frooxie

An RTX 5090 is nowhere near enough if you want to play graphically demanding games on the latest high-resolution VR headsets. Many are close to 4k*4k per eye, so essentially an 8k screen that needs to run at a stable 90 fps not to cause nausea, and ideally higher.

I didn't know that there were countries that required that. Can you give me a few examples?

It looks like dry humor to me.

dedicated cameras have mainly been innovating in video production rather than stills in the last 5 years.

Well, not Sony. Their mirrorless cameras have gotten much better autofocus and battery life and slightly better ergonomics, usability, speed and weather-sealing, but there has basically been no change in their video capabilities.

Before I introduce a new game, I start by watching a video, reading the rulebook, playing a couple of games against myself, and then practicing and refining a script so I can teach it as effectively as possible. It's a lot of work, but I like working out an optimized rules explanation, and if I'm inviting people over to play my new game, then it seems impolite to waste their time.

Two petabytes, according to PC Gamer.

It has absolutely nothing to do with pas as in a step.

"Pas" as in the negation originally came from "pas" as in a step, through expressions like "I will not walk another step".

According to NATO's 2018 report, Estonia was one of only six NATO countries (out of 29) that met the goal of dedicating 2% of their GDP to defense. Not that dedicating 100% would stop Russia if they wanted to invade.

High levels of oestrogens in the womb linked to autism

I wonder how this fits with the "extreme male brain theory of autism".

After 30 years in IT, I've never once seen anyone use a Mac for anything business-related, much less programming. That is not an exaggeration. (At my current company, we're using 75% Windows, 25% Linux.)

You seem to be literally saying that harassment is necessary when developing operating systems. Is that your intention?

Why on earth would they not use their own platform to present their content?

I know one of them personally, and I think in her case, she may have had a few hundred people following her art blog, while on Instagram, she quickly amassed over 100,000 followers, so when she stopped updating the blog, she lost less than 1% of her fans.

It comes down to people knowing how to follow Instagram/Facebook accounts, while they haven't even heard of RSS.

A few years ago, my favorite writers and artists had personal blogs. Today, many of them have moved to Instagram, Twitter and/or Facebook, making them inconvenient or impossible to follow using RSS.

Apart from the migration to walled gardens, I also think it's a problem that 99% of web users haven't heard of RSS.

Do you have any books to recommend for people who aren't interested in learning in-depth about historical linguistics, but like reading about the sort of interesting trivia found in the Tumblr post?

English used to have a four-form system, where yes and no were the responses to a question posed in the negative, whereas yea and nay were the responses to positively framed questions.

I know German has "ja" and "doch" as ways of saying "yes" to positively vs negatively framed questions.

One thing I've found interesting is that in English you answer positively and negatively framed question in the same way, whereas in many East-Asian languages, you take the internal logic of the sentence into account, leading to confusing dialogues for English teachers working abroad in Asia: "Didn't you do your homework?" "Yes. Yes, I didn't do my homework".

I'm on 54, probably forever as there's no response from the developer of the RSS addon I use. (I tried 15 of the most popular alternatives, and didn't like a single one, so Firefox 54 it is.)

I really like the original Lee/Kirby comics (and Byrne's run in a similar style), and I'd love to see movies that were true to the best parts of those comics. The only good FF movie we've gotten so far was called The Incredibles, but there's no reason why the real FF movies couldn't be at least as good and successful.

Not sure what you mean.

I mean that e.g. if we create a machine that can solve every thinking-related problem that humans can solve, then we can be certain that we have created artificial intelligence. But how are we supposed to ascertain that we have created something conscious, as in a machine with subjective experience? Strictly speaking I can't be certain that _you_ are conscious. (Also, why would we replace "AGI" with "AC", when people are looking to build something intelligent, irrespective of whether it has internal subjective experience?)

I guess this is not the right place to ask or think.

That has not been my experience.

We understand what intelligence is better than we understand what consciousness is. "Artificial Consciousness" would be the vague term.

According to the book "Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism", countries become hardworking and disciplined because of economic development, rather than the other way around. A long but interesting quote:

"Having toured lots of factories in a developing country, an Australian management consultant told the government officials who had invited him: “My impression as to your cheap labor was soon disillusioned when I saw your people at work. No doubt they are lowly paid, but the return is equally so; to see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied easy-going race who reckon time is no object. When I spoke to some managers they informed me that it was impossible to change the habits of national heritage.”

