- prometheus76 parentThose diseases are back because of rampant immigration. People from other countries bring them here. It has nothing to do with "obscurantist beliefs", whatever those might be.
- > prior to the widespread deployment of malicious microphones, were adequate authentication for many purposes
Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand the context for malicious microphones and how that affects secure passwords.
- They fired most of the UI/UX team soon after Steve Jobs died.
- They farm you for attention, not electricity. Attention (engagement time) is how they quantify "quality" so that it can be gamed with an algorithm.
- If you have access to ethanol-free fuel, that basically eliminates gasoline "going bad". It's the ethanol that degenerates over time.
- "However, animals like us do not experience salt desire as a powerful, controlling drive as we do with oxygen, food and water." (from the article).
I disagree with that, especially when I was young. I would crave salt. I would lick my hand and sprinkle salt on it, then lick the salt off. I would break chunks off the salt lick block we had for our horses. I would lick the homemade play-doh my mom would make because it tasted like salt.
There's no substantiation for the claim in the article that we lack a salt craving. Apparently, the author hasn't, but I know a lot of people that do.
- I would contend that empiricism is inadequate to discern what is real and what is true. Much of human experience and what is meaningful to being a person is not measurable nor quantifiable.
- The act of curating facts itself is required to communicate anything because there are an infinite number of facts. You have to include some and exclude others, and you arrange them in a hierarchy of value that matches your sensibilities. This is necessary in order to perceive the world at all, because there are too many facts and most of them need to be filtered. Everyone does this by necessity. Your entire perceptual system and senses are undergirded by this framework.
There is no such thing as "objective" because it would include all things, which means it could not be perceived by anyone.
- Ah yes. People who think like you and agree with you are rational, not prone to fear, disgust outrage, or protectiveness. But people who disagree with you are obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with. You are "educated" and they are "fear-mongers".
- I agree with your view completely. I see the current use cases for AI to be very similar to the practices of augury during the Roman Empire. I keep two little chicken figurines on my desk as a reference to augury[1] and its similarity to AI. The emperor brings a question to the augurs. The augurs watch the birds (source of pseudo-randomness), go through rituals, and give back an answer as to whether the emperor should go to war, for example.
- I didn't say anything about emergency medicaid being illegal. What I did was present evidence that illegal immigrants do, indeed, use Medicaid funds in the form of emergency care, and I presume those are the records that are now being reviewed by ICE. Your original claim was that illegal immigrants don't get Medicaid, but you neglected to consider emergency medicaid funds.
- Couple of notes: Medicaid DOES cover emergency services for undocumented immigrants, to the tune of 16.2 billion dollars during the Biden administration. (Reference: https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/cbo_on_medicaid_for_i...)
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it isn't happening. From a May 25, 2025 article on the official CMS website: "The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced today increased federal oversight to stop states from misusing federal Medicaid dollars to cover health care for individuals who are in the country illegally. Under federal law, federal Medicaid funding is generally only available for emergency medical services for noncitizens with unsatisfactory immigration status who would otherwise be Medicaid-eligible, but some states have pushed the boundaries, putting taxpayers on the hook for benefits that are not allowed."
From this article: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cms-increasing-o...
- They have a pamphlet available one more click away from the link you shared that gives detailed information on how undocumented immigrants can get free/reduced-cost health care, and what all of their options are: https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/content/dam/wahbe-assets/...
- TheDraw was a cornerstone of my teenage years. I would log into different BBSs just to see their ANSI welcome screens, then I would try and re-create them to learn the art. It was a unique form of animation and I was hoping you had figured out how to get TheDraw working.
I also later used ANSI to make my own cool command line prompts in DOS and later, Linux.
- You can also use a plastic bottle or even a paper drinking cup.
- I'm not sure that's the mechanism at work because I have boiled eggs using plastic cups and also waxed paper cups many times. I don't think any water is boiling through. The cup itself is staying at 100C, which is below its ignition point.
- My daughter is just getting into photography, and I was hoping your guide would share more of how to set the exposure for moon shots (which can be tricky and unintuitive for beginners). You might want to add some examples and what your settings were, as well as how you derived those settings.
- Oh man. This makes me want to throw my phone against the nearest brick wall sometimes. The UI is loading, I reach for the button I want to hit, but it moves and a different button takes its place because the app/page is still loading, or worse, an ad has taken the place of the button.
This also happens where sometimes the hotbar has three buttons, and sometimes four, and the worst apps are when buttons switch ordinal positions depending on if there are three or four buttons in there.
It feels very strange to get so agitated by these small behaviors, but here we are.
- I don't know exactly what you mean by "support the Pope", but your simple binary division between "Roman Catholic or Protestant" ignores a lot of the historical tensions between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. There's also the whole issue with the Oriental Orthodox Church, which went into schism after the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which was LONG before the Great Schism in 1054. How do they fit into your categorization?
You might find it interesting to study more details about the history of Christianity. It's not so simple as "Love Pope or Reject Pope."
- Now you get into the tricky waters of defining "justified" and "true". It's a circular definition that does not settle anything.
