TheChurn

Electoral college. Idaho always goes red, Oregon always go blue. Moving population from Oregon to Idaho transfers electoral votes from a blue state to a red state.

Whether it matters or not depends on whether it changes the tipping point state in any given election, which is hard to know in advance, but for the red team it is at worst identical to the current setup and at best a small boost to their chances in a presidential election. Conversely for the blue team it can either be meaningless or a slight negative.

if it didn’t have parents it isn’t food either

What does this mean?

That would give politicians another reason to raise the retirement age, in order to stay in power.

They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don’t play.

Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.

Other than that I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.

Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.

I mostly just pay for it because I’ve used it for ages and definitely get more value out of it than the subscription cost. I don’t think I use a single nitro feature.

One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.

The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.

I think this is from Berserk, but it’s been years and I can’t quite tell.

No, that’s not a real problem either. Model search techniques are very mature, the first automated tools for this were released in the 90s, they’ve only gotten better.

AI can’t ‘train itself’, there is no training required for an optimization problem. A system that queries the value of the objective function - “how good is this solution” - then tweaks parameters according to the optimization algorithm - traffic light timings - and queries the objective function again isn’t training itself, it isn’t learning, it is centuries-old mathematics.

There’s a lot of intentional and unintentional misinformation around what “AI” is, what it can do, and what it can do that is actually novel. Beyond Generative AI - the new craze - most of what is packaged as AI are mature algorithms applied to an old problem in a stagnant field and then repackaged as a corporate press release.

Take drug discovery. No “AI” didn’t just make 50 new antibiotics, they just hired a chemist who graduated in the last decade who understands commercial retrosynthetic search tools and who asked the biopharma guy what functional groups they think would work.

“AI” isn’t needed to solve optimization problems, that’s what we have optimization algorithms for.

Define an objective and parameters and give the problem to any one of the dozens of general solvers and you’ll get approximate answers. Large cities already use models like these for traffic flow, there’s a whole field of literature on it.

The one closest to what you mentioned is a genetic algorithm, again a decades-old technique that has very little in common with Generative “AI”

Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.

A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.

The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.

Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.

That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn’t much for tech.

There are plenty of things that can cause fires that are not oxygen, and don’t contain oxygen.

The halogens, Fluorine and Chlorine in particular, are powerful oxidizing agents on their own and can produce flames in the same manner as common flames.

Here’s a report on the spectra of flames produced by combustion in a Fluorine atmosphere (PDF warning).

AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all

No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn’t matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.

Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.

Further, this isn’t a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don’t want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.

Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.

‘Those people’ are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.

They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.

They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.

Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.

Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn’t actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn’t interact with those ads.

Global North/South is a socio-economic and political grouping.

Developed countries = global north
Developing = global south

It does originate in geography, as the vast majority of wealth and high-tech industry is in the geographic North, but countries like Aus and NZ also fit, despite being South of the equator.

Haskell isn’t really that hard to learn

A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors

In many cases, getting something out quickly is more valuable than having it be clean.

Part of being a senior is knowing when fast is more important than perfect. Not saying your senior did everything right, just that a single example of someone’s code isn’t enough to judge the value of a person to an organization.