This Australian consultant was understandably worried that the workers of the country he was visiting did not have the right work eithic. In fact, he was being quite polite. He could have been blunt and just called them lazy. No wonder the country was poor — not dirt poor, but with an income level that was less than a quarter of Australia’s.

The country in question… was Japan in 1915. It doesn’t feel quite right that someone from Australia (a nation known today for its ability to have a good time) could call the Japanese lazy. But this is how most westerners saw Japan a century ago.

In his 1903 book, Evolution of the Japanese, the American missionary Sidney Gulick observed that many Japanese “give an impression…of being lazy and utterly indifferent to the passage of time.” Gulick was no casual observer. He lived in Japan for 25 years (1888-1913), fully mastered the Japanese language, and taught in Japanese university. After his return to the US, he was known for his campaign for racial equality on behalf of Asian Americans. Nevertheless, he saw ample confirmation of the cultural stereotype of the Japanese as an “easy-going” and “emotional” people who possessed qualities like “lightness of heart, freedom from all anxiety for the future, living chiefly for the present.”

(...)

This was not just a western prejudice against eastern peoples. The British used to say similar things about the Germans. Before their economic take-off in the mid-19th century, the Germans were typically described by the British as “a dull and heavy people.” “Indolence” was a word that was frequently associated with the Germanic nature."

A similar thing happens with comics; The New York Times's review of Art Spiegelman's WWII memoir "Maus" started with the line "Maus is not a comic".

This was meant as praise, because "obviously", if it's any good, it can't be called a comic book. (Then, of course, the term "graphic novel" got traction, and immediately got misused so often that it's now completely meaningless.)

How about if I draw 7000 sketches or drawings in a year? How would that be "bulk registered"?

If we tell people the dangerous false idea that hard work is the main factor that makes someone rich or successful, we could end up with a terrible society where the rich feel they have no responsibility to help the less fortunate (by e.g. providing universal healthcare), because they must simply have been lazy – even though most rich people started out rich, and even the rich people who started out poor and worked hard still owe their success partially to being lucky enough not to have been randomly afflicted by some disease, by growing up in a society that provided them opportunities for education and business, etc.

So if your kids turned out more successful than others, don't tell them it was just because they dreamt big and worked hard. While hard work is important, their success was also partially due to luck and the work of others, and they should never forget that.

A weird detail is the Chinese transliteration of "karaoke":卡拉ＯＫ. It starts out with two Chinese characters pronounced "ka" and "la", and then tacks on the English "OK": ka-la-OK. So the English word "orchestra" turned into "OK" after two transliterations.

Here's another paper, "Learning Styles - Concepts and Evidence": http://psi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/105.abstract

I quote: "Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis. We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice."

Wikipedia has many links to more criticism of the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Criticism

For instance: Psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Barry Beyerstein, and colleagues listed as one of the "50 great myths of popular psychology" the idea that "students learn best when teaching styles are matched to their learning styles", and they summarized some relevant reasons not to believe this "myth".

Also, even if every law was made in accordance with some perfect ethical system (whatever that would be), problems remain:

1. You can still do unethical things that are too small or too big for laws to handle. It's perfectly legal to cheat on your partner, or to mock a bullied child, or to form a political party that takes power and repeals laws you don't like.

2. Even for the things that are covered by laws, a superhuman AI would be able to find bizarre loopholes that obey the letter of the law but would be considered unethical by most people.

31/40, but when I'm asked to visualize something I don't immediately conjure up a detailed picture, it's more like a cursor going over a scene and adding details as needed.

For instance, until I was asked to "Rate how vivid the colours of that person's clothes look in your mind?", I hadn't even imagined his clothes being ANY color. Once I decided that he wore a green sweater, I could "experience" the green color vividly.

I thought the "neutral inner voice" was universal.

For me, most of the time, I don't have any kind of inner voice. I don't usually think in words; thinking is more like combining abstract symbols/feelings/concepts in a way that's more immediate and less linear than language.

I think this post from 2009 is where I learned that there's a large variation in people's ability to form mental imagery: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

Maybe you'd find it interesting, if you haven't read it already.

Look at any picture of a person using the Oculus Rift. How does it make you feel?

Envious that I don't have one.