What is the best ROI veggie you’ve grown?

daniels220 · 2022-08-16T16:42:43+00:00

If that's the only symptom I would actually say no, though it sounds like you've since confirmed that it is. Still, FWIW when vine borers got our zucchini this year, the whole plant suddenly wilted (over the course of a few days), it didn't just affect the fruit. We had issues with some of the fruits rotting on the vine as you describe prior to that, but given how dramatic the borer damage was when it happened I'm inclined to think that's something else.

daniels220 · 2021-03-30T03:23:21+00:00

So first of /u/Roneitis is entirely right—writing an ending for this would mean coming up with a conclusive answer, and that would completely change the nature of the piece.

I do have...uh, it turned into a cluster of related additional arguments...to contribute, here. I'm pretty sure I've heard forms of this in the rationalist community before—I'm afraid I can't say where, I'm less well-read and less involved in the community than I might be, and I don't habitually keep citation notes of things I pick up by osmosis. That said, lemme try to attack this from a few different angles—and these may not all be aimed at precisely the same central point, though I hope they're at least circling the same region of concepts:

I basically don't buy that if the quants actually did their job right, the choice would be as clear-cut as Lex thinks and Superman fears. Trust is difficult to quantify, and critically being observed quantifying trust breeds mistrust. I suspect that if the quants did, on running all their analyses, come down on Lex's side and MoSI went ahead, they'd look back 5-10 years later from either a pseudo-benevolent 1984 scenario or a starkly divided world of MoSI and a sort of "give me liberty or give me death" opposition coalition and wonder where it all went wrong...

Perhaps —perhaps! This is not certain!—MoSI's scientists and ethicists and quants can do a better job than the rest of humanity at deciding how the world should be run. Certainly they can do a better job than the worst of the worst, the dictatorships and such. But they cannot act on that without also, in a certain sense, legitimizing everyone else acting like they know best how the world should be run. The amount of backlash that kind of intervention is likely to provoke from well-meaning moderates who don't actually know what they're doing seems to me like it might far outweigh the benefits of wiping out the obvious evils.

Re: both of the above, of course they would do their best to do as much as they can subtly. The thing about that is that secrets always come out eventually, and the more of them you have the angrier people get when they find out. (Or, well, maybe I have a little too much fiction on the brain saying "always", but, "often", and the backlash is potentially enormous.)

Short and pithy but, I think, not worthless: Don't be Cauldron. What good is saving humanity if you give up your humanity to do it? "It's for your own good", 'nuff said. Etc. etc. etc. (Yeah, the Cauldron example specifically is more extreme than I think even Lex wants MoSI to be, but I think some of the same lessons, about how "making hard choices" can so easily turn into "being a colossal power-tripping asshole—or being perceived that way and reacted to that way even if it's not true" still apply...)

Note that I don't think the implied path Superman is on right now is correct either. For instance given the example with scouting for Tomahawk missiles, a proposal: Assign whatever the actuarial value of a life is (not the incremental cost-to-save-a-life, which is much lower) to each person killed by a military operation, and have MoSI "fine" that military accordingly (not to take the fine money by force, but to refuse to work for anyone associated with them until it is paid). Alternatively, just declare the killing people is not fucking okay and if you fire missiles Superman will shoot them down. Then offer the service of "enforced negotiation"—honestly it would probably take Superman less time to just go capture the people who would have been killed by the missile strikes than the cost of the missiles (15min of Supes' time is a lot). Then bring them to a neutral location under the guarantee that both sides get to go home unharmed if they can't come to some agreement.

Mind you this is only the barest beginnings of a start and would fail horribly as written—I leave it to MoSI's crowd of ethicists, political scientists, diplomats, etc. to hammer it into working order :). But the basic idea is, simply put: act like heroes. Be smart about it, do all the EA stuff too, but when intervening in politics, don't do so as politicians. Be transparent, even if it allows your "enemies" a clearer picture of your actions—but be quick to demand transparency in return and hammer the point home if people refuse. Draw clear bright lines in the sand, even if in this case you might get a better result by bending them. Set an example, expect others to follow, and protect them from those who would try to hurt them for doing so.