- Why did the person who posted this change the headline of the article ("Diffusion models are interesting") into a nonsensical question?
- Yes. I'm no longer a Mormon, but I baptized around a dozen people on my mission and they were all found from knocking on doors. But this was also thirty years ago, before the internet was a thing for most people.
- Less likely to speak English in my experience.
- This was 30 years ago, so I'm sure a lot has changed since then. I was a missionary and the way we got into buildings in Toronto to knock on doors was to just pick the last name with the most letters from the directory, buzz them, and when they answered, we would just say "pizza delivery" and 95% of the time they buzzed the door open.
- Rich people don't pay income taxes. They pay capital gains taxes. They typically don't have income, or very little income compared to capital gains.
- I see it as a clash between people who are instinctually inclined towards philosophical nominalism (woke) and people who are instinctually inclined towards realism (not-woke). Dr. Nathan A. Jacobs lays out the details and the arguments for this way of defining our current culture war here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVmPIMg4St4
- On further reflection, and a re-read after a night of sleep, I agree with you that my example at the end was not a clear indication of what I'm pointing at. I was trying to reveal that "reality" is more than just physical processes, and "mind", especially, maps onto physical processes, but only relationally.
A bird watching Fallout and pressing keys on your keyboard with its beak is not participating in the story of Fallout the way you are. You are watching a story and tracking a narrative and making decisions about which keys to press. But this is a bit of an obscure analogy.
Let me try a different one. You just sat down in your favorite chair after a long day of work, and you ask your young son to please bring you a cold drink from the refrigerator. He cheerfully runs to the refrigerator, grabs a beverage, and runs back to you, handing it to you.
The process of you vibrating your vocal cords which make a physical vibration of air that goes into his ear and vibrates his eardrum that then sends impulses to his brain and, later, his body that end up with you holding a cold beverage in your hand...those are all physical processes. But the relationships between sounds and "words", between words and sentences, between sentences and movement...none of that is physical. The relationship with your son obviously has a physical component, but the meaning behind your genetic connection to your son is largely metaphysical.
Another analogy: if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? I am firmly in the camp of "no". Does the tree create vibrating air waves when it falls and hits the ground? Of course. But a "sound" is an abstraction that forms in the mind of someone who is there watching (and more importantly, hearing!) the tree hit the ground. That "sound" is a metaphysical concept that we map onto the physical world, and the ability to make these distinctions, to categorize our incoming sensory input, is what enables us to perceive anything at all. Without that structuring, categorizing, and filtering of incoming data, the world would be overwhelming and we would be paralyzed.
Am I a solipsist who only believes that what is in my mind is "real" and that the physical world around me is an illusion? No. The first and best lesson I ever had that the physical world is real is getting punched in the face. That will knock solipsism right off the list of being a possible worldview.
I believe reality is an interplay of concepts and physical, "potential" or "raw" matter.
One more analogy: cooking. When I want to make bread, for example, I have a recipe, which is a concept. It is an abstract concept of how to transform raw materials into a new thing: bread. So you gather raw ingredients, and you combine them following a particular order. You let the yeast feed on the sugars and make nice little CO2 bubbles in your dough, causing it to rise. You then put it in the oven and after some heat and time, you remove what used to be flour, water, and yeast, and you put it on the counter to cool. It has been transformed and you call it "bread".
The classic materialist move is to now just say "yeah but it's just flour, water, and yeast." Which is physically true. However, those ingredients have specific interactions that happen when combined, and further interactions that happen when exposed to high heat for a certain duration of time, and when we remove it from the oven, we don't say "come get some flour, water, and yeast that have been transformed through chemical processes, heat, and time!" No. It has a new name now. It has switched categories. It has changed ontological levels and changed from three ingredients into a new identity: bread.
Now I'm hungry for some toast.
- Numbers are not physical, but you see three objects all over the place. A number is a category. The number "three" exists as a property that I can use to group physical objects (or even other categories). So I can group together three pencils or three cars. The only physical properties that cars and pencils have in common is that their both physical...maybe they're the same color...but I have grouped three pencils and I have grouped three cars, so now they share a property of "three", but "three" is not an intrinsic physical property of pencils, nor cars. It's a potential metaphysical property, but only becomes manifested once an observer groups three pencils.
My argument is that a "mind" cannot be a purely physical process in the same way that a video game is a purely physical process. The computer instructions are stored in my hard drive and encoded, and it's a physical process for my computer to retrieve those instructions and follow them, but the game itself is something the user interacts with by watching what's happening on the screen an interacting with it. The computer program of course has a physical component, but lives mostly in the layers of abstraction from 1s and 0s up to "flashy lights on screen", but none of those things mean anything if a mind isn't watching the screen, paying attention, and interacting with it.
Here's a question that boils down what I'm trying to say: If you have a pet bird that sits next to you as you play Fallout New Vegas, and taps the keyboard occasionally, is your bird playing Fallout? Is playing Fallout a purely physical process?
- A pattern still overlays a physical object. You can abstractly describe the pattern of a crystal without looking at a crystal.