vertexFarm

Condescending, gets hung up on form and image instead of substance. Pretty obvious deflection. Everybody runs on emotion as well as reason, and there are perfectly reasonable situations to get emotional. Maybe you get a lot of ad-hominem attacks because you deserve it.

Want the debate club response? Just endless, endless sources and studies and data. They are out there and they are overwhelming and conclusive.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2995507/

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Be sure to click through and check out all the individual citations. I wonder if you'll actually live up to your supposed principles and care about the evidence.

Your foolish fringe-science delusions and intellectual arrogance are going to drive your descendants to despair and death. But I have no doubt you'll go to your grave unconvinced no matter what the evidence points to, blissfully leaving the outcome of your decisions to future generations. It's ironic that you mention falsifiable claims, since literally no amount of overwhelming evidence can ever convince deniers that their claims are false.

Climate models are not "wrong" or "right," they are models based on finite variables which resemble reality within an expected margin of error. Thus they will always have slight but expected variance from actual measurements in the future. Science doesn't reveal absolute truth, it gets us fractionally closer to absolute truth. Right now 97% of scientists have reached a consensus that even based on the most conservative extremes of the margin of error of our climate models that anthropogenic climate change is real and is marching towards catastrophe. That's a higher degree of certainty than plenty of other scientific concepts that we have put into practice. You are claiming to have better knowledge than the utterly overwhelming majority of evidence and expert observation. Is it because you are miraculously the smartest person on earth, or is it because you are a deluded crank? It's pretty obvious which it is to everyone but yourself and other conspiracy peddlers.

Lately I've been wondering if a full-scale thermonuclear exchange might actually save us in the long run. Our endlessly growing industry is going to eventually wipe out much more of our biosphere than even a worst-case nuclear exchange would. Imagine that. It might actually end up dampening our industry and giving us more time. Sure, fallout is a terrible thing--you have a bunch of deadly isotopes hanging over a region with a half-life of 80,000 years or so--but what is the half-life of a Sahara desert? How would most of the world hunker down and survive if nearly all latitudes resembled that for the next few million years? What about when our oceans completely collapse? There's already dead zones the size of entire continents out there. How long will that last when the whole thing is a dead zone and has to start over? If that happens, all large, complex life on land will be 100% fucked. That would last so, so long that even if humankind somehow miraculously managed to survive (fyi: they wouldn't) the survivors would no longer be anatomically modern humans by the end. They would have slowly differentiated and adapted and evolved through several stages of new, distinct species along the way. Our sentence for the crimes we're carrying out today will be that long.

The great oxygenation event is probably the most similar historical precedent for what could happen if we continue chemically sterilizing the oceans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

We're in for a very tough time--I don't want to sow any seeds of defeatism or unnecessary cynicism, but we are no longer looking at a choice between catastrophe and a continuation of our normal way of life. We are looking at a choice between catastrophe and utter cataclysm. Between hundreds of millions of deaths and billions. This is going to eventually come to truly desperate measures. Humankind will not get through this without having to make some incredibly difficult and bloody decisions in the future. Every day we dawdle and ponder what to do makes the decision our descendants will get stuck with more and more horrific and Pyrrhic. It will eventually come to a point that the most rational decision is to start attacking industry and agriculture with force. That's terrible, but there will come a day when it's an act of basic self-defense. It will also lead to strife and death and famine for millions. But we no longer have the privilege of choosing an option that doesn't involve suffering and atrocity--we have missed our best chances and in the future we will be forced to choose based on the degree of harm, not whether or not there will be harm. The horrors of the 20th century won't even hold a candle to what we're currently laying out for our offspring. It's utterly shameful.

The world today is safer, more civilized, and more prosperous than it has ever been in history, but this is a false stability that we're borrowing against our own future to maintain. It's eventually going to come back to us with a shitload of interest.

Ah, I was getting my data from the same site but I forgot to toggle mobile browsers. Wonder why that's not the default option? That's silly.

Have you ever considered that maybe it's due to past union efforts that they currently don't have massive transgressions they must currently fight against?

Sure, we've all heard the anecdotes of a union protecting some guy who probably wasn't competent or cut out for the job. But how do you like your weekends? Benefits? Work/life balance? It's not perfect, but those things would gradually erode away without unions to fight for and defend them. Don't think companies will preserve that forever just out of the goodness of their hearts. Don't think it's just a permanent, inviolate fixture of our culture now. It's a hard-earned way of life that our ancestors carved out for us.

