Comment Re:Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate (Score 1) 206
"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone
Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.
"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone
Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.
Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.
"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"
Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up
Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.
The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!
Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.
Obligatory: get off my lawn.
Evangelicalism has become more extreme because it does not need to appeal to moderate christians anymore - and that's largely because moderate christians are a shrinking group.
When I was growing up in the west, most people would consider themselves cultural christians. They would not question that 'god made us' or that there was a heaven/hell. It was what they were told was the answer to meaning of life questions. The evangelical movement mostly grew by enticing these 'dead christians' into their ranks. I mean, 30 years ago, people who talked about evolution were deemed dangerous.
But moderate christianity is in massive decline. People are comfortable saying they are agnostics/atheists now and don't feel the cultural pressure to attend church or identify as christians. This makes the job of the evangelical much harder. Look at people like Ray Comfort - all of his bizzario 'arguments' rely on the person he is arguing with having an a priori acceptance of basic biblical theology. When you listen to him now you're like WTF is that guy on, but once you realise that in his heyday he was targeting moderate christians, why he became such a big figure makes sense.
Essentially, now that they don't need to appeal to moderates anymore they have just gone total batshit crazy, and will likely become even more so as cultural christianity continues its decline.
The thing is, at least with non-competes it was clear what your obligation was. The new front in the war on employee rights is around 'trade secrets'. It used to be that the line for this was anything you could not memorise - so you can't take copies of code, or lists of customers, but anything you can remember (e.g. a way you solved a coding problem, or names of customers you could remember) was fair game. But there has been an erosion of this and a move towards companies 'owning' knowledge in your head.
The problem with this is that it turns everything into a grey issue where you have to spend huge amounts on lawyers if you end up challenged. I imagine there will be a renewed push to challenging the boundaries of trade secret definitions as a result of this change.
Fiction:
12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell
Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual
Every change looks like corruption in the eyes of people who don't like it.
And corruption looks like evolution to some people.
Personally, I'm in favor of words meaning as much of the same thing over time as possible. It enhances communication and understanding. If you need a new meaning, you either need a new word or you need to explain yourself at a bit more length. Lest you "decimate" (cough) the listener's/reader's understanding... you get me?
The conservation laws are statistical, at least to a degree. Local apparent violations can be OK, provided the system as a whole absolutely complies.
There's no question that if the claim was as appears that the conservation laws would be violated system-wide, which is a big no-no.
So we need to look for alternative explanations.
The most obvious one is that the results aren't being honestly presented, that there's so much wishful thinking that the researchers are forcing the facts to fit their theory. (A tendency so well known, that it's even been used as the basis for fictional detectives.)
Never trust results that are issued in a PR statement before a paper. But these days, it's increasingly concerning that you can't trust the journals.
The next possibility is an unconsidered source of propulsion. At the top of the atmosphere, there are a few candidates, but whether they'd impart enough energy is unclear to me.
The third possibility is that the rocket imparted more energy than considered, so the initial velocity was incorrectly given.
The fourth possibility is that Earth's gravity (which is non-uniform) is lower than given in the calculations, so the acceleration calculations are off.
When dealing with tiny quantities that can be swamped by experimental error, then you need to determine if it has been. At least, after you've determined there's a quantity to examine.
LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.
LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.
I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though.
I'll be impressed when one of these ML engines is sophisticated enough to be able to say "I don't know" instead of just making up nonsense by stacking probabilistic sequences; also it needs to be able tell fake news from real news. Although there's an entire swath of humans who can't do that, so it'll be a while I guess. That whole "reality has a liberal bias" truism ought to be a prime training area.
While I certainly understand that the Internet and its various social media cesspools are the most readily available training ground(s), it sure leans into the "artificial stupid" thing.
I think most people are just offended by the almost automatic arrest of someone who acts in self defence. But this is really a procedural matter - it might seem really obvious that the person was acting in self defence, but the police cannot just make that assumption at the outset, especially in serious cases involving a death.
It's also a side effect of the creeping ideological position that if you are arrested you're probably guilty, and hence there is no reason to fund decent remand prisons, legal aid, and a justice system that can resolve cases in a timely manner. That attitude's all fine until someone who is probably a victim gets sucked into the justice system and it becomes apparent how your punishment begins long before you ever make it to trial.
Here's the lyrics to a fairly typical, average kinda tune:
We used to swim the same moonlight waters
Oceans away from the wakeful day
My fall will be for you - My fall will be for you My love will be in you If you be the one to cut me I will bleed forever
Scent of the sea before the waking of the world
Brings me to thee
Into the blue memory
My fall will be for you - My fall will be for you My love will be in you If you be the one to cut me I will bleed forever
Into the blue memory
A siren from the deep came to me
Sang my name my longing
Still I write my songs about that dream of mine
Worth everything I may ever be
The Child will be born again
That siren carried him to me
First of them true loves
Singing on the shoulders of an angel
Without care for love ‘n loss
Bring me home or leave me be
My love in the dark heart of the night
I have lost the path before me
The one behind will lead me
Take me
Cure me
Kill me
Bring me home
Every way
Every day
Just another loop in the hangman’s noose
Take me, cure me, kill me, bring me home
Every way, every day
I keep on watching us sleep
Relive the old sin of Adam and Eve
Of you and me
Forgive the adoring beast
Redeem me into childhood
Show me myself without the shell
Like the advent of May
I’ll be there when you say
Time to never hold our love
-------
But there's next to no repetition in it.
It's also worth noting that even objectively terrible movie treatments (for example, Soylent Green's failure to represent the actual storyline of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, while also being cheesy and stupid, and Without Remorse's failure to even remotely resemble Tom Clancy's book, while also being... well, lame) didn't hurt those books.
Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!
Newton submissively begs scraps from Einstein's table, suh.
No. Leave the fucking books alone.
Protip: Just don't buy into new motion pictures based on books. Your problem, solved! Because as you probably will understand if you give it some thought, the existence of a first-time movie treatment of a book doesn't hurt the related book. Quite the contrary, most often.
For those of us who don't want to see yet another Roadhouse or Bladerunner or Poseidon or Total Recall — and for the authors — new motion pictures based on previously untreated stories are a good thing. At least once they're out on physical media. Movie theaters... [shudders]
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
