dashdsrdash

joined 2 years ago
[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 15 points 1 year ago

Good luck with that -- I'm a pzombie this year for tax purposes.

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is that actually true? Have they been audited? One problem with long-term storage is "long-term" is a thing that humans are bad at.

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The main character commits rape because this isn't a real universe anyway. You made the right choice.

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago

It's true, but they are still fairly easy to injure.

Try forming a fist and then hitting with the outside edge of the hand instead of your poor little fingers.

Or learn from your ancestors and become a tool-using mammal. I understand milkshakes have a distinct fondness for fascists.

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 8 points 1 year ago

Mike is a fed, yes.

So is Steve. The snack thing is left over from his previous undercover assignment at NORML. That didn't end well, but he's pretty sure he can get Mike to agree to buy explosives, which will be a good bust.

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 9 points 1 year ago

Shorter: "Let's assume that I'm a godling. I will definitely be an evil god. Here's how."

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago

My friend's father -- coincidentally named Feinman, not Feynman - used to say "They always advertise what they haven't got."

"Less Wrong".

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 7 points 1 year ago

It's not that verbing nouns weirds language so much as the regreekification.

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Genetically altering IQ is more or less about flipping a sufficient number of IQ-decreasing variants to their IQ-increasing counterparts. This sounds overly simplified, but it’s surprisingly accurate; most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present

Contradicted by previous text in the same article (diabetes), not to mention have you even opened a college-level genetics text in the last decade?

Anyway, I would encourage these people to flip their own genome a lot, except that they probably won't take the minimum necessary precautions of doing so under observation in isolation. "Science is whatever people in white coats say it is, and I bought a nice white coat off Amazon!"

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The thing about rationalists is that they are fully invested in irrational beliefs, which they prefer not to examine. In other words, just like most people, but with a specific terminology that, if they use it properly, identifies them as one of the elect.

I suggest that whenever your relative talks about EA, you talk about kindness. When they bring up longtermism, point out that you have to survive in the short term to reach the long term, so working on better policies now is rather important. If they start in on life extension, note that until quite recently, all the major advances in improving average human lifespan come from improving infant mortality, and be prepared to explain the demographic transition.

When they go extropian, say that it's a nice vision of the future but your kids are unlikely to see it unless we fix the world we're currently in.

But most of all, point out that multiplying infinitesimals by infinities to justify any course of action (a) is Pascal's Wager and (b) justifies every course of action -- so it can't justify any.

[–] dashdsrdash@awful.systems -4 points 2 years ago

If you are in a 60 Hz electrical area (i.e. the Americas, mostly), and the power is rock-steady, and you have cheap fluorescent lighting -- then anything other than 60 Hz refresh rates might improve your screen, but much more so on old CRTs than on modern LCDs and OLEDs.

These days, like most smartphone 'features', it is mostly but not entirely about a checkmark to induce you to feel that you are missing out on something.

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