encoding" which assigns a summary meaning or topic. Simple vector math becomes a powerful reasoning tool.

The future is here.

It is objectively, quantitatively true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.

There is no data to support such an assertion. It's confirmation bias stemming from the belief that climate change will lead to such an effect.

Land usage and pollution. No pesticide/fertilizer runoff and no need to clear forest, much less land used per pound of food. Plus you can theoretically grow in cities-add a couple floors in skyscrapers and your cities become a little more self sustaining.

You're also not tied to variations in weather, meaning more consistent yields and substantially smaller likelihood of crop failure. And you're saving labor of tilling/planting, as well as the significant equipment/fuel costs and associated outages that go with outdoor farming.

There might also be automation benefits, easier to design an assembly line around your indoor grow setup with consistent lighting conditions for visual processing, but I'm not sure about this one.

Even making it that far is a testament to the prowess of your space organization. It's a cheaper first step which probably directly and indirectly tests some 75% of the components needed for an actual landing.

Wouldn't renting a studio or efficiency apartment be more consistent with his/her personality and desires

Sure, but in the article these spaces are billed by their marketing as solutions to the affordable housing crisis, but it seems like they're potentially missing out on a market share and possibly creating living spaces which are even uncomfortably open for extroverts, by being designed as excessively open, in the same way that open concept over optimizes for design constraint enabling collaboration to the overall detriment of comfort and productiveness.

For starters:

techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/study-calls-out-dark-patterns-in-facebook-and-google-that-push-users-towards-less-privacy/

www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/facebook-accused-of-misleading-advertisers-then-trying-to-hide-it/

theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/20/facebook-violating-privacy-mark-zuckerberg

FB's entire business model is fundamentally in conflict with any semblance of privacy. Why anyone believes anything that comes out of Zuckerberg's mouth is beyond me. FB is built around exploitation of user ignorance, apathy, and unwarranted trust.

Make no mistake, no matter how much these dangerously charismatic CEOs speak about positive changes to society, modern large tech companies are 100% self serving and always engaged in carefully prepared corporate doublespeak. They don't give any kind of a shit about your privacy when it is directly tied to the bulk of their revenue. What motivation does fb actually have to delete facial recognition data like they claim, as opposed to just quietly storing it somewhere on the back end? There's no legal requirement and if they get caught, the only people who would care are the kind who by and large have already moved off FB. Meanwhile the upside is huge for future facial recognition applications - this is a massive goldmine of very sensitive personal data.

It’s an assurance that Facebook isn’t actually retaining data that it could use again someday to recognize your face.

Given fb's history of lying, it's only an assurance that they won't overtly use such data. No guarantee that they're not still storing it on a server somewhere, and good luck proving as much.

Also, what does this mean for people without accounts that are being tracked? I wonder if facial data is collected on them too, after being labeled by friends.

Decent joinery and inbuilt storage spares residents having to buy flat pack furniture, while the living spaces, which all flow into an outdoor area, are designed to encourage communal dining and social interaction

All of these spaces seem to have in common that they're absolutely hostile to introverts who need at least some privacy and quiet. They also follow a consistent pattern of cramming as many people into a tiny space as possible to milk properties while billing themselves as driving some kind of positive housing revolution.

This is just open concept for housing and the CEO who talks about doing this out of some implied generosity is a comical stereotype of the sociopathic but charismatic SV executive.

If you want to build a community, you need to foster a common, meaningful goal for people to come together over, and it needs to be organic. It also helps if the people have a common culture/heritage. You can't commercialize community as a product to transient weekly renters from random places for any meaningful amount of time, it just comes off as forced and artificial, like corporate propaganda.

I imagine that has more to with taxes than anything else. Adjusted for inflation, petroleum is quite low compared to it's price over much of the last 3-4 decades.

I don't think it costs anywhere near $10/hour to operate a passenger vehicle, even after insurance and maintenance.