as alive as you need me to be
It makes much more sense if you read the last third or so of the post.
They convert their examples of algorithms optimizing for different or wrong things into direct social commentary on how social media algos optimize for rage, as this is more profitable than something that would optimize for... you know, improving society... many elements of modern tech driven society are optimizing for the wrong thing.
The entire set up of the post is 'i am a computer scientist and my job is i sweep floors in a grocery store'.
That entire setup is a society nonsensically 'optimizing' what it does with workers of various skill sets.
This person did this because they are immensely bored and underutilized, they are underemployed.
IE, the labor market / education system is very badly optimized.
A better optimized society would have them writing a post with them describing a more consequential, practically useful code adventure.
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Ok, so, Pluto is more spherical than Mercury, but the most important criteria is local gravitational dominance.
Which Mercury has, but Pluto does not.
I do not see how this is a difficult concept to grasp.
Yeah, sometimes you can make a hasty definition, and then refine it to a level of consistent clarity, after it is justly critiqued, though that refined definition may be multi tiered and somewhat complex.
Thats... thats how science works, thats like the entire fundamental concept of it, right there, improving the level of detail to which you understand reality, via empiricism, logic, participatory debate.
The primary purpose of the planet defition refinenment is to emphasize the importance of relative local gravitational dominance.
I'm trying to imagine you using this kind of logic with like, biological taxonomy.
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At that point the only really 'planety' thing about is is basically that it is spherical.
Its not primarily orbiting the sun, so much as it is the barycenter of itself and charon.
And there are moons that are bigger, and more spherical, and more massive than Pluto.
And while it does have the vaguely heart shaped terrain feature, Mars has a smiley face crater, Saturn has an eternal hexagon on its north and south poles, despite being a gas giant, Jupiter has the spot, Mimas kinda looks like the Death Star, etc.
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Its because its a colloquial phrase that more or less the media picked up and ran with.
Actual astronomers and astrophysicists use math to describe what they're talking about, math that you can find and learn fairly easily on wikipedia.
Lay people tend to just evaluate a phrase for its extremely literal meaning, not realizing that it is at best just pop science jargon, short hand to refer to a pretty well defined and precise concept, that is difficult to summarize without losing specificity.
There are many, many other examples of this kind of thing happening with other phrases or terms used to refer to complex concepts.
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What is going to be funny is if/when they discover planet 9, and all the apparent Pluto superfans just utterly lose their shit when they attempt to comprehend that there can be another actual planet, and no, pluto still doesn't count.
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You could just look up the actual astronomical or mathematical definitions of a 'cleared orbit' if you wanted to, you know that right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood
As a consequence it does not then share its orbital region with other bodies of significant size, except for its own satellites, or other bodies governed by its own gravitational influence.
This latter restriction excludes objects whose orbits may cross but that will never collide with each other due to orbital resonance, such as Jupiter and its trojans, Earth and 3753 Cruithne, or Neptune and the plutinos.[3]
As to the extent of orbit clearing required, Jean-Luc Margot emphasises "a planet can never completely clear its orbital zone, because gravitational and radiative forces continually perturb the orbits of asteroids and comets into planet-crossing orbits" and states that the IAU did not intend the impossible standard of impeccable orbit clearing.
Pluto and other plutinos are bodies whose orbits are significantly governed by Neptune.
Go look at all the numerical values provided by various algorithms that measure essentially the extent to which a celestial body is locally gravitationally dominant, the extent to which it has 'cleared its orbit'.
You may notice that everything considered a dwarf planet scores orders of magnitude less, by literally all the metrics, than actual planets.
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No.
Lets try a more simple metaphor.
One person is navigating through a crowd, occasionally bumping into other people, having to juke and dodge their way around.
Another person has an entourage or body guards to their front, and two gaggles of papparazzi following behind them, at each 45 degree angle to their rear, as they walk through an entire empty street 4 lane street, with some occsional people walking past the whole scene on the sidewalk.
Pluto and Charon are basically an awkward, clumsy couple trying to get through a densely packed mall or convention.
Neptune is Taylor Swift, as an entire parade float, just, herself, body guards, papparazzi. And I guess she also can have some literal ingroup orbiters who manage to stick around, their lives revolve around her the same way their walking patterns do.
And then maybe, by chance, that awkward couple leaves the convention, gets lost, walks the wrong way to a restaurant, and end up just directly crossing the street that Swift walked down, 6 hours ago.
There, is that a sufficiently relatable visual metaphor to illustrate the difference between the two situations?
Every game is an idle game now... ?
Sure, why not.
Average Adult US reading level is between a 5th and 6th grader.
At least 15% are at 2nd grade or below, ie, functionally illiterate.
Only around 5% to 10% can read at a level where they can perform their own critical analysis of different news sources covering the same topic, evaluate for bias, emphasized details, left out context, etc.
... Most Americans are indeed thumb sucking morons.
Remember the Hermain Cain Award subreddit?
Hundreds of documented cases of people vehemently refusing real treatment for a 'fake' disease, being immensely cocky and belligerent untill very nearly the end, and then, near the end... still somewhere between defiant, in denial, and delusional.
... Those are the private citizens in the US with the vast majority of the guns.
You are completely correct, many areas of the US will collapse into pockets of highly armed, highly religious cults, utterly bereft of anything resembling logic, beyond the sociopathic logic of how to run a cult.
Basically, a couple of David Koresh's for every county. Good luck!
... What about teeth?
... Does he just keep growing teeth?
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C Suite is in a cult.
Tons of Microsoft senior engineers have been resigning over this kinda shit.