Actually, those things are gradually eroding away this very moment, because unions are now terribly weak and most Americans have internalized this contrived hatred of organized labor. It's not going to go well for workers in the future if we're so complacent. Make no mistake, you and I both enjoy the fruits of bitter and intense union battles from previous generations. They may seem unnecessary relics of the past now, but without them we'd be back in tenement housing working 16 hour days and making barely enough money to afford rent and food from the company store very quickly. Lots of industries are already pushing us back to that state. Be grateful your career has a union. It's definitely well worth one percent of your salary.

Chrome------------------64.15%

Internet Explorer--------10.83%

Firefox-------------------9.89%

Edge---------------------4.30%

Safari--------------------3.80%

Opera--------------------1.58%

Safari will survive since Apple is their patron. Obviously Internet Explorer is only a lumbering undead husk at this point, and it's pretty shameful that it's still outgunning Firefox by a small amount. Even more sad that it's got over twice as many users as Edge, lol.

Thanks for the reminder. I try to give a little to Mozilla and Wikipedia on a regular basis. So far they are living proof that there is a way to make this whole mess work at a high standard of quality without resorting to the advertising model, which seems to become more heinous by the day.

Please everyone help the other options survive, even if you don't personally like them or use them. There is no way legislators are ever going to catch up on their technical knowledge enough to manage even the most blatant monopoly. Who am I kidding, they wouldn't care anyway. Somebody has to get in there to offer competition and keep things honest. Having options improves all of the options.

If you're tired of the butt jokes or if this planet is just too mainstream for you, might I recommend another mysterious, ringed celestial body in the same general region i.e. a bajillion kilometers from nowhere?

Why not Chariklo! You almost never hear about this baby. I'd love to see a mission fly close enough to properly photograph it in my lifetime, but it's super rare to send something out that far and it would probably have to pass up on much more important science objectives in order to swing by such a tiny backwater dwarf planet. Supposedly the rings have been confirmed by stellar occultation, which is cool because it's super small for such clear rings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10199_Chariklo

I want to stand on the surface and look up for a while. See also Chiron and Haumea.

Sure, okay. What about inflation? If we have 1% of people with 90% of money and assets, either:

A.) The upper class are extremely rich and the rest are desperately poor, or:

B.) The masses have enough money to live comfortably and the upper class has 9x of that growth because that's how percentages work--thus this world has to have many times more total wealth relative to the world in option B. It works if that is feasible considering that world's industry.

But what about when inequality keeps growing as projected, and the 0.1% have 90% of the wealth? Then the 0.01%? For the rest of the people to have a similar quality of life, the total number of assets in the world would have to grow by 10,000x. Otherwise, some people have to get poorer for a perpetually smaller percentage of people to have 90%.

Wealth isn't strictly a zero-sum game, but at a certain absurd point the math doesn't work. At that threshold, cold hard physics kick in and physics is most certainly a zero-sum game. Physics is as zero-sum as it gets. Nature balances her books mercilessly. If wealth inequality is at reasonable levels and there's a reasonable amount of growth, it's perfectly possible for the middle and lower classes to be prosper while wealthy classes obtain much more money than they. But when the wealthy have an extreme majority of all assets--in order to keep the rest of society at a tolerable standard of living you'd be raising the total assets in the world by like ten thousand times. Obviously that wouldn't work. It assumes totally unrealistic rates of growth, which is a recurring issue for our civilization these days. Wealth does become a zero-sum game under specific conditions. Our civilization isn't a perpetual motion machine.

Just out of curiosity, what capabilities do you think are extremely valuable? This isn't an attack or anything, I ask with sincerity.

Eeeehhh I don't think that's as guaranteed as you make it out to be. Surviving technologies had a honeymoon phase, a disillusionment, and then they even out into a plateau. Not all technologies are guaranteed to survive forever and end up like this though, there are many examples of things that just plain weren't worth it once the true costs were revealed.

It's fine to lose touch with people. Some people are meant to drift away as you move forward in life, you can't have everything all the time. Those people still drift away even with facebook, you just have this illusion that they're still in your life. Often you have to watch their bizarre posts as they get old and go nuts. Or some arbitrary algo hides them from you anyway, and you forget they are even in your friends list. This is just me, but I think I'd rather have the fuzzy memories of some high school friend and the closure; the certainty of knowing that chapter of life is done. If both of us can't be bothered to put forth the minimum required effort to keep in touch, so be it. Is it really of any value to have a purely symbolic attachment to this person forever? Look through your full friends list and contemplate this for a while.

It's not certain yet, but the social cost of facebook could potentially be enormous and damaging. In the end will it really prove worthwhile? Should we put up with the "real marriage" after the honeymoon? If it's a sufficiently rocky marriage--if it's a one-sided and abusive relationship--the rational thing to do is not to hold tight, ignore it and ride it out. The right thing to do is plan for divorce. I think this is yet to be determined, but I'm starting to lean towards the opinion that near-exclusively digital socialization was a mistake.

