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Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
>He is neither affiliated with the person who lost the legos

I haven't watched part 2 yet, but he absolutely is affiliated with the person who lost the LEGOs. He's explicitly working with the son, who was the previous person that was running point on trying to get the sets back until it ruined his life.

Comment · 1 year ago
Heat pump != Geothermal energy generation, or any energy generation at that

Home geothermal /could/ be a power source, sure, but I do not believe that’s what OP intended to say when mentioning heat pumps. I’d be pretty surprised if it was becoming common in Europe to have home geothermal

A heat pump (which are more common in Europe, but they’re gaining popularity in the US) is essentially a reversible air conditioner that can take advantage of the latent energy in the air to move heat very efficiently. They’re a great invention, but they have nothing to do with producing energy

Comment · 1 year ago
And it's also the result of policy changes that Amazon is making in a few days:

https://www.theverge.com/news/612898/amazon-removing-kindle-...

From the article you linked:

>The new law won’t apply to stores that offer “permanent offline” downloads

Amazon is actively choosing to do this to maintain an even tighter grip on their ecosystem

Comment · 1 year ago
Are you really saying that psychology doesn’t have “any sort of reproducible outcomes,” or are you not including that one in your definition of “soft sciences?” The comment you’re replying to explicitly did, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Because Skinner boxes exist. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built around them (casinos, gacha games/loot boxes), just to pick a super low-hanging-fruit example.

Comment · 2 years ago
It makes even more sense when you take the law of large numbers into account. The scale we're experiencing most things on is /so/ far removed from the scale on which these probabilities are being expressed.

There are more molecules in a cup of water (on the order of 10^24) than there are cups of water in the ocean. If you have a cup of water's worth of matter, you aren't just rolling 10 dice (or even 1000 dice) and looking for mostly 6s. You're rolling a few septillion dice and hoping for a significantly non-normal distribution. It just isn't feasible.

Comment · 2 years ago
> But if you got a computer program with 1% of the instructions switched out, I bet you’d get a non-working program.

I believe it was a comment I saw on here once that took it a step further and included the OS and all hardware logic in there as well. I can have two identical desktop computers with only one program installed on each, the only difference being that the program is totally different. Those two devices could ultimate be two seemingly completely unrelated machines to the end user, even though they share far more than 99% of the exact same instructions. The only "code" they wouldn't share is the specific program they run. Everything else from the hardware to the OS is many millions of "lines" that are the same.

Something that plays movies nonstop vs a production database. Photoshop vs Halo: The Master Chief Collection. An IDE vs a point of sale system. Control software vs a web browser. A program that locks you into the software vs one that still gives you access to the OS. The differences can start getting seemingly huge very quickly.

Comment · 2 years ago
Stars have to have enough mass to have enough gravity to start and sustain a nuclear reaction that constantly blasts energy out in all directions. This limits just how energy-dense they can get. What they lack there, they make up for in size and lifespan.

We can make sustained nuclear reactions in much less space using engineered pressure instead of gravity, so that skews the energy density ratio.

Comment · 2 years ago
The narrator on many episodes of How It's Made says "row butt"
Comment · 3 years ago
I’m aware, but thank for your sharing the info for anyone who might not be :)

I just meant that I wish that /I/ could downvote people. I don’t comment much, but racebaiting like that should just be greyed out

Comment · 3 years ago
Times like this I really wish I could downvote people on here
Comment · 3 years ago
> Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime

Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just simply not the approach that countries with globally low crime rates take? At the very least, it's insanely reductive. USA already has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Supporting and hiring more police officers into a broken system won't help anything, especially when the cops are often criminals themselves (let alone the fact that their priorities so frequently seem to be contrary to the community's).

On some level, sure, we need a form of policing that the public trusts, and we need to take crime seriously when appropriate. USA is nowhere near the first point, and is fumbling the bag terribly when trying to apply the second point.

Strong social support nets and programs, fostering community and civic culture, a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place--these are all much more effective steps as opposed to "more cops, more people in jail."

Comment · 3 years ago
> I'm saying maybe it's as ethical as current medical science, as long as you sterilize them

This is eugenics. You are the one that brought it up saying maybe it's relatively ethical. I'm rejecting that point and saying that it categorically is not ethical.

Comment · 3 years ago
> It's pretty easy to monitor a handful of test subjects with heritable mutations and make sure they don't reproduce

So just to be clear, what we're talking about here is a protocol for performing eugenics on humans that were bred as part of an experiment, right? And ethically, that isn't a hang-up for you?

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