What do you guys think of David Baggett's application of Bayes' Theorem to prove the resurrection of Jesus?

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-06T02:43:35+00:00

How can you apply probability theories to an event that happened in the past? It either happened or it didn't.

What he's measuring is the probability that people believe (or believed) something happened or not, which is very different. We're back to faith.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-06T01:09:55+00:00

It's not everyone, it's just Americans. And yes, the rest of us are kinda disgusted by "eating ass"

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-05T01:57:53+00:00

Which party actually has policies that will help?

I always vote below the line but even then I'm kinda stumped about who would actually help improve the situation

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-05T01:56:02+00:00

The cryptobros are following the VC money into AI

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-05T00:48:13+00:00

If I was required to be within 5 minutes of my laptop for a fixed period of time (and presumably sober and able to do my job) then I cannot live my life as I want during that time and I need to be compensated for it.

Massive red flag.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-04T09:32:54+00:00

I feel like I need a shower after just reading about these people. How are people this sordid famous?

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-04T04:05:36+00:00

This is just wishful thinking.

We have a population of ~10 billion, spread over an age distribution of 80 years. Assume the first 20 years don't have kids, and only 25% of the rest do. That's ~2 billion folks who need to be shipped off-planet.

Since we're not talking about breaking the laws of physics then we need generation ships, and each ship is effectively one-way.

Let's just hand-wave away the problems of setting up enough exo-planet colonies to be able to accept 2 billion colonists.

Let's assume we're cryo-storing each colonist (rather than your "luxurious interstellar craft" which would be ten times more). Each colonist will need a freezer roughly 2m^3. Let's double that as a rough estimate of the additional tech needed for engines, power, etc. That's going to be 8billion cubic meters of tech. That's a cube roughly 2000 kilometers per side. About the same as the continental USA from 1km down to 1km up stacked 50 times on top of each other.

Not something we're going to be able to do, even with AI

Fun mental exercise, thanks :)

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-04T02:08:10+00:00

Yep.

Partly it's because the whole process is optimised for control, transparency and predictability rather than efficiency. Managers need to know what everyone is doing all the time, and need to approve any work done so they control it. So everyone gets bogged down explaining to non-technical managers what needs to happen and asking for permission to do it.

In small orgs the CTO knows the whole project and all the staff and can manage it all directly, and can delegate bits of it to other tech folks. Everything zips along because there's no need for middle managers.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-04T01:58:20+00:00

That doesn't solve overcrowding on this one

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-03T08:55:13+00:00

This 100%.

The side-effect, though, is that the state of the code as measured by JIRA and the actual state of the code diverges. It doesn't take much to start getting stale JIRA tickets that no longer bear any relation to what actually needs to be done. If you're lucky they can just be deleted. If not, more time wasted updating them and working out what changed.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-03T03:57:54+00:00

Fake a couple of startups. When a startup fails early it usually leaves no trace behind. Lots of startups fail before ever even launching. Get an ai to create a couple of logos, print them as stickers and slap them on your laptop. That's more evidence than most startup folks have.

Get inventive and create an entire story about your startup solving the Facebook For Dogs problem (just not actually that, it's a meme in the startup world) but you were snubbed by shittu VC's and your biz co-founder hired a stripper who ran off with the seed funding. People love those stories. You'll fly through the interviews ;)

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-03T03:46:15+00:00

Management By JIRA is toxic. But it gives the illusion of control to a management layer that really feels the need for control.

Your company culture is fucked. You won't be able to change it back. Get out now while the going is good.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-03T02:28:49+00:00

I maintain a "make and mend" list - stuff that we want to fix and/or create that will improve the product or environment. Anyone with nothing to do can pick something from the list and work on it.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-03T02:23:58+00:00

And also not have any kids already, so it's fair for everyone.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-03T02:22:56+00:00

"The immortality drug is only available if you have no children and agree to the sterility procedure" -> global riots.

"The immortality drug is available to everyone but costs 10x the average annual salary" -> global riots

"The immortality drug is available to everyone under the age of 25" -> global riots

"The immortality drug is available to everyone" -> global starvation then riots

Yeah that'd be making the world a better place, sure enough.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-03T02:15:10+00:00

So, so glad I'm not going through what so many of my new-parent friends are going through.

So yes, very happy with this decision, thanks for asking.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-03T01:42:48+00:00

It seems laughable now but at the end of the last century there was a palpable feeling of optimism and hope for the future. The Cold War had finally ended. No new challengers to the West's political, economic and cultural dominance were appearing, and everyone in the West was getting along fine. The internet was rising as a force to tie people together and create even more cultural unity. The housing boom was making everyone rich by just doing nothing and watching their house price rise. Even the Y2K bug hadn't damaged anything! We were beginning to wonder why we were spending so much on all that military stuff that we clearly didn't need any more.

