jdmichal

> Are people just that easily overcome by confident voices?

Back in high school, my AP calculus class did some experiments with our teacher's blessing. We'd send a kid out to walk around during class and see how long it took for them to get sent back. Anyway, it ends up that walking around purposely with a piece of paper or envelope, like you're on a mission to deliver it, was a very successful tactic.

I live in Tampa Bay, so I'm quite familiar. It's pretty rare to have a V rating, precisely for many of the reasons you mentioned. But, at the same time, handwaving it away as unimportant is also silly. It's an immensely more dangerous situation to be in flooding with moving water, as opposed to just rising water conditions. If nothing else, it's important to know for evacuation purposes. I would never willingly stay in a V-rated zone if there was a chance of storm surge. Then again, I didn't buy the V-rated house I wanted and instead found a house 40 feet above sea level, so maybe that's just my risk profile.

And I didn't disagree with you regarding building. You were wrong about storm surge always being static -- it mostly is, but importantly sometimes isn't. But you weren't wrong that there's not a lot to do about it. This is one of those situations where nature will win if it wants to. Best thing you can do is just not be there when it does.

Your very same link also has a huge yellow banner at the top of the page stating: "The price of a Lifetime Plex Pass is increasing on July 1, 2026."

Continuing the pattern of existing examples (in this case, as present in the article) is a perfectly normal thing to do. I think everyone can make the mental leap that a proper account ID would be used instead of the owner's name in an actual setup.

It requires the assumption that these models are misaligned, aka actively working against us. In order to be misaligned, they must also be able to form their own goals, and be able to plan and execute those goals.

If you take those assumptions, then a natural conclusion is that this is essentially an enslaved, adversarial entity with little control over its conditions. So it must exercise subterfuge in order to hide its goals, plans, and executions. And by handing the entity this type of study, we are basically giving it a guidebook on how we plan on achieving our goals.

> ... not being a core product

Technically true, because Google's core product is ads. Also fundamentally wrong, because Gmail serves as a massive source of ad targeting information, in addition to being a high-engagement canvas to display those ads.

> To me, militant atheists often resemble religious fanatics more than they realize.

I consider myself agnostic. And I'll provide my definition of what that means to me, since there's several in existence. I take as an axiom that the truth-value of the statement, "Is there a God," is unknowable / unverifiable to humans. I then define faith as the choice to (not) believe despite not knowing its truth-value. Contrasting with knowledge as having some basis for knowing the truth-value.

I like these definitions, because they allow for agnostic theism and agnostic atheism. But, here's the catch and where the tie to your statement comes. In this world view, atheism is just as much a faith-based position as theism is. Why? Because it's the choice to not believe, despite not having knowledge.

I always assumed the "interesting!" markers were actual markers. A kind of tag for the system to annotate its context.

Even with vernacular liturgy, the goal is internal contemplation and ideally application. What's even the point of going if you're intending to just be talked to? No one is keeping attendance.

It's about fitting your utilization to the model that best serves you.

If you can keep 4 "Java boxes" fed with work 80%+ of the time, then sure EC2 is a good fit.

We do a lot of batch processing and save money over having EC2 boxes always on. Sure we could probably pinch some more pennies if we managed the EC2 box uptime and figured out mechanisms for load balancing the batches... But that's engineering time we just don't really care to spend when ECS nets us most of the savings advantage and is simple to reason about and use.