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> I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway.

One year, not two.

There was never any hope of containing COVID. It was endemic by the end of 2019. Individual countries had a chance of avoiding it with border controls that no Western country has the political will to implement - but the will to implement an indefinite policy of sakoku no longer exists anywhere. Since COVID was globally endemic before official sources even acknowledged human-to-human transmission, there was never any hope of not taking the bullet eventually - although in theory "eventually" means "until the next Commodore Perry".

A reasonable strategy would be to slow the spread of the virus to study vaccines, treatment protocols, and the possibility of long-term sequelae, and to build medical capacity, and then, at some point, declare good-enough preliminary results and (modulo medical capacity concerns) let it rip. Letting it rip while there are still such vast unknown unknowns is irresponsible and only potentially justifiable in hindsight - Anders Tegnell looks good now, but it could've been a lot worse.

But the propaganda machine can't turn on a dime, so the measures lasted much longer than they had any reason to, at least in the parts of the "Free World" that believe in respecting established authority qua established authority.

The year is 2027. Power grids still go dark for ransom, but at least the internet has been turned back into TV. If you know how to use Linux, you might be able to pick up a fourth podcast!

What's the merit in distinguishing between bias and factual misinformation?

The Westboro Baptist Church could start a news outlet and report on every single time a gay man did something wrong or immoral. They wouldn't need to make anything up - there are a lot of gay men in the world. But would this be morally acceptable?

> the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers

Most of the people I know have been beaten or robbed at least once, or narrowly escaped being beaten or robbed. In almost all cases, the perpetrators were never caught. Are we the underclass?

The vast majority of cases of assault, robbery, and murder are not carried out by wealthy landowners or the police. If you're that concerned with people being beaten, robbed, and killed, your priorities should be different.

Is it a symptom of that, or is it a symptom of the fact that it's much easier for the sorts of people who'd go to protests and do things that get them arrested anyway to call themselves journalists?

If you don't rule out hobbyists, freelancers, and the self-employed, I can declare myself a journalist, start a blog or a Twitter, and start throwing Molotov cocktails, and if I get arrested for it, that's another arrest of a journalist.

And as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing opponent of the regime, I want to raise the number of arrests of journalists, because that makes the regime look bad, as shown by this thread. Even if every single arrest is of someone like me - a left-radical with a Twitter account, not Walter Cronkite or whoever - it's unlikely that anyone will bother to check, and even more unlikely that, if anyone bothers to check, very many other people will hear about it.

> If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist.

But if you would, you might still not be. I once got press credentials (and a steep press discount to an event) because I wrote for a group blog and knew a guy.

It's also how you get a list at all. I don't like EA's "Jeremy Bentham solved philosophy forever" worldview, but at least it gets them thinking big, you know? Is anyone else making these lists?

AI safety isn't an EA "preoccupation"; it's just weird enough and noticeable enough that it's easy to mistake existence and prevalence. It's also not even their weirdest position.

The first question on their list is about the 'problem' of wild animal suffering - and I've personally seen EAs argue that, because some animals are carnivorous, nature should be destroyed.

That's not even the weirdest position EAs take. Look up Brian Tomasik. Specifically, his paper about the possibility that electrons might suffer.

Concern about superhuman AI is one thing; bullet-biting utilitarianism is another entirely.

(This isn't the only place where their philosophical framework is stuck in the British Empire; they also tend to take a teleological view of history and moral development, and believe that their views are the self-evident progression of ethical development that every culture and civilization will come to eventually. They may not be as bad about this now as they used to be - there are questions about China now - but I don't think they're quite to the point of coming to terms with cultural contingency yet.)

Brave was a good browser. Now it's... what, a Chromium extension? I liked pre-rewrite Brave much more than post-rewrite. The tab contexts (or whatever they were called, it's been so long that I've forgotten) were great - pre-rewrite Brave had ten separate containers for cookies and so on, so if you kept Facebook in context 8, you'd only be logged into Facebook in context 8, and you could do all your other browsing in the nine other contexts.

This was also good for multiple accounts; most social media doesn't support clients anymore, or doesn't have good clients, and in order to keep separate topics separate, you need multiple accounts. So now I keep three different browsers open, because there's just no good way to do this otherwise.

I still mostly use Brave, but IMO it's much less differentiated from other browsers than pre-rewrite.

SAT IIs are pretty obscure, and I don't think there's any benefit to taking them over AP tests, since APs can sometimes be translated into college credits and have much more support in public schools.

One of the points of metrics is to reduce the relevance of how savvy your parents are. But you have to have pretty savvy parents to take the SAT IIs.

Metrics get a lot of heat from people who don't realize what the alternative is, but I know a guy who got into Harvard because his grandparents go to the same synagogue as some admissions people and called in a favor. _That's_ the alternative to metrics.

As other people have said, they're different sorts of thing; but the sort of thing React is wasn't as big a deal in 2010. Backbone and AngularJS, two frameworks that are practically Precambrian at this point, both had their first release in late 2010.

In 2010 terms: let's say you want to write a web app. jQuery : your library of useful PHP functions :: React : Ruby on Rails. That analogy breaks down in many obvious ways (React isn't MVC and [modulo JSX transpilation and whatnot] uses the same language as jQuery, Rails is not easy to reason about especially if you're in 2010 and method_missing isn't considered harmful yet), but hopefully the basic idea comes through - library of functions vs. very opinionated framework that facilitates rapid development.

Do none of these designers travel?

If you go to Amsterdam, you notice motifs from the flag of Amsterdam everywhere. They're everywhere because they're the sort of thing you can put everywhere.

If you go to Bremen, you notice the Stadtmusikanten everywhere. The flag looks like the logo of an oil company, so nobody uses it. The Stadtmusikanten are a little complex, but they're there and they're at least not lame.

You don't even have to go to Europe! What's Maryland's visual identity? The flag and a crab. You can't draw the flag from memory, but you know it when you see it, and it's not lame. It doesn't look like a gas station.

You could throw a dart at a book of coats of arms and land on something better than this Oklahoma design. It may not make sense for Oklahoma, but people would read sense into it over time, like they did with the flag of Amsterdam. Or they wouldn't. The Maryland flag has a complicated history, but there's no meaning that can be read off it without knowing that history.

> Because the fact that China has not engaged in non-local applications of violence

Yet.

The PRC has been internationally relevant for a few decades. The US has been internationally relevant practically since its founding.

And for whatever reason, people don't think the PRC has continuity with pre-Mao China -- which has been internationally relevant since long before the US existed, and which doesn't have a very nice track record.

And large-scale automated farming is less productive per acre than small-scale labor-intensive farming.