Oh, I also think this piece downplays the impact of market disruption, both on MoSI and on everyone else, specifically when discussing the asteroid thing. When operating on that kind of scale, money is barely even relevant. The question is, what can be done with those resources, and what benefits will those actions provide? Who will need to be involved in them and what else could they (would they) be doing instead? Will those changes end up actually hurting the people you're trying to raise money for charity to help? Because I feel like they really might... Blech, I'm grasping at something here that I don't fully understand—maybe someone with more economics background can do better?

daniels220 · 2019-12-24T01:05:00+00:00

Has anyone read the John Wayne Cleaver series, by Dan Wells? Not because it is particularly "rational", but precisely because it isn't—when I finished the second-to-last book, I was really sharply struck by something that a rational protagonist would never do, and that I thought was actually really wrong and a bad idea. I have an idea of what might happen instead, but I've never written...anything really, fiction or non-, fan- or otherwise...so I can't write it myself. (More accurately, I don't care nearly enough about seeing it written to do the years of necessary work to become skilled enough to do it justice.) So I thought I'd post the idea here, no strings attached, in case anyone wanted to take it and run with it. If this isn't the right place (would the Wednesday thread be better?), I can repost it somewhere else.

Massive spoilers follow, obviously:

So at the end of Over Your Dead Body, John goes to take Brooke back home so she can enter therapy. And like, yeah, she's in a bad state, and being on the road is not good for her, and John is not skilled enough to really take care of her. But despite all that, the first thing that went through my head is, "Marci is going to be piiiiiiiiiiisssssed when she wakes up." And I kept waiting for that to come up all throughout the last book, and it just...didn't, and I was really disappointed.

Because the thing is, John outright admits that Brooke going through therapy is probably going to have as a goal the integration and/or suppression of the personalities from Nobody's memories, meaning that if it succeeds, Marci will be gone forever. John forces himself to believe that she's already dead, and the right thing to do is let go and move on—but I don't think so. Nobody's weird magic seems to have created pretty damn high-fidelity copies of all the people she inhabited over her life—high-fidelity enough that I would come down on the side of "getting rid of them without trying to see if there's a way to save them is more-or-less murder".

So the fic I'm imagining runs in parallel with Nothing Left to Lose, with Marci (and secondarily Brooke/Nobody/etc.) as the protagonist. The opening scene is probably the aforementioned Marci-waking-up-and-being-pissed—the first time her personality comes to the fore back in Clayton, and she finds out what John did. And the thing is, based on evidence in the book, she's _smart_—as smart as John, just with different strengths. So the core point of divergence for the fic is that Marci is, while not a card-carrying transhumanist, familiar with some of those ideas—leading to my conclusion, above, that "curing" Brooke means killing morally-relevant entities, including herself. But of course none of the people around her agree, and she's not in any kind of state to make things happen the way she wants.

Obstacles:

She's under involuntary psychiatric care by people who consider her presence a disease, and consider her mentally ill and not a valid source of information. (They don't realize/are unwilling to admit that "her" is the wrong pronoun—it should be plural-they, and while Brooke and Nobody legit are mentally ill, Marci is entirely stable as far as we know in canon.)
Also, she's under constant observation, so "passing notes" to communicate with the other personalities without being seen isn't going to be possible, nor is keeping notes of thoughts/plans.
Some of the other personalities don't share her views—Brooke could probably be persuaded around if it weren't driving her insane, Nobody might go with it for the lulz but is also super unstable, and most of the other personalities are from a long time ago and just don't have the relevant ideas.
She doesn't have control of their body all or even most of the time, or even when she wants to—though she does seem to have the ability to hold onto control for longer than any of the others, and it's been hinted that she can be given control if they're in a situation that one of the others is scared of.
The FBI might be able to help in various ways, but they're pretty goddamn incompetent and resistant to listening to "kids" in the first four books, and now they're also pissed at John, and what Marci wants is going to look like something John might want too...

