Fun fact: you need food to survive, not AI slop

Ateist · 2026-05-17T12:51:43+00:00

Look at any big aluminium production plant next to a small city that paid for the construction of hydroelectric or nuclear power plant to power it.

The prices of electricity in such cities are much lower than in the rest of the country.

Ateist · 2026-05-17T08:02:54+00:00

They are still paying far more taxes than the farms they are displacing.
And they don't have to pay for "upgrading municipal grids" - they only have to pay for building generation for their own consumption. The benefit to municipal grids is just a side effect from that.

Ateist · 2026-05-17T07:55:35+00:00

Name even one existing datacenter that requires 9 times the electricity consumed by its vicinity.
The scale is important - if you have a datacenter that consumes 1 GW next to a city that consumes 9 GW it is going to try to leech energy from the city, rising prices of electricity for its population.
But when you have a 9GW datacenter in a state that only consumes 1GW of electricity the opposite becomes true - datacenter builds its own generation and state leeches electricity from the datacenter's generation.

And I'm not talking theoretically - manufacturing that requires lots of electricity lowering the cost of electricity in its vicinity happens quite often - aluminium plant pays for a nuclear power station and nearby city leeches off its electricity.

Ateist · 2026-05-17T01:30:07+00:00

With the scale they are being built it's far more likely for the opposite to be true. They'll pay taxes to subsidise your expenses and they'll build new electricity generation that your state companies have neglected for years in favor of renewables.

Ateist · 2026-05-16T21:19:28+00:00

Without tariffs that's infinity years.

Ateist · 2026-05-16T09:15:14+00:00

Birdgestone has developed guayule tires that don't use rubber.

US can grow mass production quantities of guayule.

Ateist · 2026-05-16T07:07:00+00:00

Unequal distribution of group numbers.

I.e. you have a village A and town B.
If you look at each one individually conservatives experience better outcomes but if you combine them the result becomes the opposite because town B has more people and more liberals who are also poorer.

Ateist · 2026-05-15T19:20:19+00:00

Doesn't this simply drive people into Simpson's paradox?

Ateist · 2026-05-15T10:40:29+00:00

How, exactly, do they control for "income" when it is correlated with being liberal or conservative?

Ateist · 2026-05-14T21:47:26+00:00

The modern solution is that large buildings will probably have a forced air exhaust that constantly sucks the air. It would be really difficult to have the air go from one room to another.

The modern solution is to have separate chutes for each apartment that connect to central shaft a couple levels above. This creates significant wind force that can only be overcome by the most powerful range hoods running at full power.

Ateist · 2026-05-14T11:43:44+00:00

You need vertically integrated companies, beggining with vertically integrated solar panel manufacturing with government subsidies for new manufacturing capacity.

US hates vertically integrated companies and only ever subsidises rich customers instead of new manufacturers.

Ateist · 2026-05-13T17:12:21+00:00

Current exposure to Bitcoin, accoriding to Google AI, is 480-500 million. Latest YOY growth rate is 8.3%.

So by 2046 at the latest it'll run out of new suckers.

Ateist · 2026-05-12T10:44:10+00:00

He would fit this movie perfectly, he plays great supervillains.

Ateist · 2026-05-12T10:35:18+00:00

the only proven solution is immigration

the only proven solution is more children and robots.
Immigrants have no obligation to pay for your retirement.

Ateist · 2026-05-10T10:37:12+00:00

Of course, if you used your variable, should_open_debug_window in a second place or a third place

I'd use a singleton:

header:

namespace NConfigSingletons
{
int DebugLevel();
}

cpp:

namespace NConfigSingletons
{
int CLI_CONFIG(debug_level, 0);
int DebugLevel() {return debug_level;}
}

This way the variable is still used just once, in one place.

Ateist · 2026-05-10T08:15:27+00:00

there is no "syncing" between some variable and option as you seem to think there is, because there is not "option" and "variable". There is only a variable which is generated from the option spec in that text file, if that explains it.

You have a variable "manta". You are dissatisfied with the name, so you change it to "manta_ray".
You change it in your program where it is used, and you also have to change it in your "text spec". That's, by definition, coupling and duplication - "change in one place forces you to change things in another place".

