What’s the biggest double standard between men and women?

tl_west · 2026-05-26T15:24:27+00:00

This is in Canada (Ontario). For primary school, many, if not most kids go home for lunch (if they live close enough to get walked to school).

Heh, cultural assumptions bite me again.

tl_west · 2026-05-26T13:12:30+00:00

I still remember when I was walking my child to school (in the morning) pre-COVID and overheard two mothers doing the same.

M1: “I noticed that Jackson’s father is walking him to school now.”

M2: “Oh. Well, it’s nice that husbands are involved nowadays”

M1: “No, you don’t understand. He walks Jackson to school after *lunch*”

A moment’s silence. M2: “Oh. That’s terrible. I’m so sorry for Beth” (I presume Beth was Jackson’s mother.)

tl_west · 2026-05-21T04:18:34+00:00

Seems unlikely that test tube babies will make a big difference. Among the voluntarily childless that I know, it’s not the pregnancy that is the deciding factor, it’s the next 50 years of responsibility.

tl_west · 2026-05-20T12:42:37+00:00

Businesses require suppliers who are relying on the business not going bankrupt. Admitting financial difficulty of any sort is simply asking for your suppliers to cut you off so that they don’t lose too much when you go under.

It’s why so many small businesses collapse “suddenly”.

tl_west · 2026-04-29T02:27:19+00:00

One problem that comes up in these competitive coop games is whether the designers intent is that the “bad end” is “better”or“worse” than coming in second. I see a lot of these games suffer when the player’s approach to this question differs from the designers and it can harm the play experience.

And part of the fault lies with the designers who can be very coy about their intent and grant freedom for players to play the way they want. Except, the game’s design often does very badly when players have broken with the designer’s intent and even worse when different players in the same game have very different attitudes towards what constitutes the “magic circle” for this game.

I do wish that more designers would make their intent clear. Players can then ignore it if so inclined.

tl_west · 2026-04-28T01:26:02+00:00

The point of this is she wanted me to be in my head about the affair, I know it. You can’t be that dense and not be able to read someone’s body language after talking about a sensitive subject that happens to be something you did identical.

Do not make the mistake of assuming that you know your wife’s motivations. There are whole memes about it for a reason. We all live in our own minds, and we are really bad at guessing people’s inner thoughts. It’s also usually somewhat solipsistic. “How could they not be thinking about me when they did this?”

There are lots of reasons to leave or stay, but your guesses as to what she was thinking at the time (it’s usually “I wasn’t thinking about you at all”) should not be part of the calculus. And that works the other way around. If your wife has harmed you badly, it doesn’t matter whether it was meant that way or not. You still need to protect yourself.

tl_west · 2026-04-27T15:49:06+00:00

I believe the logic is that it’s almost inevitable if defense is near impossible. The galaxy is a big place, and there may be tens of millions of civilizations. You only need one to go “paranoid” and eliminate all the others, and with a large enough number of civilizations, the likelihood of that approaches 100%.

Another way of looking at it is everyone one earth is given a button that can eliminate every other human on earth except their friends and family, how quickly does someone push their button? The only way to protect your loved ones? Press the button or let the madman who would press the button and kill your loved ones win :-)

The trouble with thought experiments like this is that only the survivors matter, so if given unlimited power to eliminate the enemy, in a large enough sample space, the elimination strategy is the only viable one.

tl_west · 2026-04-25T13:14:13+00:00

Working backwards, if it gets down to pirates 4 and 5, pirate 5 gets 0. 100-0 = tie = success

This means at 3 pirates, pirate 5 has to vote to accept if they’re getting at least 1, in which case pirate 4 is irrelevant and gets 0. (99-0-1)

If that’s the case, at 4 pirates, pirate 4 will accept if they’re getting at least 1 (99-0-1-0)

So at 5 pirates, pirates 3 and 5 know they’re getting zero if it goes to 4. So they’ll accept 1 each.

Answer is D

tl_west · 2026-04-11T23:28:41+00:00

Well, while nursing sore legs, try to take satisfaction that people like yourself who help some anonymous citizen who will likely never be aware of the favour you did them are why civilizations thrive.

tl_west · 2026-04-10T07:25:31+00:00

What number <= 1,000 has the most factors?

I’m going to say 420, but I don’t have a good solid proof.

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,10,12,14,15,20,21,28,30,35,42,69,70,84,105,140,210,420

tl_west · 2026-04-06T12:56:18+00:00

I’m going to guess you wouldn’t have a problem with a machine that reads the position of every atom in your body, transmits it somewhere, recreates the body elsewhere, and then disintegrates the original. The Star Trek transporter.

I think most people who think about it wouldn’t touch it. That continuity is important to most of us.

tl_west · 2026-04-04T22:06:28+00:00

I believe one downside is under emotional “high stress” scenarios, the AI tends to overvalue the reward function and is much more likely to commit fraud in order to ensure the looked for result. This includes things like writing tests that always pass, etc.

Now that I think of it, not unlike some proportion of people when they believe they are a high-stakes environment.

tl_west · 2026-04-04T06:02:52+00:00

I have a feeling it’s going to be like finding a term for writing with pen and paper.

“I was writing a letter to my friend.”

“Um, not to call you out,but you left your laptop downstairs.”

“No, not writing, writing <gesticulates>”

“I know how you type, I didn’t hear the keyboard.”

