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Comment Re:More likely because people guess they are watch (Score 1) 38

My guess is it is more likely to be an artefact of increased attention rather than an actual increased tendency to be pro-social.
Ie, people on average are x% likely to give up a seat for a pregnant woman if they are actively aware, but in many cases people on public transport are "zoned out" so the actual rate of people giving up a seat is lower.
The "Batman" may just be something somewhat unusual that increases people's awareness of their immediate surroundings rather than making them more pro-social.
An interesting follow up would be to try things that are "unusual" and attention level raising, but are somehow neutral and free of the sorts of symbolism that are attached to Batman.

Comment Sometimes, Slashdot posters who are under pressure (Score 2) 38

Sometimes, Slashdot posters who are under pressure to publish, anything, no matter what, to increase their publication count, will make stupid comments, mentioning terms they have vaguely heard about, without any real thought as to whether they apply.

P-hacking involves researcher degrees of freedom and the ability to find some signal for "something" in a bunch of data by varying how the the analysis is performed after the events themselves.

That does not seem a relevant at all in the context of this particular study, which uses a very simple method and measure for what it is testing and whose methodology was pre-registered before it was done.

Comment Re:Fungus vs plant (Score 4, Insightful) 38

It's kind of a suprising to me that it was a fungus and not a plant that developed this ability. After all, plants already feed on elecromagnetic radiation.

The chlorophyll in plants is finely tuned to absorb specific wavelengths of light. It already has a hard time with green light compared to blue light, and it's simply not going to work at all with radiation that has wavelengths that are orders of magnitude shorter. Chlorophyll acts like a little antenna that gets excited by certain light frequencies, but ionizing radiation would just blow the chlorophyll molecules apart and destroy them.

Taking advantage ionizing radiation is going to require a completely different mechanism than plant photosynthesis, just like you can't use glass lenses or parabolic mirrors to focus X rays or gamma rays. Plants probably have no more chance of having such a mechanism than fungi do.

Comment Re:YAFS (Yet Another Financial System) (Score 1) 69

Like I've said before, this is just yet another financial system being created to have a minority of people manage the majority of the wealth, to their own advantage. This is just a new competing system with less regulation created by the crypto bros to wrestle the current system away from the Wall St. bros.

I think this view gives the crypto bros too much credit. They might now be thinking about taking advantage of the opportunity to wrestle the system away from the Wall Street bros, but there was no such plan.

Comment Re:Very difficult to defend (Score 2) 39

too much hassle. build a shadow fleet of well-armed fast interceptors with untraceable munitions and sink the saboteurs.

To intercept them you still have to identify them, which you can't do until after they perform the sabotage. Given that, what's the benefit in sinking them rather than seizing them? Sinking them gains you nothing, seizing them gains you the sabotage vessel. It probably won't be worth much, but more than nothing. I guess sinking them saves the cost of imprisoning the crew, but I'd rather imprison them for a few years than murder them.

Comment Re:Not surprising to me... (Score 3, Insightful) 55

Those mitigations could cause other problems down the line, so it makes sense that Microsoft didn't want to deal with those for Windows 11.

IOW: "We've only got $3.5T in capital to work with, so this is just too hard for us to figure out. You'll have to switch to an OS made by unpaid volunteers."

Comment Re:What is thinking? (Score 1) 288

You ignored his core point, which is that "rocks don't think" is useless for extrapolating unless you can define some procedure or model for evaluating whether X can think, a procedure that you can apply both to a rock and to a human and get the expected answers, and then apply also to ChatGPT.

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