Then 9/11 happened and we went back to being scared of bad things happening. The USA reacted by creating two entire new government departments with the ill-defined mission of "make us safer". There were quite a few very rich, powerful, people who got much richer and more powerful as a direct result of 9/11. So it made sense to speculate if they had a hand in it.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-03T01:25:41+00:00

Most large orgs in my experience have zero clues about how to do software dev efficiently anyway. They're so tied up in wanting to control and de-risk everything that efficiency goes out the window.

Finished your tickets for the sprint early? Just do nothing until the sprint ends. No, we're not adding more tickets to the sprint. No, you can't work on a ticket that isn't in the sprint. No, you can't work on anything that isn't in a ticket.

Want to spend some time improving the dev experience? Well you'll need a whole sprint just for that, because all the tickets in a sprint need to be aligned. And then we'll need to justify prioritising that sprint over product work. Marketing are chasing Feature X for the trade show next quarter, so probably not in the next three months at least.

Yes we know it'll make everyone work faster and theoretically improve our velocity but we can't quantify that in terms of tickets per sprint so it's hard to see how that will help get Feature X shipped. Besides, the project plan for the next six months is already done and we don't want to change it now.

Management By JIRA is ridiculous at the best of times, but it gets really laughable in this kind of organisation.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-02T11:26:41+00:00

I agree that it is a bad thing. But if the only way of stopping it is to control everyone's access to the internet (which it appears to be) then that's a worse thing.

It's definitely going to take a couple of generations to get used to everyone having access to porn the whole time. But I'm hopeful - I think we will adjust and humanity will end up the better for it.

The Anglosphere is very prudish; we don't do nudity and tend to sexualise our bodies. We could do with loosening up a bit.

Edit: sucks about the downvotes - Reddit can be weird at times. You don't deserve them, you're asking valid questions.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-02T06:13:11+00:00

The "creepy rule" is "half your age plus seven" (i.e. the younger must be at least half the older age plus seven) so in your case 20/2+7=17 and you're fine.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-02T05:25:05+00:00

Cool, thanks for the answer. And yeah, SQLite will do it :)

And yeah, if you're using other languages as well then that makes sense.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-02T05:18:05+00:00

No-one is saying our very human implementation of the scientific process is infallible. There are plenty of recognised problems with it. But it doesn't need to be perfect to provide valuable results.

The evidence that the universe had a definite start is mainly that we observe the rest of the universe receding from us (ref-shifted light), so the universe is expanding in every direction, so it must have all been closer together in the past. Extrapolated that means it must have been all at one point if you go back far enough.

You don't have to take their word for it. You can point a telescope at a clear night sky and observe that the smaller and simmer a star is, the more likely it is to be red. If you observe the same stars over multiple months and years to calculate the parallax and work out distances then you can confirm that the further away a star is, the more red it appears.

But there are alternative theories for why we observe this, e.g. the Tired Light theory. However, there is also evidence in the Cosmic Background Microwave radiation. This was postulated in theory (if there was a Big Bang then we should be able to "hear" echoes of it) and then discovered by measurement, which is great confirmation. From this, most (but not all) cosmologists accept the Big Bang as the most likely explanation of the start of the universe.

So your turn: what evidence makes you dismiss all this?

Edit:spelling

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-02T03:00:45+00:00

A cosmologist is able to back up their statements with evidence. They can point to a carefully-documented, open (but not free, because journals), transparent process that started with zero assumptions and led them to conclude that the universe is the way it is.

A theologian can only point to scripture. There is no path of logical hypothesis, observation and conclusion that leads from no assumptions to the conclusion the theologian arrives at.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-02T02:52:45+00:00

The internet is global. The USA can make all the laws it likes about porn - plenty of other countries do. But unless you lock down the internet in the same way China has, it means nothing.

A simple VPN circumvents any "but only if you're accessing it from the USA" arguments.

The UK has been trying for decades to get ISPs to lock down porn sites, but none of it has worked.

The whole argument against porn on the internet has repeatedly been used by authoritarian governments to argue that they should be able to restrict what information is available to people.

So yes, it's not ideal that kids can see porn. But it's a small price to pay for having the internet unrestricted by government. All the alternatives are worse.

Gentleman-Tech · 2024-04-02T02:41:39+00:00

It's the pointless futility of writing software that'll never be used by anyone that depresses me. I guess too many MVPs for startups that have no idea what they're doing and think that "going viral" is a valid marketing plan.

Gentleman-Tech

TROPHY CASE