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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Memorization is not the same thing as critical thinking.

    A library of internalized axioms is necessary for efficient critical thinking. You can’t just turn yourself into a Chinese Room of analysis.

    A well designed test will freely give you an equation sheet or even allow a cheat sheet.

    Certain questions are phrased to force the reader to pluck out and categorize bits of information, to implement complex iterations of simple formulae, and to perform long-form calculations accurately without regard to the formulae themselves.

    But for elementary skills, you’re often challenging the individual to retain basic facts and figures. Internalizing your multiplication tables can serve as a heuristic that’s quicker than doing simple sums in your head. Knowing the basic physics formulae - your F = ma, ρ=m/V, f= V/λ etc - can give you a broader understanding of the physical world.

    If all you know how to do is search for answers to basic questions, you’re slowing down your ability to process new information and recognize patterns or predictive signals in a timely manner.



  • This isn’t a profound extrapolation. It’s akin to saying “Kids who cheat on the exam do worse in practical skills tests than those that read the material and did the homework.” Or “kids who watch TV lack the reading skills of kids who read books”.

    Asking something else to do your mental labor for you means never developing your brain muscle to do the work on its own. By contrast, regularly exercising the brain muscle yields better long term mental fitness and intuitive skills.

    This isn’t predicated on the gullibility of the practitioner. The lack of mental exercise produces gullibility.

    Its just not something particular to AI. If you use any kind of 3rd party analysis in lieu of personal interrogation, you’re going to suffer in your capacity for future inquiry.




  • Reminds me of the time Vivek Ramaswamy bilked investors for over a billion with a phoney Alzeheimer’s drug

    he helmed the leadership of Roivant, a multi-billion-dollar American pharmaceutical company he founded, and gallantly relinquished his CEO role in 2021 due to his unwavering stance against ESG principles, despite facing opposition from his liberal workforce. While this narrative might seem appealing, it is akin to the endless “flip-flops” that have plagued his campaign—an elaborate work of fiction that unravels upon a modicum of scrutiny.

    Let’s start with the basics. Ramaswamy has funded his campaign through the sale of over $32 million in Roivant stock options in February of this year. This could lead one to believe that Roivant, based in Bermuda, is thriving and that Ramaswamy is a great entrepreneur. Except the company reported staggering losses of $1.2 billion in its financial report of March 2023. This isn’t a one-time slump: In March 2022, when Ramaswamy was still Roivant’s chairman and a major shareholder, the company reported an annual loss of $924.1 million.

    Ramaswamy’s defenders may argue that Roivant performed better during his tenure as CEO in 2021, but alas, the numbers tell a different story. The reality is that Roivant’s finances were abysmal under Ramaswamy’s watch. During his tenure in 2019, the company’s net operating loss exceeded $530 million. By 2020, the losses had doubled to over $1 billion, accompanied by a 65 percent decline in revenue.


  • Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media

    Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You’re still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You’re still securing the URL from a private DNS. You’re still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).

    Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.

    There’s not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.

    If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting “Communities I’m interested in” on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth “Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!” reactionary in between instances, that’s an immediate turn off that I don’t think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.

    Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we’re all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).

    Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.


  • Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else?

    In theory, the problem is one of compounding assets. If you have a family farm with multiple inheriting children and the farm has to be sold to pay off the inheritence tax debt, who buys them? Inevitably, bigger industrial agriculture firms. So more and more plots are aggregated within a smaller and smaller number of privately owned farming companies.

    In practice, this has already happened decades prior (centuries prior, if you look at the history of land ownership in Ireland). The people buying up small plots of land aren’t pioneering farmer entrepreneurs. They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.

    Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.

    Wealth in the UK isn’t being redistributed, its being aggregated. The prior and current governments have gone all in on private equity as a cure for sluggish growth. This is purely Rich Guy on Rich Guy violence.

    If you genuinely care about protecting the assets of the working class, you need less middling Starmerism and more radical Maoism.




  • If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should.

    Generators take space, require maintenance, and have a certain optimal capacity that isn’t necessarily hit on a given roof.

    For wind energy in particular, the bigger the turbine, the more yield per $ spent. If you go out to Corpus Christi you’ll see these enormous turbines - $10M to $50M / ea - that generate on the order of $24 to $75 per MWh, or $.024-.075/kWh. Home wind/solar don’t get anywhere close to that.

    Prime placement of units, distribution across a wide area, and a degree of storage capacity means you’re going to get better and more consistent yield.







  • If only NASA could run experiments so that we could understand how the concept of fear-based self preservation eliminates any semblance of courage when faced with even the smallest threat to their ill-defined paradigm of manhood.

    You’re significantly underestimating how many Chud engineers NASA employs. The agency that was founded by Nazis refugees has always had a shit history on race politics, cinema hagiographies produced decades later notwithstanding.

    In a parallel universe where we have a functioning federal government

    One of the biggest jokes of the US depiction of the Space Race was how many times we got our asses drubbed by Russians with less money, manpower, and educational resources, simply because our administration was so cartoonishly incompetent. We have an obscenely wealthy federal government that can afford to fuck up on the scale of trillions of dollars and still come out ahead.