Supposedly, a meltdown at sea is pretty low risk because you have the perfect heatsink literally everywhere around you, and its a molten salt design, which I think(?) (source: my ass) means that the fuel would at worst leak into the sea and immediately solidify back into some inert state.

If you want, you can view science as a system of organization. A way of making sense of facts. If I give you a file of seemingly random ones and zeroes, it is useless. If I give you an algorithm to decode those ones and zeroes into a message, that has utility. However, somebody else could produce an algorithm to decode those same ones and zeroes into an entirely different message. So, which algorithm is correct? Neither.

But say I give you another file, and Algorithm B doesn’t produce anything useful for this message, so now Algorithm A is more useful. But I also provide a new Algorithm C which also finds messages in both files. Now which is more correct, A or C? And on and on. We continue to refine our models of the data, and we hope that those models will have predictive utility until proven otherwise, but it is always possible (in fact, almost guaranteed) that there is a model of the universe that is more accurate than the one we have.

Consider the utility of a map. A map is an obviously useful thing, but it is also incomplete. A perfect map, a “true” map, would perfectly reproduce every single minute detail of the thing it is mapping. But to do so, it would need to be built at the same scale as the thing it is mapping, which would be far too cumbersome to actually use as, you know, a map. So, we abstract details to identify patterns to maximize utility. Science, likewise, is a tool of prediction, which is useful, but is also not true, because our model of the universe can never be complete.

I don’t really know what this post is on about, but science is not truth. It’s a system of prediction. The closest you can get to “truth” would be observation and data. Science is the process of interpreting these facts to better understand what things will look like in the future. It is obvious that science is not ‘true’, because by its nature it requires change over time as our models of the world improve.

I thought this as well, but I’ve started to think they could be useful if I follow way more aggressively, and create a list that is “what I want on my feed” and default to that. It’s stupidly cumbersome, but would have the desired effect. Of course you’re right that they should just let you add directly to a list - I think the reasoning for the current functionality is to limit stalking/harassment, though I don’t exactly understand how that is inhibited at all.

Feel like the inverse is more apt: where old people go, the young run the fuck away from.

An “Everything App” is just an operating system.

The reasoning behind a specific system may not be arbitrary, but why is one system better than another? People have also used 8 day systems, and 10 day systems. It would seem to me that biggest reason it is still in use today is “it’s the way we’ve always done it”. The inertia of the 7-day system makes change very hard, though there have been attempts over the last few centuries by both France and the Soviet Union. So, even if you could scientifically prove that some other system would be more productive, you would have a very hard time implementing it.

The idea that I will work a few percentage points more or less over my life, as a direct result of the phases of the moon, is, while perhaps technically correct, a fundamentally silly reason.

I tried to pick ratios that wouldn’t cause riots in the streets, haha. Interestingly, 7-3 is still less work overall than the current standard 5-2. I could get behind a 3-1-4-2 system.

This is a tangent, but you ever think about how arbitrary the week structure is? Like, if weeks were 6 or 8 days long, it would be a big shift in work-life balance regardless of how you split the days up. But thousands of years ago we decided on 7 and it just kind of stuck.

Assuming 8 hour days, here are some different splits for on and off:

• 3 on 1 off: working 25% of the time
• 5 on, 2 off: working 23.8% of the time
• 4 on, 2 off: working 22.2% of the time
• 5 on 3 off: working 20.8% of the time
• 4 on 3 off: working 19.0% of the time

I got the award for the “most unlucky, anti-lucky, possible player”…

So there’s that.

From what I understand, there’s (at least) two kinds of free speech. There’s free speech as in the government will not restrict your speech, which is important for criticizing the state without fear of being locked up. Then there’s the fanatical idea of maximizing speech: that the marketplace of ideas requires minimal limitations on what can be said anywhere, and the ‘best ideas’ will naturally rise to the top.

The problem with the latter is that it is incredibly noisy, easy to manipulate, and often an illusion anyway. Proponents of the latter in the US will use the former as cover, but they are different things. The 2nd 1st Amendment has nothing to do with your ability to moderate private spaces. Removing trolls, enforcing rules, and focusing discussion are all necessary for engaging in useful dialogue.

The Elon Musks of the world are both wrong and fuckin’ nuts, in my opinion. Often, what they really want is for the consensus of a place of discussion to more closely align with their own ideals. They think, “I am right, others disagree, therefore there must be some fundamental flaw in the system.” The simpler explanation is that they’re a moron.

I’m guessing they don’t want non-qualified individuals benefiting monetarily from mental health services. I can only assume it’s a legal can of worms.

I don’t disagree with your overall point, but as they say, anything that can happen, will happen. I don’t know when it will happen; tomorrow, 50 years, 1000 years… eventually nuclear weapons will be used in warfare again, and it will be a dark time.

Worth noting Biden recently put something like $60-$80 billion into improving the IRS.

As a child, I remember it was trivial to use Google to see through surveillance webcams that people from around the world had purchased and left unsecured and public on the internet. I hadn’t thought much of it then, including how obviously invasive of their privacy it was, but I think it has left me with an awareness of just how little these systems should be trusted to protect that privacy. I have no trust in the system to protect my data from anyone.

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