- Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago. Should we have started taxing tractors?
I really have difficulties seeing AI as anything else than yet another type of machinery. If your argument is "but it's replacing ALMOST ALL human labour" - well, the same argument was valid for tractors a hundred years ago (when almost everyone was employed in agriculture).
- I liked how you could buy an official Roomba spare parts kit, though.
In a mechanical device meant for messy places, parts necessarily wear out quicker than in most electronics, and being able to buy and swap out the parts easily seemed like a nice feature.
- We moved this year and couldn't get my old(ish) Roomba i5 to work in my new wifi easily. I've been meaning to debug the problem further, but if it can be confirmed that it's an iRobot issue and there's nothing I can do, it would save some effort.
It sucks, though, that I can use my fucking vacuum cleaner because a remote server of the manufacturer has decayed. Does anyone know if there are robotic vacuums that work fully locally without remote servers?
- > So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit?
Because there's a huge network effect in play here and Valve was first in the market.
- 1. I work in finance and here people sometimes write math using words as variable names. I can tell you it gets extremely cumbersome to do any significant amount of formula manipulation or writing with this notation. Keep in mind that pen and paper are still pretty much universally used in actual mathematical work and writing full words takes a lot of time compared to single Greek letters.
Large part of math notation is to compress the writing so that you can actually fit a full equation in your vision.
Also, something like what you want already exists, see e.g. Lean: https://lean-lang.org/doc/reference/latest/. It is used to write math for the purpose of automatically proving theorems. No-one wants to use this for actually studying math or manually proving theorems, because it looks horrible compared to conventional mathematics notation (as long as you are used to the conventional notation).
- Valve is sort of like modern Bell Labs for software. It has almost-monopoly on PC game sales, which results in massive profits. Then it uses part of these profits for public good on projects that are at best tangentially related to their actual business.
- If you check out the man's social media, the hilarious part is that he is not even trying to sugar coat it in anyway. It's like: "yup, I'm ruining your internet, what are you gonna do about it?"
- Check out the guy's social media (links in the original article). The shit is downright hilarious. He's very self-conscious about how horrible his business is.
- In many cultures, there is/was also the idea of cyclical history. Things don't go forward or backward, they just repeat themselves in slightly different ways infinitely.
- Are all of these ingredients equally harmful? If not, why not just ban or restrict the ones that are harmful and keep using the rest of them? It's sort of weird to bundle a lot of very different types of chemicals under the same term.
- > Yet when NPR runs non-stop Walmart articles [1], often in a neutral to positive fashion [...] Among the top results in your link are: "Pasta meals from Trader Joe's and Walmart may be linked to a deadly listeria outbreak", "Walmart recalls frozen shrimp over potential radioactive contamination", and "A man accused of stabbing 11 people at a Walmart is in Michigan authorities' custody".
- I think the first one is better. What's the purpose of having all the text crammed in a thin column in the middle of the page anyway? If I'm reading the page on a wide screen, let me use all of the motherfucking screen.
- I didn't even read the article, but the answer is clearly zero.
- Slate Star Codex' take on Adderall (and ADHD) is a good read: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
In short: no-one "has" ADHD. We just decided that people on the lower end of the spectrum in the "ability to concentrate" trait deserve a bit of a boost from otherwise illegal drugs to function in the society. Being in this lower end is called "having ADHD".
- What is the motivation for people doing this? Is it just for the lols or are they making money out of this somehow?
- If you think the time spent traversing all that space is completely worthless. Otherwise it makes sense to make things dense so that people can mostly reach whatever things they want to reach by walking a short distance or taking a quick tram connection, etc.
- Oh yeah, public transportation is fucking horrible. Still, it is basically the only viable way to support a large population density and not turn everything into a wasteland of parking lots and car lanes. Let's face it: cars just take an order of magnitude or two more space than e.g. metro for the same number of passengers and, in big cities, space is a very scarce resource.
- > Given the supposed 50+ year lifespan of such a battery
Surely the lifespan is almost forever. It's just a tank full of sand and some heating pipes. Maybe the pipes and/or control electronics needs to be replaced occasionally, but nothing should happen to the sand inside - like ever.
- What exactly does this chip do?
If you're a tourist, you get to experience only those parts. If you live there, you have to experience the other 99% of the life also and it's not so great.