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kbal

@ kbal @fedia.io

Posts
4
Comments
659
Joined
3 yr. ago

I'd appreciate it if everyone could just stop burning fossil fuels, please. Thank you for your cooperation.

  • TIL about hedonic regression which decomposes the item being researched into its constituent characteristics

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  • There was a big online debate about it maybe 15 or 20 years ago and I spent some time looking into the details. It's not a bad idea in principle, but at least in the US and Canada they often take it to crazy extremes in order to hide price inflation.

    They might for instance fail to adequately account for the high prices paid by early adopters of something new being representative of something other than the inherent merits of the new thing. Today's cars and vacuum cleaners are indeed better than their 1980s equivalents in many ways, but imo they're not better by nearly so much as to explain the "hedonic" adjustments that have been made.

  • What do you think about using older memes?

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  • Mine only cost $300 sometime in the late 80s. Computer prices kept on declining all the way from 1950 to 2016.

    (edit to make a better guess at start and end years — 2016 because it was the year of the 1080ti)

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  • SearxNG is the only way I know of to get reasonably good results.

  • Do you block accounts that post with very high frequency?

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  • I block them if (f * t - p - e) / q * r passes a certain threshold, where f is the frequency of posting, t is how annoyed I am by the general theme or topic of those posts, p is the cuteness of their profile pic, e is the amount of effort they put into each post, q is the overall quality of the posts, and r is a random number generated by my subconscious.

  • What's the worst part about getting older that young people don't know about?

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  • Realizing how stupid you were when you were young.

  • What kind of things do you think movies are most dishonest about?

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  • I prefer a more deontological approach. Don't do bad things, even if they threaten you.

  • What kind of things do you think movies are most dishonest about?

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  • I find that they too often exaggerate the wisdom of following the orders of the bad guy. Like, if they say "drop your weapon or I shoot the hostage" okay sure, maybe consider dropping your weapon, depending on circumstances. If it's "give me the MacGuffin I need to release the neurotoxin and kill fifty million people or I shoot the hostage" maybe don't do that.

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  • The offensively stupid part is where they pretend it's not a hypothetical thing that might some day exist after a series of unprecedented breakthroughs that there's no sign of yet, but something that might be here any day now if it's not already upon us.

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  • Are you an LLM? Or just a troll? That's another problem with "AI" — it's hard to tell, these days.

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  • This should be a poll. Why do you hate "AI"?

    • The sheer volume of hype it gets is horrifying and everyone needs to stop talking about it
    • It's a trillion dollars of wasted investment capital that is going to wreck the financial markets
    • Its main use is generating bullshit and we already have enough of that
    • All the talk about the dangers of AI superintelligence is insulting to real intelligence
    • Slop is no substitute for thought and it's drowning out real culture
    • All the fucking bots are making life hard for web server admins for no good reason
    • The amount of energy it wastes is unconscionable
    • Almost every use of it seems to be a misuse of it
    • It's too expensive to be worthwhile
    • It'd have to get a lot more expensive if the people selling it were ever going to stop losing money
    • The more people rely on it the worse it makes everything
    • Nobody has the slightest idea how they could ever make it trustworthy
    • Its output is often wrong in subtle ways that are hard to detect
    • People have a tendency to imagine intelligence where it isn't there, causing psychological harm
    • Nobody can afford dram any more
    • That you found something it seems useful for is outweighed by all of the above

  • What's one book everyone should read at least once in their lifetime?

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  • The Crying of Lot 49 — it's pretty short.

  • What's your most interesting dream?

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  • I dreamed that I owed someone an apology for something I had said to them in a dream.

  • How can you make sure that my post that you are reading now is real and that you are not currently dreaming?

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  • I will suppose that some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.

    I shall think of your post, my keyboard, the sky, the air, the earth, all colours, shapes, sounds and all external things as merely the delusions of dreams. Dreams devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands, or eyes, or ascii, or bandwidth, or ganja, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.

    I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation; and, even if it is not in my power to know any truth, I shall at least do what is in my power: I will resolutely guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree.

    (... remembering that most search engines suck now and so people who don't recognize it might have trouble finding out what that's from: it's Descartes.)

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    Automods suck

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  • I wouldn't call them a necessary evil. More of an ineffective annoyance.

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  • Is this just Linux propaganda, or how much of it is true?

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  • If you seriously want to know, bear in mind that you're only going to get answers here from the kind of people willing to watch a youtube video based on nothing more than that clickbait thumbnail, and that audience might consist mainly of very weird people.

  • TIL Humans have a tendency to walk counterclockwise over walking clockwise

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  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • It's a difficult question, so I hope some people who have interesting things to say about it will turn up here. All I can contribute is this link: Ancient Arguments For Vegetarianism

  • What was your most profound psychedelic experience?

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  • One time I read about the Buddha and I decided to just sit quietly under a tree for as long as it took. It took a while. Sure I've also tried lots of drugs but nothing really beats zazen if you manage to get to the end.