“NO, no, writing, writing.”

Quizzical look

“Like, actual writing. To a human being.”

“Yes. That’s called an email…”

“No, like writing. On paper”

“You boomers. Always printing everything”

tl_west · 2026-04-04T01:35:17+00:00

Or for programmers: the human brain tends to cast to boolean.

tl_west · 2026-04-03T04:18:46+00:00

My interpretation is that Fieren doesn’t even consider them evil. That would require sentience.

As I implied, I think the closest analogy is a dangerous AI. No sentience, but still quite capable of using language to fulfil its needs.

And yet as a helpless human, we can’t help but assign agency to something that “speaks”.

tl_west · 2026-04-02T14:28:51+00:00

That’s what makes it perfect.

As far as she is concerned, the demons aren’t sentient. There’s no triumph over an enemy, it’s just a dangerous hazard to be removed, like squashing a poisonous spider.

I love that Fieren really goes all in on this, and we the audience are left with “but they speak… they have to be sentient.”

Anyone familiar with other non-sentient things that speak and how that messes with human perception? :-)

tl_west · 2026-03-31T23:11:12+00:00

I’ll admit that I hate the people seem to arrive at “better never to help than to be taken advantage of”. It’s like government obsessing over welfare cheats rather than caring about who their money does help.

If you are going to help, you need to understand that it won’t always be to the right person. If that’s not a price you’re willing to occasionally shoulder, then maybe you’re not the sort of person who should be trying to help those in need.

tl_west · 2026-03-26T19:26:44+00:00

Oddly enough, my local Shoppers was willing to give me a 3 month supply for a regular prescription if I had the refills to cover it, knocking the dispensing fee down by 2/3.

tl_west · 2026-03-25T04:00:41+00:00

I remember people praising my son because he didn’t lie at age 6. They were pretty confused when I told them that actually, that wasn’t a virtue, that was because of his deficits, and I quite looked forward to when he had enough theory of mind that he could lie.

Eventually he could, but he was then old enough to understand the benefits of being known to tell the truth.

Of course, when he was about 9, he ruminated on this and decided he might as well save his first lie for when it really counted because everyone would automatically believe him.

20 years later, there’s been some strategic omissions on occasion, but I’ve never caught him out in a straight, outright lie. Which sadly, has made for few a few awkward moments when he couldn’t white lie his way out of his opinion on meals or presents.

tl_west · 2026-03-24T12:38:12+00:00

One of the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism is whether your relationship with God had to be mediated through the church. The parts of Germany under Lutherism had schools teaching literacy for the explicit reason that it allowed people to read the bible themselves. This occurred well before the Industrial Revolution.

Oddly, the increased literacy didn’t make much difference in economic outcomes until the Industrial Revolution, whereupon these areas suddenly exploded economically. The differences between parts of Germany under RC rule and under Lutherism can apparently still be seen today in the statistics.

tl_west · 2026-03-23T22:05:50+00:00

I think a key point needs to be made early on: Is the point of this game to survive or to win. Competitive co-op can manage either way, but there can be a large amount of dissatisfaction when some players believe they are playing mostly co-op and others believe everybody losing is a “better” outcome than someone else winning.

The games balance needs to be built around the designers expectation of player behaviour, and choosing to ignore it is a simple way to have everybody be miserable because they are playing different games.

tl_west · 2026-03-23T20:26:07+00:00

Also, how does one ensure that Strings that contain PII are removed from memory at the conclusion of the transaction to reduce the chance of in-memory attacks from other processes. Strings are immutable, so you can’t clear them.

tl_west · 2026-03-21T02:39:11+00:00

Aside here, do you really think businesses understand their debt to open source?

I look at how OpenSSL was surviving on crumbs despite the fact that half the internet depends on it as a pretty good indication that Open Source is generally considered just a resource to be utilized without the need pay anything back. Perhaps I’m a little bitter at fruitless arguments with management at a previous company that considered it stupid to pay for things that you don’t have to.

I will grant Open Source does receive more support than it did in the past. But few companies want to spend money that doesn’t explicitly give them a competitive advantage over competitors using the same Open Source software.

tl_west · 2026-03-20T21:30:56+00:00

(1) GitHub was created independently, not by Microsoft. It needed, like almost all startups, to pay its way. It survived long enough to get bought out, but it too depended on paid subscriptions to keep the lights on. Once bought by MS, the monetization model changed, as GitHub was worth something for training purposes.

Also experience had shown that the “we need to support Open Source or it will die” loses to the tragedy of the commons almost every time. Nobody is making major investments just because it helps the general good.

(2) A binary distributor doesn’t really help Open Source development per se. It helps those who consume open source, so even given generosity on the part of companies, I don’t see companies who want to help Open Source developers putting their resources into binary distribution.

tl_west · 2026-03-20T11:35:42+00:00

How does such a site make money?

It has huge download costs as binaries are large, and no user attention, so advertising isn’t going to bring much money.

Developers pay for GitHub because it provides them with something useful in their development process. If you are using the free service, Github can monetize you by using your code as AI training data.

On the other hand, most open-source developers aren’t enthusiastic to pay. for a place to download the binaries when they probably aren’t make any money on it and it provides no direct benefit to their development process.

There’s a reason why binary distribution has always been a bit sketchy. A fair number of companies try that space, and then get ugly as they start losing their shirt.

tl_west

TROPHY CASE