Educational methods are pretty much the core of news for nerds.

I'm not surprised to see some well-warranted skepticism, but the outright knee-jerk rejection of a new idea is really astonishing.

Are you kidding?

Very few things in real life cannot be revised. What are you even talking about?

What distinction are you drawing between "impossible to predict" and "random"?

The mechanism of true randomness is that it's the fundamental construct of the world. It's determinism that is an illusion. According to many quantum mechanics experiments, this holds, and there's some really complicated stuff like Bell's Theorem that proves that it's not just "hidden variables" meaning actual deterministic functionality that we just can't measure sitting behind the randomness. The wikipedia article is pretty dense, but it does refer to the formal proof and it is not simple.

What are you talking about?

I think you're begging the question (that is, assuming the conclusion) here, assuming there is no true randomness and then asserting that to get something that even looks like true randomness you have to look at a deterministic thing from outside the universe that is therefore not predictable from inside the universe, and that this outer simulator universe or god itself can't have true randomness but it can disguise its randomness from the inner universe -- which is a long-winded way of saying you are postulating nonlocal hidden variables.

But you can't assume your conclusion. Flip it around: assume it's all random, and ask where true determinism comes from? It can only come from a simulation, or an outside deity, or else it's just pseudo-determinism. And that appears to be the case with this universe. How does a series of always-random microscopic events look deterministic at the macro scale? It turns out that while it's random, it's not evenly distributed and when you multiply those random numbers together in large objects the odds of something going weird are so low that it won't happen until many trillions of times the age of the universe...probably. In particular, the laws of Quantum Mechanics (completely nondeterministic) converge on equality with Newton's Laws (completely deterministic) at the scale of everyday things. And the laws of Quantum Mechanics seem to always work*. Whereas Newton's Laws make incorrect predictions at the scales where we typically have to use Quantum Mechanics.

One random event can influence another random event. It will produce a random result, with a different probability distribution function based on the inputs.

For instance. You eat ice cream on 20% of sunny days and 1% of rainy days. There's a 30% chance it will rain on Wednesday. What are your odds of eating ice cream on Wednesday?

Having said that, this is sort of related to the "nonlocal" interpretation of Bell's Theorem that allows determinism to exist, only if there is a mechanism outside the fundamental forces that interacts faster than the speed of light (and therefore kind of sort of time-travels back in time), carrying information between particles that should not know about each other according to relativity and cannot know by the functioning of any known fundamental force. This generally seems unlikely to me but it is not truly excluded.

This question works out exactly the same if you flip the logic and assume reality must always be stochastic and say models may appear deterministic, but how can reality be?

It turns out as best we can tell, it is absolutely random. You can read into that wikipedia article for a few loopholes that allow determinism, like nonlocal hidden variables, superdeterminism, or a version of many-worlds. But I need you to note that you really do have to make some non-obvious other assumptions to make determinism keep working. Which do you hold most sacred: determinism, or causality? I'd argue most of us intuitively want to keep both and it just doesn't work.

Okay, I see the analogy to QM via where the act of measurement changes the system being measured, although calling that "simple quantum mechanics applied to social phenomenon" feels like a big reach just to drop an irrelevant science term in to match up with your later comment about rocket science. And anyway the QM uncertainty relations can be derived mathematically, unlike the social phenomena you describe. Unless you are Hari Seldon and have discovered a mathematical model for psychohistory.

How does the conclusion flow in any way from the premise?

How does that conclusion flow in any way from the premise?

There's a difference between absolute autocracy and absolute consensus. You're basically describing ways to solve the prisoner's dilemma. Suggesting the only options are either we all agree not to defect voluntarily, or a single all-powerful dictator forces us not to defect. There are a wealth of other options though, including accepting a low rate of defection, or, just looking at the very word "autocracy", you can go with democracy and have people at least adhere to a majority. Marking these other options as impossible needs a whole argument.

Seems to be in contradiction unless you're saying the latter part sarcastically and using "rocket science" as an example of something that is trivially easy to understand.

I find this a strange take. Walmart is a real competitor to Amazon. And any competitors to Walmart's is a competitor to Amazon's. Very few products are fundamentally different just because of the channel with which they distribute goods to customers -- basically just perishables or individually-unique items (handcrafted items, or to some degree selections of produce). Furthermore, even if they are completely different, why would it matter for the purposes of this comparison? There's no particular reason that all of one market has to be higher than a portion of another market.

