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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Are you assuming that AI in this case is some form of generative AI? I would not ask chatgpt if a mushroom is poisonous. But I would consider using a convolutional neural net based plant identification software. At that point you are depending on the quality of the training data set for the CNN and the rigor put into validating the trained model, which is at least somewhat comparable to depending on a plant identification book to be sufficiently accurate/thorough, vs depending on the accuracy of a story that genAI makes up based on reddit threads, which is a much less advisable venture


  • For me, I think it’s the fact that I have to prepare for both a social interaction and a monologue depending on whether they answer or not. As someone with mild social anxiety, the uncertainty and the fact that I am unequivocally initiating the interaction messes with a lot of the ways I would cope with joining a normal social interaction and throws me off my game



  • How quickly do you think these things happen? Billions of those dollars have gone to projects like CAHSR, Brightline West, and the NEC maintenance backlog, among a host of other projects. The fruits of this spending are something we will really see around 2030 for the most part. Also, worth pointing out that subways are usually funded separately from intercity rail, which was the focus of that announcement. Separately, that same act funded 700 million in new rail car purchases for 7 public transit systems (4 light rail systems, 2 subways, and 1 Commuter rail), 1.7 billion for new lower emissions buses for a number of systems across the US, 13 million for a new transit oriented development pilot program, and a number of other programs. It’s not as flashy as the turn of the century subway system build outs in Atlanta, DC, and San Francisco, and there’s just so much room for more because the US is absolutely starved for transit, but calling that an empty promise is just an absurd mistruth



  • It’s definitely not that. They are just pointing out that the right to free speech prevents the government from impeding someone’s ability to say something, it doesn’t (despite implications made by a lot of people who cry out that their right to free speech is being impeded) force others to listen to or agree with that thing being said. If anything, the people that abuse the name of free speech by implying that it means people need to agree with them, or need to amplify their message, are attacking free speech by mudding the water around what it means and making it harder for good faith entities to invoke that right



  • Vivian was victimized by her father’s heartless disregard and rejection of her identity. Elon is now going around stating a narrative that her coming out to him is at least a significant contributing reason he is a fascist (“I lost my son to the woke mind virus”), a narrative that this headline plays directly into. You can take the same sequence of facts and headline it as “Musk is going public with the same bigotry that he wielded against his transgender daughter. A lot of trans people have family members like him” that doesn’t make it sound like Elon Musk would have been politely building his rockets and evs in a corner if only his daughter hadn’t come out as trans, and doesn’t make it sound like Vivian indirectly donated 10s of millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign by coming out as someone that that exact campaign wants to suppress. The headline as written is almost a threat to closeted trans people. “Yeah, your parents may be Schrodinger’s bigots right now, but come out and they will go full scorched earth to dehumanize you and you will be responsible for their shift”.

    I’m pretty sure you are agreeing that that isn’t the case, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the text of the article is also aligned against that message, but the headline (probably written by an editor hungry for rage clicks) is solidly aligned to it, and should be called out for that




  • Am one of those “assholes”. Kamala was far from my favorite candidate in 2020, but I just donated a hefty (for me) chunk of change and will be volunteering. I didn’t need perfection, just a feasible path to victory in November and now we have it. I’m so pumped right now, project 2025 no longer looks like an inevitability. LFG!


  • Yes, I’m just speaking to the point the comment was making, that solar panels over parking lots that are at car factories particularly benefit from the hail defense aspect because the parking lot owner (the factory) has a vested interest in maintaining the condition of the parked cars. This isn’t an argument for any point of view, it’s an explanation of what was clearly ambiguous language by the original commenter, based on your misinterpretation. The sass is unnecessary




  • Porque no los dos?

    Rabbit hole incoming: If you have to pick one, I suppose it depends on what metric you are trying to maximize. One doublestacked intermodal train car takes two long haul trucks off the road. One Siemens Venture passenger train car takes 74 people, or about 50 cars at 1.5 people per car, off the road. You can generally run longer freight trains than passenger trains, but 25x to normalize for VMT (which could be used as an approximate measure of direct health impacts from driving: crash risk, elevated blood pressure, obesity. It could also be used to approximate societal impacts of car culture: real estate dedicated to surface parking, voting bloc size that supports car-centric planning and development regulations) is probably excessive. On the other hand, if we normalize for emissions (hard to find data here, but as far as I can tell trucks are on the order of 10x as emissive), that gets us down to 5x train length, which is about on par (northeast corridor trains are typically in the 1/6 of a mile range, and median freight train length is somewhere in the 1-1.5 mile range from what I could find), and if we use infrastructure damage/maintenance cost (trucks are about two orders of magnitude worse than even today’s SUV saturated passenger car market, I’m assuming without reason or evidence that damage to steel rail infrastructure between a freight and a passenger car scales significantly less harshly for the sake of simplicity), things look downright strongly in favor of freight traffic. At the end of the day, it probably just depends on which use case has more unmet demand on a case by case basis. Of course, both pale when compared to the opportunity that high speed rail gives to take short haul flights out of the sky, but that is another set of analysis and does partially correlate to the elevated infrastructure cost of high speed rail vs conventional rail.



  • Radiation does not by definition make things it impacts radioactive, and most of the lingering effects that we associate with radiation have to do with radioactive particles that are left behind by the atmosphere. Since there is no particulate matter traveling between the sun and Mars (photons not withstanding), the surface of Mars would not be expected to acquire radioactive properties from an acute solar radiation event like this one. However, an entity on the surface of Mars would be exposed to radiation from the Sun, much more so than an entity on/near earth and it’s magnetosphere (Mars’ thin atmosphere and distance from the sun probably helps reduce that disparity relative to something in say low earth orbit, but I don’t think it fully equalizes or shifts the scales). I am not an astrophysicist, so there’s at least a 20% chance I got part of that wrong.