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Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 269

Yeah that changes the context somewhat. There's a difference between "We should remove the bi-annual time change, it's unhealthy" (which I agree with and would like to happen) and the wishful thinking "WhAt iF iT wAs SuMmEr aLl yEaR rOuNd" crap that seems beloved of legislators and others who sort of agree that the bi-annual time changes need to go, but have the worst idea of how to implement it.

This paper isn't advocating for keeping bi-annual time changes. It's advocating for standard time. And I agree standard time is probably a better approach, even if some people get butt hurt about the idea of it not still being light at 9pm in the middle of August.

It all depends on who you are optimizing for.

  • Parents with kids would do better on standard time, because they have to take their kids to school before work.
  • Everyone else with a 9-to-5 job may do better on DST, assuming a short commute distance, because sunrise at 7:20 instead of 8:20 just adds useless time before the morning commute, while sundown at 5:53 means driving home before dark.

There is no one correct answer, because which one fits your circadian rhythms better depends entirely on what time you wake up.

Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 1) 103

the reason DACA was done via EO was that Republicans refused to pass the DREAM Act which was a bi-partisan bill kicked around since 2001 but Republicans would filibuster it at every oppurtunity.[sic]

"We couldn't get a law through congress so we did something questionably legal via executive order" is reinforcing the point being made by the grandparent (which, FWIW, I don't fully agree with. Many of Trump's executive orders are clearly less rooted in law than what's come before).

Same with the McCain Kennedy bill, bipartisan legislation never got a vote in the Senate

By the way, funny that you mention Sen. Kennedy in the context of immigration reform, who rather famously said: "This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forth an amnesty bill like this." Yet here we are.

Comment Re:To the non-cutters... (Score 0) 30

Why haven't you stopped watching _all_ corporate content - broadcast TV, cable TV, whatever the DSS dish companies are doing, Amazon, Netflix, blah blah blah

I hope you're not _paying_ for any of it...
And I hope you're not consuming very much of it...

It's bad for you. The people who make it are idiots, but they are crafty idiots. They know how to hurt you even if they don't know much else.

The idea that we have to watch their content is just baked into the cake, and nobody can escape it.

I was talking to a mechanic once. We were complaining about the news, and how it was all fake, they were all liars, etc.

I asked, "why not stop watching it?"

He responded: "but then I wouldn't know what's going on"

I replied, "you just said they are lying to you. So how does watching them tell you whats going on?"

(then everyone clapped)

He didn't answer. But I don't think he changed his habits.

Next, lets talk about Americas insane addiction to a Sportsball industry that regularly abuses us...

Comment Re:Even bots need DEI (Score 3, Insightful) 156

>people don't hire on merit
>Which candidate would you feel most comfortable working with for 40+ hours a week?

Why do you think "merit" and "works well with the employees I already have" are unrelated?

>Of course the candidate with a similar socioeconomic profile as your own would be preferred:

I suspect that's often true, but certainly not universal.

For example, allegedly, some people want slaves and want to lord themselves over their slaves. So they would never hire people like themselves, SES wise; they would only hire people where it was clear (in their own minds) that there was SES or other status daylight between themselves and their "underlings" So I'm not sure there's a universal law of hiring. I agree that "hiring someone like me" is a common -- but not universal -- pattern.

(Oddly enough, in the USA in 2026, I think you'll find that white males are the _least likely_ to use the "someone like me" hiring strategy - if for no other reason than decades of targeted enforcement against that that group for appearing to employ that strategy. Eg the Indian preference for hiring Indians, or the female preference for hiring females, is stronger than the white-male preference for hiring white-males. Maybe not in terms of hidden preferences, but in terms of actual hiring outcomes, yes, that's what the data will show)

Back to the non-universality of hiring strategies: A friend of mine with a tech business intentionally tries to hire mid-field performers. He doesn't want a rapid climber, because he cannot afford to keep them on staff once they understand what they are worth. He wants mid-field performers who are going to do solid, reliable work, and be content to work for him for a long time. So he doesn't hire on "merit" - he hires for "good enough, low turnover"

Other businesses have other strategies.