Honestly I find that carve-out of online vs. brick-and-mortar as fundamentally different Things more strange than the geofencing off of China vs. rest-of-world given that most of the audience probably lives in !China and if China is a significant outlier and throws the stats more than most other countries. Though it would be nice if the article described what's unique about China instead of just mentioning that AliBaba is there and eclipses both.

FWIW I was surprised at this headline and clicked in because I thought Amazon had surpassed Walmart many years ago, so I guess I was in a bubble.

That's an interesting take because I find it the opposite -- I find official assimilation policies cause a focus on differences because those are what is to be eliminated, and a de-emphasis on sameness because there's nothing to assimilate there. Whereas multiculturalism says let's acknowledge it and let it all slide on by. It's not like individuals who have differences from the mainstream culture aren't already aware of them, but when you say to celebrate those differences then you don't need to spend mental energy on covering for them.

I can't quite follow "and people wonder why the fuck there is so much shit going on" means though, I feel like you skipped a step.

I strongly suspect that it's either literally illegal or an extremely high legal risk for Microsoft to mandate it overtop of religious objections.

The summary is really bad, and that sentence being obvious nonsense is how you know. Read the actual article. Organoids aren't actual animals. Organoids are tiny clusters of cells, of which a portion are human.

The ethicists looked at three cases. Two of them are about human cells in animal brains, and one is about organoids. The organoids one is the one dismissed because there's no pain. Transplanting human cells onto an animal brain is dismissed because human brain cells develop so slowly an animal dies of natural; causes before it could actually integrate with the brain circuitry. It specifically calls out that future animals that have slower-developing brains, like monkeys, could need a new assessment.

Iâ(TM)m imagining directional microphone data that isnâ(TM)t transmitted as audio could be used to disambiguate who is saying what.

What are you talking about?

There's 3 stories today on slashdot about COVID. Just go to the front page, ctrl+f for covid. Click next, do it again. Most pages have multiple stories as hits. Occasionally there's a page without them, but look at the dates. There's a lot even if you drop the ones where COVID is just a passing mention and focus only on the ones where it's the subject of the story. If you go back 10 days there's one that recounts the number of infections and deaths (https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/01/17/1830244/7-of-americans-have-had-covid-19).

Whether an article is "divisive" is going to be subjective, whether there's "complete silence" on COVID since Biden has been elected is clearly way off.

"I said I needed eggs from animals that can't fly. These are bird eggs!" he said, rejecting the robin eggs you offer.

"Oh, so you're claiming Ostriches aren't birds? What double-think bullshit." you say.

The actual finding here is people are more convinced by personal stories, whether or not they concur with the facts. Unfortunately. It does not say that it's easier to lie. Furthermore, personal stories can lead you to non-factual conclusions *without lying*, if your personal story happens to be the minority case. For instance, if there's a law where the police can get a warrant for the arrest of anybody who steps on a sidewalk crack, you might have a personal story about how that's how your kidnapper was arrested and you were rescued, so you have personal reason to support this law. I suspect strongly that the statistics would bear out that this law does not lead to good outcomes overall.

I think it's pretty obvious why your analogy is bad, but just in case: you generally can't interchange phone radios and screens. You can interchange chargers generally. And chargers often interoperate with other phones and other non-phone devices in the same household, while the other components do not.

Also, some purchasers expect a charger in the box, some don't give a shit, so the "full stop" isn't the end of that sentence. Customers could expect a screen protector or a case to come with a phone, but they typically don't, whether or not those phones have form factors that are relatively standard.

Still, you could satisfy the purchaser who expects the cable by having the "phone & charger" bundle be a common option at point-of-sale for new purchases (as opposed to trade-in or replacement).

Flip side of all this is I personally find that my chargers don't last as long as my phones, so a free cable within is not an increase of waste, it's actually a net decrease since there's no packaging around my separate purchase of a replacement charging cable. So I'd like the cable to remain packed in. I just think you're making a poor argument for it.

I think it's reasonable when the context is high-precision measurements, which only has utility when considering very small timescales much smaller than a second. Consider that people are more likely to say "6 seconds" than "a tenth of a minute" under most circumstances. Likewise, 10 centimeters vs. a tenth of a meter.

Okay, that's sort of fair, I guess. They have to be unable to sue you if you use the version that is extremely similar to the edited version. Though I bet by the time this reaches public domain nobody will care at all about the Mandalorian, with or without the jeans guy.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that an edit of this scale shouldn't be copyrightable at all, and instead should just be part of the original copyright term, even if it technically happened a week or two later than the original release. By contrast, a more extensive edit that was much later, like the Star Wars re-releases, I think you can fairly say that the changes are still copyrighted separately from the original, when the original reaches public domain.