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Joined 1 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月12日

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  • Maybe…but two things:

    If the number of obese people is lower, then what are the people who aren’t mildly overweight? They are healthy weight. So even if the percentage of mildly overweight people stay the same, the day to day comparison is with a bigger group of healthy weight people, so they probably were more recognizably overweight.

    Secondly, with less really obese people you wouldn’t get desensitized to seeing fat all the time, which makes mildly overweight people seem more normal. Somebody with a BMI of 26 and about 15lbs overweight would have been more likely to be described as “plump” or “husky” back then. But when crowds are full of people that are 50+ lbs overweight, that 26 BMI seems downright healthy.

    This is all speculation. I can’t remember how I perceived overweight vs obese people back in the 80’s.









  • This is true, but…

    Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.

    So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.

    You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.

    And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.

    Same curve.

    Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.

    The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.

    Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.

    Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.

    While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.






  • You’re not going to split hairs out of this one. Trying to say that these are not Evangelicals because no true Evangelical would do this is pretty much the "No True Scotsman " evasion. When people say, “Evangelicals”, this is exactly the group to which they are referring.

    The one or two “True Evangelicals” in the US can consider themselves exempt from this thread.




  • Back in the 70’s and 80’s there were “Travesty Generators”. You pushed some text into them and they developed linguistic rules based on probabilities determined by the text. Then you could have them generate brand new text randomly created by applying the linguistic rules developed from the source text.

    Surprisingly, they would generate “brand new” words that weren’t in the original text, but were real words. And the output matched stylistically to the input text. So you put in Shakespeare and you got out something that sounded like Shakespeare. You get the idea.

    I built one and tried running some TS Eliot through it, because stuff is, IMHO, close to gibberish to begin with. The results were disappointing. Basically because it couldn’t get any more gibberishy that the source.

    I strongly suspect that the same would happen with Trump’s gibberish. There used to be a bunch of Travesty Generators online, and you could probably try one out to see.




  • Actually…yes. At least for the “war criminal”. I think the point is that you can’t hide your inner feelings from the feather. So if you genuinely, in the deepest depths of your heart, have no qualms about bombing civilians then you’re fine.

    I think this points out the fundamental relativistic nature of morality and how the feather copes with it. Everyone has some sort of moral compass, and the feather measures how true you were to it. And really, what more can you ask of anyone? Decide, for yourself, what is right and what is wrong and stick to it.

    Putting aside the fact that a toddler probably lacks the intellectual or emotional development to have a truely personal morality, I cannot imagine that someone who “broods” all their life over kicking a kitten when they were three is anything other than the nicest most moral person you’ll ever meet. I don’t think that have any trouble with Anubis and Thoth.