Not getting fired or laid off, though that's happening too... resigning.
Bill Gates himself has expressed significant dissapointment with where the company has gone and is going, thinks AI needs to be optional, its clearly not ready.
... Everyone hates this other than C Suite, who are either psychotically delusional, in an actual AI worshipping cult (you'd be surprised how many tech high ups are in one), or, they simply hate us and want us to die, want to be the overlords of whatever is left after they basically destroy modern civilization.
I truly wish I had better news to convey, or a plan to offer.
I... came from a not dissimilar family situation as yourself.
More or less, it was dumb luck in the end that allowed me to finally escape them and ... just move to a shitty dump of an apartment, halfway across the country, middle of nowhere, but I can afford it, and I usually have my peace and quiet and solitude.
Most of the other people here have been through some shit, and aren't looking to cause or get into any more trouble, but every once in a while some dipshit lights up a cigarette indoors and we all get have a fire drill at 2am.
Infinitely preferable to having 0 privacy whatsoever and walking on eggshells literally all the time.
I dunno, hey, on the bright side, at least you didn't have to go through two heatwaves and two blizzards while homeless, at least you're not still crippled, after a year of physical therapy to recover from all the injuries that caused.
But... I also know what the stress and mental toll of living with psych os is like, its truly maddening.
I hope that you are able to find peace and solace in something.
I used to work for the largest non profit shelter system in a major West Coast city.
- All the shelters have been beyond completely full since the second year of Covid.
- No, there's basically nothing that is specifically aimed at helping cishet men.
... and that was all true before Trump/DOGE basically cut 80% of funding for social services, non profit grants, etc.
The entire system of shelter and aid for the homeless and at risk and domestic abuse victims and all that, broadly, its completely collapsing right now.
Trump's having FEMA build comcentration camps for the homeless, that's the new 'model'.
Realistic advice for this person would be to find some friend or extended family member they can stay with for a while, there's almost 0 chance that any of the organizations listed out in the comprehensive top reply will do anything other than waste this person's time with intake procedures and then not actually be able to help them meaningfully.
Yeah sorry if this a gut punch but uh yeah, the most at risk suffer the most under fascism, who woulda thought.
We're gonna be looking at 5 to 10 million homeless people by the end of 2026.
Wait a minute...
Zoom in on the hand.
...Enhance.
Oh no.
Whoops, now I'm a fungal colony / gestalt consciousness... untill the planet I'm on gets killed by its star?
Is that how you... achieve, or totally avoid samsara?
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https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf
https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/ckle23.pdf
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-deaths-from-homicide?country=USA%7ECOL%7EVEN
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-across-sources?country=%7EUSA
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2023-crime-in-the-nation-statistics
... many of these are either very complex and/or have links to the actual data sources buried somewhere within the pages...
I'm not writing a report to publication standards here.
I'm making a lemmy comment.
On a phone.
If you'd like to commission me to write out a full, proper report, do a comprehensive meta-analysis of my own, well I have about a decade of experience being varying kinds of data analyst, db manager, econometrician, so ... eh, $50 bucks an hour sounds like a bargain for a one off project.
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What do you mean exactly by 'criticizing threat perception'?
By showcasing empirical data, I am providing the means by which the fuzzy, heuristic driven, very often innaccurate, incorrect, and prone to bias threat perception of a human brain can be improved, can be made more accurate, more in line with actual reality.
The alternative is vibes based exaggerations and misconceptions.
Do you... not see the value in the general concepts of empiricism, the scientific pursuit of getting closer to 'the truth'?
Do you not think its possible to moderate or modify your innate threat perception, with more data, so that you can see threats that your squishy, approximating brain otherwise wouldn't, so that you can use reasoned logic to determine which things your intution is assessing incorrectly?
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I mean... not to seem like I'm bragging, but, because you brought it up...
I've had a number of monogamous relationships, and when not in one of those, had a decent number of one-offs, flings, as well.
Somewhere between 10 and 20, all of those together, and a few of them were even technically models, you know, part-time, for little tv spots or some kind photo shoot or something... but yeah, yeah I'm not an incel, lol.
Oh right, and I'm bi. Had a few interesting encounters with men... not bad overall, but I do tend toward appreciating the female form a bit more, generally.
And also... I don't own a gun.
I don't really... need one...?
I grew up occasionally plinking with .22s at the range... but I don't need a gun.
Someday I might like to get back into just range plinking again, I find the whole breathing control thing to be ... kind of zen-like, relaxing.
But I don't need one, for self defense, even crippled as I currently am.
And I currently live in a fairly shitty neighborhood, as far as crime rates amd drug activity goes...
...but you'd maybe be surprised by how far just being generally polite, not looking like you have anything worth taking, and having conflict de-escalation skills can go toward keeping you safe.
Its not lack of critical thinking.
It is motivated reasoning.
They're using their brains, they're using them to justify atrocities, by unmaking the atrocity into something else.
They're thinking critically, but without the concept of arriving at a conclusion that seems to make sense, they are instead doing it backwards; scrambling for narratives and lines of reasoning that avoid the obvious conclusion and obvious evidence.
... this is evil.
I literally cannot think of a better definition of evil then starting from knowing you are wrong and then doing everything you can to gaslight yourself and others into not thinking you are wrong.
The Minnesota Fraternal Order of Police or whatever they fuck their little piggy club is called, who issued a statement explicitly denying reality and reframing this as a PR problem for people who don't support the unwarranted first degree murder of civillians?
Literally evil.
These people are not redeemable, they are fundamentally broken, violent, dangerous sociopaths.