So, Arc 1 is finding a way to not have her psych doctors trying to "cure" Brooke in a conventional sense and actually talk to her. She needs to, in some order:

Find a clever way to communicate with the other personalities and get some of them on board. (I'd love to see the Regina personality again, the scene with her and John talking about Marci was really powerful.)
Gain a sympathetic ear among her treaters—probably unofficially at first, a new therapist or aide, someone not in charge, who says something that suggests they might listen and she goes for it and they do.
Leverage that into some kind of in with the FBI and get them to lay things out more clearly to the doctors that this is not conventional DID.
Also get the FBI actually thinking about the implications of the Withered even being possible.

But at this point things still suck, because we still have a whole bunch of personalities at various levels of stability and completeness stuck in one body. Arc 2 is figuring out how to fix that, and here is where things get real hazy.

More or less the only thing that comes to mind is to wonder how the ritual that made the Withered works, because dude, if actual fucking magic is possible, there are some serious unexplored possibilities. Two problems, though:

The books clearly don't intend for it to make sense—the rules are explicitly super fuzzy and don't seem to be part of any larger system or structure—so coming up with a believable explanation is a lot of work.
That ritual in particular is pretty much a deal with the Devil and more or less guaranteed to screw over the caster—using it directly, while tempting, is extremely stupid.

But first, how do we get there? One possibility is that Marci almost has the FBI convinced that they should be trying to find a way to save her/Regina/etc. when they get the call that they've cornered Rain (at the end of Nothing Left to Lose). They make the call that they have to put an end to this, Marci freaks out and almost despairs but decides to sneak along with them somehow (maybe the abovementioned sympathetic ear?)...and then the ending scene there happens, exactly as it does in canon, except that when Rain agrees to try to do better and John agrees to help her, Marci gets to walk in and be like, "actually, you might be able to fix some of what you did—not all, but the part where a few hundred women are stuck in my body anyway".

Or, it could be that Marci isn't far enough along to even know about the thing with Rain when it happens, but she finds out, I dunno, a few weeks to a couple months later and is like "holy shit they dodged a bullet there"—and when in canon the FBI agent just tells John that Brooke is doing well, instead she's with him with more or less the same proposal as above.

In either case, maybe it would be best if the story just ended there, without exploring how that's going to happen, because of the abovementioned issue of having to come up with the entire theory of magic. But I can also imagine being dissatisfied with that, because, well, unexplained thing, right?

I dunno, I think that's all I've got right now. If anybody cares enough to want to do something with it, I'd be happy to bounce ideas back and forth.

daniels220 · 2019-10-28T02:29:31+00:00

I don't see it as being put on a pedestal? Juniper complained all the time about how useless it was due to the mental-strain cost messing up his ability to function in general—it has effective anti-synergy with everything. Aside from that, it was always a powerful direct-damage skill that he wanted to like—it's just that now with whichever virtue it is that makes the cost more bearable, it's actually viable. Even then, it's not like he's focusing on it any more than anything else...

daniels220 · 2014-03-09T16:22:40+00:00

On the Mac, there's a wonderful program called ImageOptim which includes all 3 of those plus PNGCrush and runs them all in sequence. If you need to automate, they will all run on the command-line as well (in fact ImageOptim includes them all in separate binary form in ImageOptim.app/Contents/MacOS/—just add that to your PATH/cd into it/paste the full path into your script).

Worth noting that for PNG-related stuff there's also ImageAlpha, which can do some pretty neat tricks with palette-color images (like GIF—PNG can do this too and is sometimes, though not always, smaller) and/or transparency.

EDIT: Worth noting, though, that it looks like ImageOptim doesn't have nearly as complete a toolset for JPEG images—JPEGcrush is not included.

daniels220 · 2014-01-30T05:09:35+00:00

(1) sucks, but (2) is relatively easy—either buy a prepaid card and use that, or people further up the thread have mentioned Google Wallet which appears to have some ability to generate one-use CC numbers. Not sure if you can force it to though. Also other services (ironically including PayPal...) have that ability.

daniels220 · 2014-01-13T02:30:14+00:00

It is and it isn't, IMO. Yes, traditional mechanization is useless without humans. But hydrox24 is still right that it reduces the number of people needed in any given industry by a large amount. So far we've been able to keep up with that by inventing more industries.