Comment Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 1) 162

> but "not understanding cost" is a dangerous assumption to make.

One of the best, most succinct phrases in this discussion. Thank you.

We don't have to wait for AGIs to develop their own agency and build terminator robots. Industrial robots with no agency and with auditable and deterministic programming already kill humans. The industrial robot doesn't understand there's a human in the safety cage with it. It doesn't understand that moving through space occupied by a human has a cost. It doesn't know there's a human there and it doesn't know what a human is.

Designing automation that can never kill a person is already an unsolved problem with standard, non-intelligent technology.

I don't know if AI makes it harder or easier. On one hand, AI behaves, in effect, non-deterministically (even though at some level it is deterministic, it's not observably so).

OTOH, in organic intelligences, adding sensors, adding alignment, giving feedback - tend to produce humans who accidentally kill less frequently. So maybe something like the 3 laws will conceptually be part of the System Prompt of future AIs, and they'll figure out how to avoid HAL 9000 problems.

Comment Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 1) 162

Thanks for the interesting response.

The strongest man today; the hardest workers today... are not 10x or even 2x as strong or as physically productive as the best in human history. Depending on what you think about ancient man, we are possibly weaker and dumber than some of our ancestors.

The transmission of new ideas across memory, time, and place is the extra term in the equation of human achievement, civilization, and prosperity. It's not that labor doesn't matter. It's that ideas are like compound interest. Labor adds principal to our civilizational account balance. But Ideas compound it.

In the long term, ideas are all that matter.

I have the same reservations you do - powerful people will continue to want to corner and concentrate their power.

It's unclear how well they will be able to do that, however. The capability lag time between a paid frontier model and a self-hostable open-weights model is months.

The ability to train a good-enough model will also be commoditized. In my youth, we had distributed crypto challenges.... to get super-computing work done on mass democratized hardware of like-minded individuals. So in the future, we can fall back on analagous distributed model training efforts if some better alternative doesn't exist.

I am skeptical about a post-scarcity society and I am skeptical about man's "labor" ever going to zero. Of the infamous twelve possible AI outcomes, I am somewhere in middle. For biblical reasons, I believe the extinction of man is not going to happen, and I believe the utopia of man is also not going to happen.

Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 2) 156

Did you see the pictures of the AIs in the study?

What's with that lighting? They didn't adjust for the fact that the woman looks slightly more like a serial killer, with a wrinkled skirt pulled up to her ribcage. I haven't seen graphics that bad since Metaverse. The study noticed it, but didn't adjust for it. Relevant quote:

"Johanna was perceived as less human-like than Johan"

Because the graphics were terrible.

Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 2) 103

Control of other people's speech is always about asserting power.

It's never actually about "reducing harm"; it's about asserting power.

Talking about it in "harm" terms is a clever hack: ... because most humans are sensitive to harm/harm reduction along their moral reasoning (see: Jonathan Haidt)

But "Never hurt my feelings" is an impossible bar, and it doesn't scale across a civilization. It cannot be a basis for law.

The attempt to abuse the "harm receptors" of political enemies is contributing to the mutual dehumanization across faction lines.

Comment Re:Still rocking their beige Natural keyboard (Score 1) 89

I'm one of those people that learned how to type 60+ WPM the wrong way (had a computer in the home since 1980 when I was 12)

Same experience for me. I remember a slow day in the office back in 99 or 2000 (we'd just shipped a release) we got into an argument about typing speeds so set up typing tests for the whole team. My "my fingers never actually sit on the home keys, my hands relocate from time to time, and most of my typing is with three or four fingers and a thumb" ass clocked over 100wpm to the incredulity of the rest of the team.

Natural keyboards feel decidedly unnatural to me, because my hands always want to be somewhere they don't fit.

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