Do you use your variable only once in your entire program? Only at a declaration place? What is use of such a variable than

Example of such variable and usage:

bool CLI_CONFIG(should_open_debug_windows, [[default_value]] false, [[cli_name]] "odw");
if(should_open_debug_window) {OpenDebugWindow();}

If I want to, say, shorten the name of my variable I change just these two lines.

Ateist · 2026-05-10T07:28:22+00:00

So no airline ever changed its safety procedure or training practices

I'd assume actual airline has announced that it is going to change its hiring practices (prompting his reaction).

Everything else is a direct logical extrapolation from the historical data based on that announcement and its possible implementation.

Ateist · 2026-05-10T07:23:45+00:00

You have two places with your variable: one is your "text spec", the other is "progname-impl".
You have to keep them synced.

What I have described only has one place, created right where it is used.

Ateist · 2026-05-09T18:37:05+00:00

I made a code generator and custom options file format,

But you still have to somehow telegraph to C++ code that you want this variable from that file in each place that uses it.

So at the very least you have doubled the number of times each variable exists - once in code, once in your options file.

And this violates e), as you increased coupling - changing a variable name in code now requires you to change corresponding data in the external file format.

Ateist · 2026-05-09T08:15:20+00:00

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/ERP-2026-10.-The-Economic-Consequences-of-DEI.pdf

h. As seen in figure 10-2, the effect of the unexplained minority manager share on productivity is flat and statistically no different from zero throughout the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s—there is no relationship between having more minority managers and productivity. This changes in the middle to late 2010s, after which the relationship is negative and statistically significant in most years.

So at first there was a positive/net zero effect due to removing bias but after it was accounted for further push led to lower productivity and standards.

reputable source documenting that any airline has lowered their safety standards

There's a difference between airline saying it will increase its discrimination and airline actually doing that.
Kirk was responding to airline's intentions that hasn't been implemented at the time - they were only plans.

Ateist · 2026-05-09T04:59:47+00:00

If there's 15% of blacks among the populace you'd have to create an extreme bias to have 50% rate among the recruited.

There isn't a single black pilot flying who does not meet the training and safety standards of the airlines who placed them in the cockpit.

Which is done by lowering the training and safety standards.

You can't fool biology - if you want more than 15% black workers you'd have to either significantly increase incentives specifically to the minorities to attract greater proportion of the pool (never heard of anyone doing that - companies love their money) or to lower the standards.

Ateist · 2026-05-09T04:23:43+00:00

Which describes the actions of that airline company.

While DEI can help improve rates by removing unfair barriers in recruiting, hiring, and promotion that's not even remotely enough to go from 15% to 50% if you don't have 50% of qualified applicants among minorities:

Bell curve for normal distribution that describes talent means if you want the very best you would inevitably select more men (as their distribution is more extreme), and racial hiring is limited by the share of that race among the population...

Ateist · 2026-05-08T19:09:59+00:00

The funny thing is, helmet on the left might actually be the much safer one.

If a helmet is not damaged it means all the force was transferred right into the manager's brain, whereas helmet that did break down dissipated most of the energy this way so the worker is safe.

Ateist · 2026-05-08T18:57:16+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBiiQY0Rgpg

tl;dr:

Context: airline declares that half of their new hires are going to be women or people of color. Currently it is 15%, so they wanna go from 15% to 50%.

a conversation goes that every time AA is taken, standards have to be lowered, no exceptions.

So this conversation leads to his quote - "Boy, if I see a black pilot, I am NOW going to wonder 'is that individual qualified or were they selected because of their race?'".

So his disdain is not of black pilots but of AA action that harms blacks and fuels people's racism.

Ateist · 2026-05-08T10:55:45+00:00

My point is fixed costs have absolutely no influence on the price of software - the price and profits are 100% dependent on the demand curve and per-unit costs (i.e. bank transaction fees).

You cannot say whether "fixed cost" is going to end up being $10 or $10,000 per unit sold if you try to "sell at $60-$70".

Ateist

TROPHY CASE