Recent submissions

Comment · 7 years ago
Oh ho ho. Next you're going to be questioning the "race to AI". It's like you want to be forced to read articles about raccoons with distemper, instead of buzzwordy tech FUD pieces, on slow news days. Is this what you want? Is it possible, dare I say it, that you might even want want us to lose the race to racing? Why are you rocking the boat?
Comment · 7 years ago
Having saved myself a headache earlier by parsing some HTML with regex, I'm appreciating this post. On the other hand, if you don't obey dogma, it may impair the delivery of your cargo. Everything is a tradeoff.
Comment · 7 years ago
I also wonder about this. I think some benchmarks are in order, with checks for the impact of escape analysis/copy to heap.
Comment · 7 years ago
I agree this seems low. Both housing and additional expenses. How do I know if I'm the victim of an hedonic treadmill?
Comment · 7 years ago
tl;dr: they had nice jewelry, so it wasn't really dark

I don't understand why people feel the need to whitewash this, aside from a preexisting religious motive or mindlessly being contrary. Civilization went backwards after Rome fell. It took centuries to rediscover and reincorporate those parts of Western culture.

I worry that too many people secretly want to go back to being serfs.

Comment · 7 years ago
It doesn't really matter what you or SciAm think Kuhn believed, I'm telling you that the humanities faculty have used him to cosign the most outrageous anti-realist ideas imaginable. If you don't believe me, just take a class and find out!
Comment · 7 years ago
Kuhn's a realist... someone needs to tell the Humanities departments this because it's definitely not the interpretation they've been running with!
Comment · 7 years ago
I suspect they're the exception, although they may be including stock options or could even be nonsense, this being the internet and all.
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
The real question is, where can I get some hott wireguard swag?
Comment · 8 years ago
Well the postmodernists certainly cite Kuhn in support of their anti-reality drivel, but the real problem with Kuhn is that he was just wrong.

There's a mature science, where knowledge is limited but accurate, where new findings cause a recontextualization but no paradigm shift, and the previous knowledge is preserved within its new context,, and immature science, where people are doing things wrong, reaching conclusions with inadequate evidence, and stuff gets thrown out during a "paradigm shift", i.e. when they start doing mature science.

Examples of mature science are physics with the incorporation of relativity and quantum physics, which preserved Newtonian physics, or biology, where the human genome project revealed that there were 1/3 as many genes in humans as was previously thought, at which the field barely batted an eye and shifted in a heartbeat to looking more at gene regulation. Clearly, these are huge changes in the fields, but they don't rise to the level of a Kuhnian "paradigm shift" since the old knowledge and vocab and understandings were preserved.

What's an immature science? Probably the social sciences, or those areas of other fields where there's reproducibility problems, p-hacking, and other dysfunctions. To the extent that these fields have overarching paradigms, they may suffer a "paradigm shift". But in mature science, there just aren't any paradigm shifts, in the Kuhnian sense, happening, because a mature science has sufficient evidence in hand before generating a "paradigm".

Kuhn was wrong. But "Paradigm Shift" is a flashy phrase and it captured the zeitgeist of the time it was written. At this point, anything that helps tame this pop-philosophy-of-science phenomenon is not unwelcome, especially because, yes, Kuhn's writings are supporting anti-realist postmodernist trash, without being especially misread.

Comment · 8 years ago
This is a tragic decision on Dropbox's part. The service's popularity is a product of it being stable and running everywhere. If they start pulling back compatibility, where does it end? Even if this change only impacts a small percentage of users, it threatens everyone that their compatibility may be revoked.

Dropbox is violating their philosophy as a universal solution and squandering their key selling point for some small cost savings. What a horrible decision.

Comment · 8 years ago
I think you're confused. When poets talk about "enrichment" they mean spiritual enrichment.
Comment · 8 years ago
I guess the question is whether selling targeted ads counts as selling personal information under this law. My impression is that it doesn't, which makes me wonder what the author was thinking. In fact, this will be worst for the smaller companies that don't harvest, target and serve all in-house, while the behemoths will be untouched.

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