YourNetworkIsHaunted

And a Quarian who went to business school

Machines with a lot of precision parts that need to hold up to the kind of wear and tear either a Marine or a maniacal quilter are capable of dishing out. So many layers of fabric...

Hat tip to this reply showcasing a beautiful example of image gen. Very éthiccal(athiccal?) technology.

I mean the Kharkiv offensive of 2023 showed us how effective tractors can be in capturing heavier-armored vehicles in certain situations.

Oh wait, there's one! How could I miss it when it's got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

It's almost like when despots funnel oil money into maintaining power and self-aggrandizing megaprojects instead of basic public services you don't see the "lots of education" part kicking in.

Meanwhile, if there are these outliers where low IQ didn't prevent people from getting wealthy and there isn't some kind of political economy reason for it, doesn't that undermine the value of IQ as a metric? Like, you and I know that IQ is garbage but it's worth noting how "maybe IQ is just garbage" is always floating at the edge of their reasoning.

Read through the whole affair and just had to keep shaking my head the whole way through. Like, they're at least capable of pretending to disavow the Nazis and fundies who follow the same pro-kid-having definitely-not-eugenics ideas. And they talk about some of the real obstacles or having kids; raising a child and setting them up for something resembling success is expensive and hard and the world doesn't exactly feel like it's on an upwards trajectory. But rather than look at those problems in their own right and try to actually make living cheaper or easier for people in ways that would make having kids more viable and more rewarding (How long are you at the office? How much time and energy do you have when you get home?), these upper-class twits of their generation are trying to convince the few people for whom those aren't as serious problems that they should have kids. Like, I'm all in favor of improving reproductive health and that kind of technology but we are nowhere near the point where that's going to make a population-level impact on demographics. Like, they're out here trying to figure out if they can make the run to third base when they've only just brained the mascot with a foul ball. Solve the actual problem in front of us first.

‘It became clear to me that people wanted more children than they were having,’ Babu says.

So clearly the best action is to constantly tell everyone how great kids are and that they should totally have them. Because that solves the problem of people wanting kids they don't/can't have. I try to read even our designated sneer fodder in good faith but I can't understand why anyone thinks these people are at all intelligent beyond the "only slightly less than average" level. I thought Good Will Hunting taught everyone the difference between smart and rich, but maybe that was just me.

The continued polytopia mentions just keep reminding me of this take from Dave Karpf. Like, he's not talking about incredibly deep games here (no offense to the people who love them) and in the context of him trying to take on the reigns of Presidentissimo or whatever all the arguing and doubting about his gamer cred is obscuring the arguments over how weird this is to try and focus on. Like, if he was trying to claim he was a Go all-star or something that would be one thing. Even Chess has tradition behind it, even if it's actual utility for learning more general strategic thinking is more questionable. But Polytopia and Diablo? Really? If we did start apportioning political power to whoever can execute a basic strategy while clicking as fast as possible I think we'd all be bowing down to God-Emperor Flash or something.

Anyways, even if we put my unearned strategy gaming elitism aside this is such a dumb argument to be having in the first place and I don't know that I can forgive Elon for making it part of the problem.

My gut says that liquidity in this context means "making sure that there are tokens available to purchase for initial buyers" or in other words listing them on the market instead of distributing them at initial purchase price.

Pretty sure there's gonna be a contract somewhere that defines raw intelligence as "the amount of money you make for OpenAI."

If only someone had written a pretty interesting case study in how you can use valid-looking data to prove anything, even the existence of psychic powers. And people have been trying to scientifically justify racism for just about as long as the scientific method has been a thing, while studying psychic powers didn't really pick up until the latter half of the 20th century.