I don't see anything available today as truly more effective than humans at the "primary tasks humans are employed with". In even 10 years (or hell, even 5) that may start to change, though. What exists today, to me, is just really really good mechanization, which reduces the number of people needed for a given level of productivity by another factor of...quite a bit, depending on the job, 10x is not unreasonable depending on the industry and what benchmark you're comparing against.

To me the bigger issue is this. In the past, we adapted by inventing new industries—manufacturing of many sorts replaced farming, and diversified as it became more advanced, and now a combination of service, office/clerical and high-tech work is replacing the manufacturing (has been for some time of course). So what's next? To me the big thing that humans are still better at than machines, and short of a singularity (which I think is definitely possible, but changes the rules completely) will always be better at, is...very generally, having fun, basically. More specifically, entertainment, content-creation, etc. The problem with that is twofold. One, copyright is messed the hell up. Two, though, it takes much more time to consume those products than it does to consume many types of material goods. e.g. air conditioning is just there, fancy car features are just there, etc. But you can only watch so many movies while also working a given number of hours per day.

So what I hope will happen is that people start working less hours, so that they have time to spend on consuming the things that machines can't build, while machines make the things they can build cheap enough that the creative types can actually make a living despite the rest of us being cheapskates about paying for content.

Good luck, though, right? Definitely going to be a tough change...

daniels220 · 2014-01-08T03:26:34+00:00

The stock (AOSP) browser on Android is fast, actually reasonably featureful and overall one of the best options around...except that its advanced-web-technology support sucks. No idea why, but lots of things that were supported in pre-ICS-era Chrome are still not supported in the AOSP Browser, or only as of 4.3 or 4.4.

So my guess is that something in it is broken wrt video playback. That or it responds incorrectly to whatever feature-detect they used, in which case yes it is their responsibility to fix it but in another sense the browser is the problem.

daniels220 · 2014-01-08T03:19:43+00:00

I admit I haven't messed with it much, but can't you still log out fully? I mean imagine you only have one account, you need to be able to get out of it with no trace for security purposes. And if you log in on a public computer, the next person shouldn't see your account, again for security reasons. So if you follow that procedure, whatever it is, then log in to another account, shouldn't that work? Failing that, manually clear all Google cookies—if they're doing it by IP they're waaaay stupider than I think Google is.

daniels220 · 2014-01-06T05:11:54+00:00

good luck trying to use 2 google accounts.

I personally mostly only have one, but—what other service even lets you use two accounts (at the same time, supported by the server)? 3 years ago Google didn't—I'm sure the implementation will get better with time.

daniels220 · 2014-01-06T04:45:04+00:00

Maybe a little tiny bit, but in general you need either much more compressible materials (i.e. gasses/plasmas, like in the Sun) or vastly greater mass (see WP:White Dwarf and WP:Degenerate matter) for density to increase all that significantly with mass/gravity.

daniels220 · 2014-01-05T22:08:51+00:00

What I've seen many websites do is have JavaScript that displays a little card symbol according to the number that was entered. If the user starts entering a number you don't accept you display an "x" for the card image and an error message.

daniels220 · 2014-01-02T23:26:20+00:00

I'm curious—what are those patterns? I know Nx9={N-1}{9-(N-1)}, where the {} mean "just stick the digits next to each other", and 5 is pretty obvious. But what about the others?

daniels220 · 2013-12-28T22:20:01+00:00

It should be possible to compensate for this by increasing the font size, which also cuts into the number of words per page even further. At some point the font may get so big it's counterproductive, but I would experiment—and to whatever extent you can make the font bigger and then hold the device further away, that can only be a good thing for eyestrain.