I don't think counterfeit Macbook Pros are a threat to their market. Their users are usually pretty good about buying directly from Apple within their ecosystem. I don't think I've ever seen a counterfeit Macbook--there's other similar-looking laptops, but they are clearly marked as Windows machines and not trying to pass off as an actual Macbook. I'd love to see an example though, if I am being ignorant. I won't discount that possibility.

It seems they're butting up against the limit of what they are capable of reliably manufacturing, which certainly won't end well. I'm looking forward to seeing what direction they take for the next Macbook Pro, should be interesting.

The target market being people who don't want their screens to work lol? Sure, thinness and lightness are beneficial to an extent, but surely you see there's a point of diminishing returns? What's the optimal thinness? Do you want a laptop that's a millimeter thick and crumples like a squashed tin can in your bag? Nobody is saying we should go back to textbook-thick laptops, that's a total strawman.

We've reached incredibly thin and light tech, but there's a point where making it thinner vastly reduces usability and reliability without really producing any worthwhile benefits. And I hate the "not the target market" excuse. I hear that all the time, and it always seems like such a cop-out. Is there a demographic for broken displays and keyboards which apple desperately needs to pander to? What about professionals and power users? It's a Macbook Pro, after all. This should be exactly the target market. I think most pro users would rather have that millimeter back to make the keyboard and display work, it didn't make it bulky by any means. It was still incredibly svelte and light and thin.

Luckily I've solved both problems by removing all the friends from the equation. No annoying emails, no dystopic social media platforms! Just me and a bottle or five. What's the downside?

As somebody who uses my cards for rendering in my freelance work and hasn't played a AAA game since my teenage years, I'm definitely hoping to see AMD kick some ass and competitively drive down some prices. Especially since they actually seem to give a shit about linux drivers. Those saints!

Probably doesn't mention it because it's not a function of the gadget they're advertising. NLJDs cost several grand, after all.

Oh god. Yeah there's a fair share of weird junk on that site, which probably goes hand-in-hand with having the necessary paranoia to build your own nonlinear junction detector.

I found the link on Hackaday way back when, I have no idea about the rest of this shady IP address. Should have probably been more careful about posting something like this, but the electronics builds are so well documented.

That's a good point. The IR filter should light up like a beacon with most red LEDs that include a bunch of IR, such as the ones you see in a ring around most night-vision security cameras. I don't know if that would be detectable with just the naked eye and a filter, though. You'd have to have another camera capable of seeing the IR.

However it wouldn't detect those same night-vision cameras, since they are most often just standard webcam guts with that IR filter omitted as you say.. I really think this thing is just what it says--a lens detector, which catches specular glints off the glass lens and doesn't have much to do with the actual CCD or CMOS or whatever sensor is underneath. It could definitely be making use of the IR filter on most cameras to make those shine particularly bright.

That's not how you should buy tools, though. Unless you're a professional who is making a living with these tools, you don't walk straight up to the Snap-On truck and drop several grand on all the highest quality stuff. You go to Hazard Fraught and get the cheap ones, then you replace the ones that actually wear out or don't cut the mustard with something a few tiers up. Most of it will work just fine for a decade at a twentieth of the price.

The crowd here could probably build one of these out of whatever's in the junk drawer. Looks like it's the RX half of a cheap analogue walkie-talkie and some flashing lights. That's it. Two hundred bucks is egregious. Maybe if you were an actual LEO or a private eye, but for most people it makes absolutely no sense to buy the $200 version without first seeing if the $10 version does the job.

The LEDs on the front flash a certain wavelength of red light in an attention-grabbing manner and the filter blocks a lot of other light sources so the flashing red glint is easier to spot. It's pretty ingeniously simple. Of course it'll detect lots of other curved, reflective objects--the user has to verify it's a camera through manual inspection.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Anti-Spy-Hidden-Camera-Lens-Bug-Det...

Probably way crappier, but for what these electronics entail the one sold by the website in the post is vastly overpriced. It's a very simple radio, a battery, some LEDs, and an optical filter of some kind. Likely just a red gel. Plus, how great of a bug detector do most people really need? The main features are all there and it's probably workable in most cases.

Disclaimer, I don't own this. It could be a mega-turd, don't buy it on my account.

I'm interested that it doesn't mention the nonlinear junction detector, but I'm no spyhunter or anything and maybe that's an obsolete piece of equipment now. After all, there's certainly a lot more innocent transistors and diodes out in the world today than there were during the cold war. Also I'm not sure they're legal for just anybody to use since they vomit so much radio interference.

An interesting build:

http://67.225.133.110/~gbpprorg/mil/non/index.html

This sentence gave me a miniature zen moment. It's gone now, though.

