tasty_freeze

I'm a 62 year old straight man. I've described the change this way.

I've always been able to see a handsome man, say Pierce Brosnan back in the day, and say "he is quite handsome" without have a whit of sexual stirrings. When I was young seeing a beautiful woman would trigger desires, but now it is like looking at handsome men. I can recognize they are attractive but it is purely intellectual with no emotional or hormonal attachment.

You missed my distinction -- I said that the Chinese companies (like BYD) would eat Tesla's lunch except for they aren't in the US market. The other companies which Tesla does compete with have largely caught up and in some ways surpassed Tesla.

Why Musk would spend probably tens of millions of dollars on this prototype which clearly will never be drivable on roads. One explanation is he is a trillionaire and the 14 year old in him thinks it would simply be cool to do it.

I think there is a more rational explanation. Tesla sales have slowed, other companies are catching up, and if it weren't for import issues, Chinese cars would be eating Tesla's breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yet Tesla is trading at a 330 P/E and Musk has to do something to make it seem like Tesla is still light-years ahead of everyone else and just wait, that 330 P/E will be justified any quarter now. Just like shooting a roadster into deep space was just a PR stunt, this is a PR stunt to boost the brand with no actual market relevance.

As someone who has been programming for nearly 50 years of it, it seems less remarkable.

The Supreme Court ruled that it is 100% constitutional for states to disenfranchise voters based on party affiliation. I am not constitutional expert so I'll take them at their word that this is indeed the case.

So you'd expect that there would be a bipartisan movement to fix this by making a constitutional amendment to establish it as a right. We're a democracy after all. Despite the cries that "both sides do it" one side would fight tooth and nail to block any such effort, and I'm disappointed that the other side has given up and isn't willing to fight tooth and nail to promote the issue.

Yes, it is a tricky issue to make rules that guarantee fairness in elections and there are people who spend their lives figuring out ways to undermine democracy. But certainly we can put in some legal boundaries that make things limit the worse abuses.

JD Vance, VP of the USA, recently said that if Watergate happened today it wouldn't last a 24 hour news cycle. I don't know if his intent was to minimize the crime of the acting President ordering a break in of his opponent or if Vance was inadvertently admitting that the stuff Trump is doing is so much worse than Watergate.

I'm a materialist and man your opinion is going to give materialists a bad name. It is easy to jump from "rabbits are not conscious" to "rabbits can't suffer" to "it is OK to skin rabbits alive".

I believe we are all just bags of chemicals playing out the laws of physics, no libertarian free will at all. Consciousness is an orthogonal issue. Humans have it, and if you have ever lived with a dog you'd agree they have it too despite not being verbal ... hell, it isn't rare for humans to have no internal dialog yet nobody would say they are not conscious.

Consciousness is a continuum and there is no bright line where it starts/stops. Bacteria react to their environment but they are conscious in the same way that one minute after shaving I have a "beard" -- technically the hair stubble rises above the surface of my skin, but it isn't a beard. Wait a month and clearly I do, but there is no bright line where I transition to having a beard.

It probably means Apple spent the silicon to handle subnormals at full speed in hardware, rather than triggering a slow microcode handler for such numbers.

no. IEEE splits the power of two exponent from the base 2 mantissa. Yes, the exponents are added during a multiply, but the mantissas do an ordinary multiply.

The idea is rather than storing a number x as (exponent, mantissa), just store (log x) as a fixed precision number. Multiplying two such numbers is just addition, dividing is just subtraction. TBH I didn't read the article, but my reaction is that yes, that works, but one must sum all those products, and now summing becomes an expensive operation. Maybe the total cost saves area and power, but it beggars belief that it is 10x more efficient. They must be doing PR math: our low precision log scheme is 10x more efficient than a higher precision traditional approach.

Another thing to keep in mind is a lot of inference is done using very low precision math and so the cost of doing multiplies isn't that bad. Yes, it is still (n bits) squared, but as n gets small, n^2 still isn't too bad.

It was more than one minute.

> her "rational objections" were not be-all and end-all of the situation.

I hope this is not what you think my position is.

If you want to change someone's mind, you need to understand it. If someone believes false information, and if they are driven my emotion due to everything they've heard, then giving them a bullet list of facts will not change their mind 95% of the time.

You've probably heard of the term "steel manning" when arguing with someone. If you cannot state the other person's argument in a way that they agree with, then you are just talking past each other. If you can state their position as well or better than they can, now you in a better position to change their mind.

If your goal isn't to change their mind, then go ahead, just keep calling them stupid and making no progress with them.

I got the covid shot and every booster. I have no qualms about mRNA messing me up, and I think it was a tremendous life saver. As stated, there was also a ton of misinformation floating around, and people believed that misinformation.

The thing is most of those people made rational objections. The problem is their reasoning was based on false information. They didn't see it as being anti social as they thought the drug was a boondoggle, untested, and that covid wasn't serious. I disagree with all of it, but it is important to understand why they objected, and not just saying they are selfish or antisocial.

There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.

However, that discussion was largely side-tracked by the massive amount of disinformation (eg, "Plandemic") that circulated online. There are people who to this day swear that COVID-19 was just like the flu and simultaneously claim that the vaccine spike proteins have killed around 20M people. Not just crackpots, but people with reach, like Brett Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast.

Which is worse, when people noun verbs, or when they verb nouns?