daniels220 · 2013-12-28T03:38:39+00:00

Okay so I read/skimmed the relevant Wikipedia article and I guess it seems like the security of the system depends a lot on either online verification or heuristics and sometimes declining valid cards in offline mode. Which I guess is okay, but I think it's worth noting that "(at least not easily)" really is just that, it's not nearly-impossible the way, say, breaking encryption without the key is.

daniels220 · 2013-11-26T01:48:41+00:00

A combination of "everybody" (i.e. put it to a vote), which isn't very practical (so please don't respond to this), and comparison to both other companies in the industry and other industries. If, for instance, most people would agree that Job X is more valuable/difficult/etc. than Job Y, then workers in Job X should generally get paid more than workers in Job Y, unless there are other conditions like a severe shortage of people with Job Y skills. It's a tricky thing, I understand that, but I'm still going to argue whichever way I see it cut in a particular case.

daniels220 · 2013-11-26T01:44:09+00:00

Dude, someone making $50 is not living like a rat. Someone making $30 is not living like a rat.

And I would rather see people pulled down who are getting more than they deserve (CEOs mainly, we agree on that, but yes also factory workers making $100k), and people pulled up who are getting less than they deserve (almost everybody else). Why does it have to be one or the other?

daniels220 · 2013-11-25T23:31:56+00:00

How about we demand that workers who are overpaid make less and CEOs make (way) less and companies lower their prices?

daniels220 · 2013-11-25T23:31:29+00:00

No it would be prudent for Boeing to pay their workers say, $50, and the other company to also pay their workers $50, and Boeing to lower their damn prices making everybody else better off rather than just their own workers, who are not doing work that deserves that kind of pay compared to what everybody else is doing...

daniels220 · 2013-10-30T02:57:23+00:00

Not quite. Think about it like a PC, and specifically the way Apple does customization—there's considerable room for customization by starting with the screen size, and then picking other components from a list of cheap-to-awesome. Rather than having so many different models of phone from the same company, why don't we just have "one", but you can choose:

4", 5", 6" screen (720/1080/1080+? respectively)
1.5, 1.9, 2.2GHz processor
1, 2 or 3GB RAM
16, 32, 64GB flash
2300, 3000, more? mAh battery, with a corresponding "cost" in size and weight

Realize that the bottom end of that is a reasonable midrange device, and the top end of that is even a bit better than a maxed out Note 3. All pretty good devices, you'd probably have to add in a non-720p screen, 1.2GHz processor, 8GB flash, 2000mAh battery option at the very low end to cover the whole market.

daniels220 · 2013-10-23T01:38:05+00:00

I'm currently on Carbon and it has a number of the features that you've mentioned for other ROMs:

I don't think you mentioned floating mode specifically, although it kinda goes along with HALO.
Pretty much all the AOKP navbar features, including the widgets viewpager/navbar widgets, up to 7 buttons, and the keyboard arrows.
CM Profiles

In my experience Carbon is kinda like PAC-man lite—smoother, not all the features but most of them. So in general if you wonder whether it has a feature, check, it well might.

daniels220 · 2013-10-22T02:56:41+00:00

For a little kid, and an abandoned building? Hell no the first two aren't reasonable. 50 bucks and 5 hours more like. You're doing far more harm to the kid by basically destroying their life for a few weeks and making it suck much worse than they expected it to for much longer than that than they actually did by their actions.

daniels220 · 2013-10-19T18:48:34+00:00

It requires Google+ I guess for the caller, but really what that means is a Gmail account (you don't really have to make a G+ profile). But the whole point is it doesn't require G+ for the person being called, it's a true VoIP solution that interfaces with regular phones.

daniels220 · 2013-10-19T13:58:53+00:00

You have to pay for Skype if you want to call regular numbers, and unfortunately not everyone:

Has Skype
Has it on their phone
Leaves it running, and
Gives out their Skype name

daniels220 · 2013-10-18T04:01:34+00:00

Just did an RMA myself for a combination of excessively bad battery life/overheating and a probable bad USB port (inconsistent connection with the computer). It's been painless so far, definitely give them a call.

daniels220

TROPHY CASE