This is an effect more people should experience. Everyone should study and work in their area of specialty until they are considered professionally competent in that subject, then go check out that subject's subreddit. Feel bleak and abject despair. Realize you should never use reddit / similar voting-based internet forums to learn about subjects you don't understand because the signal-to-noise ratio is miserable. It's all people who don't know yet they don't let that fact stop them from posting. Early generations of charlatans "educate" successive generations and so you have this illusion that people might know what they're talking about or at least it appears like there's some legit group consensus. But it's just people going around replying in every sub-thread parroting what some random shmoe posted elsewhere in the very same thread; people racing to parrot it before other people parrot it so they get to be top parrot. People vote for stuff that's familiar to them because we universally are attracted to things we already recognize, so what we get is a bunch of those special sort of misconceptions that are popular among novices churning around endlessly.

I'm beginning to think that user-curated content is fundamentally flawed.

Some of this shows it's hurting smaller adtech companies (read: advertisers who aren't google, facebook, amazon) but nothing here really shows it's hurting smaller site's revenue in general. There's some speculative stuff like how investors are reacting.

Yeah, I've been struck by this possibility while reading a lot of the rebuttals here. "Targeted ads work because otherwise why would they be so prevalent?" or "targeted ads work because x, y and z." There could be a kind of meta-advertising at work here, where adtech is often actually marketing towards the ad market itself. Would that mean it works? In a way--clearly lots of people are buying into it. And people wouldn't necessarily notice the scheme, because after all even if targeting isn't as effective as they claim it's still a form of advertisement and would generate some sales as dumb ads regardless of whether the targeting is really effective. We'd have to measure how much above that baseline the ads are driving actual sales somehow.

But I've yet to see some actual controlled evidence showing clear data in terms of sales that we can be reasonably sure were generated by targeted advertising. I think such evidence probably does exist, I'm not saying I don't believe it just yet. But all the arguments here seem to confuse science with scientism--what we have is a lot of reasoning and academic explanations of how people think it works, which is just not the same as evidence. It doesn't matter if something sounds like the way it might work in real life, we have to make observations to call something data. I haven't seen much data here.

I'd like to see some data which was collected in a quantifiable, carefully controlled and rigorous way. I'm not trying to be snarky or saying it doesn't exist, I'd just like to see some credible data.

I was able to find this study after banging my head against a bunch of paywalled sites trying to charge money for public domain research:

https://beesystrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Chris-S...

Working on reading through. Seems like it would be difficult to control an experiment like this, since the subjects know they will be seeing advertisements as part of a study and won't really be purchasing these items. I don't know, I'm looking forward to learning more about the experimental procedure. Also they seem to be measuring somewhat vague self-reported impressions about the ad in context of being targeted / untargeted, not the actual sales they produce. Drawing a line between these impressions and real ad performance seems to be mostly a matter of opinion. As I said it seems like a tough thing to quantify, and I'm hoping that people smarter than myself have found credible methods to truly measure it.

Do you have anything you'd like to recommend?

It's also a typical horseshit vague claim that almost certainly is the result of p-hacking ludicrous meta-studies and other nasty practices. Same as those damn red wine studies that come out all the time touting its health benefits. There's an astounding number of pure trash studies out there.

No, drinking burnt coffee isn't going to defend anyone's DNA. This is patently absurd. Come on y'all, don't vote for this kind of stuff. Shame.

It's pretty rare if you consider it percentage wise, as in proportion to all the vehicles on the road. Because there's so many hundreds of cars we encounter every single commute, even small percentages are reliably represented which makes rare things seem commonplace--after all, you see them every day. But the percentage of cars and motorcycles on the road that are older than fifty is still pretty dang low. Rare isn't the same as nonexistent, after all. I believe the average age of a vehicle on the road in the US is around eleven years, which is a record high.

My BMW R50/5 just turned 47, getting real close to that over-the-hill party. I'm planning to buy it a cake in a few years, plus I've got the parts for a top-end reseal. Going to be real classy. Definitely looking forward to it.

"Mr Siedentopf says he hopes the song will play for another 55 million years."

I think I can hear the engineers over at the Long Now foundation pissing their pants with laughter: http://longnow.org/clock/

They are only aiming for 10,000 years. A walk in the park compared to this apparently godlike and immutable mp3 player atop a painted plywood box. Has this guy even heard of atomic diffusion? Not like it'll last long enough for that to even come close to becoming a relevant factor.

Where do people get this idea that machines are eternal? It's outrageously rare to find a machine more complex than an adjustable wrench that lasts half a lifetime, let alone surpasses generations, but in nearly all of fiction machines are portrayed as ageless things that dwarf our puny lifespans as fragile meat-beings. It's simply not true.

This is a weird tangent, sorry for derailing.