ignirtoq

We prepared, portioned, and provided all meals and snacks for the study.

Great for the science, not great for the realistic recommendations. Sure, some people eat ultraprocessed foods because they are just easier, but many people eat ultraprocessed foods because they are unable to access healthier options. Either they are too expensive (either in monetary cost or the time commitment to prepare the food) or (I expect moreso the case for older people) they are physically unable to prepare it. If we’re going to recommend older Americans eat less ultraprocessed foods, we need realistic options for them to switch to.

There’s not really a “taking over” the FBI can (legally) do here. The murder happened in Minnesota, so the state of Minnesota can bring a state criminal case against the ICE agent for violating state law while acting within the state. If the FBI also wants to open a federal criminal case against the agent for violating a federal law while in the country, they can open a parallel investigation using the same evidence. But the FBI can’t (legally) “take over” a state criminal case. That’s not how our legal system works.

I keep putting “legally” parenthetically because this administration does whatever it wants and uses contorted readings of the law for creating after-the-fact justifications, but here there are few options available to them even to contort.

Personally I’m fine with them taking the noise levels from the aerospace industry, too. My primary concern is how’s the battery life?

Everything I’ve played this year has been as easy—if not easier—to run on a free OS put together by a gaggle of passionate nerds as it is on Windows, the OS made by one of the most valuable corporations on planet Earth.

I know the histories of both Linux and Windows are complicated, and oversimplification is going to be more wrong than right, but this seems almost malicious. Yes many, if not most, people who work on Linux can probably be characterized as nerds, but that’s equally as true of Windows developers. Programming itself is classified as nerdy, so it would be impossible for it not to be true. And dozens, if not hundreds, of companies contribute to Linux, both the kernel and software running in user space, so it’s not like it’s only unwashed 20-somethings living in their parents’ basement that built Linux.

The statement could be completely flipped and be equally as true (if not moreso, since multiple of the most valuable companies on earth contribute to Linux), so why even make it?

“Pressuring” how? Any institution with teeth Trump has already neutered.

There’s no “how” explained in this article. It’s a few paragraphs saying very vague, abstract things, with just one somewhat concrete example in the lightsabre that I didn’t really get because they didn’t go into any real explanation. Is this article written by a movie critic for an audience of movie critics? Because I definitely don’t seem to be the target audience.

U.S. ‌antitrust agencies ⁠had cleared Nvidia’s investment in Intel, according to a notice ‍posted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission earlier in December.

Are they even giving reasons anymore? Or is the “antitrust agency” just a guy napping in a corner they periodically wake up just to give a thumbs up?

Arcades have to charge more than a quarter per play now due to inflation. The price isn’t just you renting the machine for the duration of the play, it’s you paying a small slice of the rent on the arcade location, the income of the workers, the maintenance of the machines, and the electricity for the lights, AC/heating, and so on. No arcades would exist today if they could only charge quarters.

It doesn’t matter. Even if it were constantly streaming the current volume level, the energy to transmit the value “100” is the same as to transmit “5”, so your phone doesn’t drain any faster to constantly tell the earbuds the volume is high versus low.

I don’t know. People keep talking about what to do when we “make it out of this” like the whole situation was thrust upon us by nature, and we just have to wait and tough it out until it passes, like a storm. People made this happen. The people with wealth and power in our society chose this reality for the rest of us. They aren’t just going to stop one day. And they aren’t acting like this is a storm that will pass. They are acting like this is the next step in a transition they want and intend. We have to figure out how to instigate a change from this path, and I don’t know how to do that.

We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.

Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is “in 10 years we’ll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently.” In their roadmap, there won’t be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.

What’s most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means “mean,” it can also mean “median” or “mode,” and I would argue the layperson saying “average” intends it to mean “typical,” which is closer to median (or even mode). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.

That would only be true if what people had to spend their money on stayed the same, and the author goes through great detail showing that the individual components of what people have to spend their money on to “exist” (i.e. a minimum cost of economic participation) have changed drastically in 60 years. Not only that, some of those pieces (child care, health care, higher education) have increased in cost breathtakingly faster than inflation. Sure, you could reduce that to a statement that “therefore the inflation metric is wrong,” but the author goes on to show what a better, more representative metric would look like and tell us about the economy, and that’s a good discussion mostly orthogonal to whether the inflation calculation is correct.

This is an amazing breakdown of how catastrophically bad the definition of the federal poverty line is in the modern economy. They use sound logic and data to calculate that the value should not be around $31,000, but in fact closer to $140,000.

With this foundation, they revisit common graphs that economists trot out to “prove” life has objectively improved for the majority of Americans in the last 60 years, and show that they actually show the opposite. Those graphs are built on top of the poverty line, and that calculation is bunk, so the whole argument crumbles.

The obvious next step would be to calculate the improved poverty line at key points in America’s last 6 decades and generate corrected graphs, but that seems like a monumental effort. I feel like someone could make that into a dissertation.

It always bothered me in class that they said the magnetic field of light was just too weak to have any significant effect compared to the electric field, but I just accepted it because I was still learning. Good to know my intuition wasn’t too far off.

Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

How much you want to bet SCOTUS blocks California’s redistricting but greenlights Missouri and North Carolina maps, each through tortured logic?

TL;DR: While governments are putting out assurances AI won’t make the final decision to launch nuclear weapons, they are tight-lipped about whether they are putting AI in the information gathering and processing components that advise world leaders making the decision to launch nuclear weapons. In risk assessment, there’s little difference between wrong AI making the launch decision and a human informed by wrong AI making the launch decision.

One catch is that they are only forced to release “unclassified” files. Guess who decides what files are classified?

And they’re being redeployed to Charlotte, NC, and New Orleans, LA. They’re continuing the tactic of blitzing whatever they want to do somewhere, and when the courts start to catch up, they pull out and start to do something else somewhere else. They can do whatever they want, legality be damned, if they accomplish their goals before the courts wake up. This is guerrilla warfare applied to the legal checks and balances between the branches of government.

If this Supreme Court were considering the issue for the very first time today, it would almost certainly hold that the Constitution does not protect same-sex marriage by a 6–3 vote. But now that Obergefell is entrenched as precedent, and widely supported by Americans, they’ve shown no appetite for spending down their political capital to issue an unpopular ruling that could only hurt the Republican Party.

This seems like a really naive thing to say about this court. They have shown no qualms about striking down much older cases with a stronger history of precedent than Obergefell on the most specious of reasoning. They struck down Chevron Deference last year, which was in place since 1984 and had come to form the backbone of judicial handling about highly technical aspects of government regulation of virtually every industry.

And they have no hesitation about making unpopular rulings. Several justices have a habit of lecturing the public in a way that’s essentially talking down to the people they are supposed to serve and say they simply know what’s better for the people than… the people. Their egos couldn’t care less about their public image; Chief Justice John Roberts has spoken out multiple times that people need to basically shut up and respect the court’s decisions no matter if they like them or not.

It’s a higher level of infuriating that the court is so obviously corrupt, and then the most corrupt among them present themselves as fundamentally more deserving of respect and deference than the common rabble.