https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-22147

So we acknowledge that black offenders are statistically more likely to reoffend than white offenders.

But why is that? I know a lot of people assume that this is “just how black people are.” But the image media paints of “black” is far more socioeconomic than anything else. Do poor blacks commit more crimes than poor whites? What about in the middle class? Upper class? If poor whites and poor blacks have differences in recidivism, is this due to a cultural or genetic difference in how these people handle the stresses and challenges in their lives? And if so does this difference conver advantages in other circumstances?

Something we need to be mindful of is that people often conform to the roles that others assume for them. If you’re black and everyone assumes you’re going to be a criminal, and one day you get an immoral impulse (like ALL humans do), the negative self-image that was handed to you will be a strong influence over how you decide to give in to that impulse or not.

My dad always had this attitude that women were less intelligent than men. He would never admit to that, but there are assumptions he made that had an effect. My sister had dyslexia and she’s female, so there was always this belief that she wasn’t more than “average” intelligence. And once people develop a belief, it is common for them to only notice the things that confirm that belief, while things that contradict it get automatically filtered out. It turns out that she is extremely bright, just not in areas that my father recognized. Long story short, I’m betting that if she had been recognized for her intelligence, she could have channeled that positively. Instead, she turns into a manipulative sociopath.

Other people’s beliefs about you can fuck you up.

The biggest impediment for blacks to get out from under this higher recidivism trend is what people assume to be the cause of the trend. It’s chalked up to something inherent about being “black.” Commonly, when a white male makes mistakes, people are apt to blame it on stress or other external factors, and they’re working hard, and they mean well, and they’re doing the best they can. Only after someone has evidence of nefarious intentions do we change our opinion. If we were to treat everyone else the same way, it would make a world of difference.

As far as interpreted languages are concerned, Ruby is by far my favorite. I can code in that language far faster than any other, despite having decades more with the likes of C and C++. It’s nice for quick-and-dirty prototypes and things that don’t require a lot of processing power. But for serious tasks, it’s just too damn slow. I have tried, for instance, to write parsers in Ruby because its string and array manipulation are really convenient, but for most data sources, the Ruby programs just can’t keep up. And I’m no slouch at playing “golf” with intricate Ruby expressions. What’s worse is that with the global interpreter lock, I can’t get more throughput from threading.

I’m not a huge fan of Python in terms of syntax, but although general Python code is of comparable things, Python has some tools that make it invaluable. I’m thinking specifically of sympy and numpy. Simpy is an amazing symbolic algebra library. I can’t tell you how nice it is in machine learning to be able to have it automatically compute partial derivatives of arbitrarily complex expressions. And when you can organize your data into vectors and matrices, numpy can use GPUs to get incredible throughput. This is the only reason I bothered to learn Python, and it’s one reason Python is eating Ruby’s lunch.

Why do urban legends propagate? They're always described in exciting but plausible ways and often contain just a grain of truth. Moreover, occasionally an urban legend is true, as you can see from a minority of entries on the Snopes database.

Interest in quack medicine stems from a variety of factors, different for different people, including:

- People with real health problems who were let down by real MDs. This happens a lot, because not every MD can diagnose every illness. Meanwhile, so many alternative practitioners claim to be willing to help in ways that MDs "won't."
- Various paranoid delusions about the government or "establishment" doctors trying to control or poison us.
- Actual instances of governments letting us down (e.g. Flint, Michigan).
- People with mental instability or who have been convinced they have some nebulous malady.
- People with very minor health problems (e.g. a mild dairy sensitivity) who self-diagnose as something much worse.
- People who read too much into what they got from 23andme and nutrihacker.
- People who fall victims to charlatans who want to make money from your real or perceived illnesses.
- On and on.

What keeps people sucked in is that what the charlatans are saying have a grain of plausibility and truth.

Take toxins for example. So many of these weirdos go on and on about toxins, but they're almost never specific about it. My MD (who has her degree from Yale) has a list of common ones. If someone telling you about toxins can't cough up something like that, you should tell them to fuck off.

However, there are indeed toxins in our environment. Plus, things you eat and byproducts of pathogens also bring toxins into or bodies. In fact, most plants produce toxins as an adaptation against predation, and as consumers of those organisms, we are also counter-adapted to efficiently denature those toxins. Aside from some of the nastier ones (e.g. like an arsenic overdose), a healthy liver does a good job of cleaning that up, and you excrete them as waste. I don't recommend exposing yourself to too many environmental toxins, and I would suggest avoiding certain conventionally grown foods that absorb higher amounts of pesticides, but pretty much, most people are going to be okay and should just focus on good exercise and a balanced diet (although there is plenty of confusion out there on what constitutes a balanced diet).

What's unfortunate is that there are indeed people who have problems with toxin build-up. But those people have some other underlying condition that scientifically explains why their livers aren't doing such a good job. An obvious one is alcoholics who have wrecked their livers over decades of overconsumption. Another example is people with untreated thyroid function, because there are aspects of detoxification that are regulated by thyroid hormones. I am highly skeptical of "detox programs," because toxin accumulation is never the root cause. If you fix the underlying condition, then your body will detoxify itself. So taking a bunch of crap meant to "stimulate" detox is likely to cause you more harm than good.

I actually have a bunch of symptoms that those people would associate with toxification problems. My MD figured out, for instance, that my thyroid function was not up to par and prescribed T3 supplementation. It is helping because there isn't anything broken about my liver itself.

I have encountered one detox protocol that I didn't think was utter shit. It's called ProtoClear, and all it is is vitamins and other nutrients you already need, but in their biologically active forms. For instance, instead of cyanocobalamin, it contains methylcobalamin. One ingredient I recall that fell short is that it contains folic acid instead of methylfolate. I actually have the MTHFR A1298C mutation, heterozygous, so my body's conversion may not be 100% efficient; it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Anyway, the idea is that if you take these chemicals that you need in their active forms, then your body doesn't have to convert them, and this frees up your liver a bit to spend more of its perhaps limited budget on other toxins. That SOUNDS reasonable, but I tried it, and ProtoClear didn't really help me with any of my health problems, although when I was taking it, I probably was doing a better job of getting my multivitamin every day.

When looking at any of these alternative protocols, I ask some basic questions. Am I supplementing something that my body already needs, and am I not taking it in excessive quantities? If so, then who cares. I might be wasting some money, although I'm keenly aware that I might be and am informedly taking that risk.

But if you're going to charge me $200 for a small bag of some voodoo concoction of herbs that you won't disclose, then you can go to hell. I have tried lots and lots of herbal supplements. Each one I researched carefully before I tried it of course. But I've noticed little or no effect of any kind from any of them.

On the other hand, when blood tests have come back indicating deficiency in various neurotransmitters, well, I can both maintain healthy skepticism of the test results and safely supplement those chemicals specifically. I'm not using someone's crystals to realign my aura. I'm taking some some tyrosine, which is a well-understood precursor to dopamine and serotonin. In other words, if there is (a) evidence that I have a specific problem, and (b) evidence that what I'm taking commonly helps with that problem, then I can engage in a safe and scientifically informed treatment.

There are also lots of things you can do to enhance performance. For instance pregnenolone (IIRC) has been associated with improved hippocampus performance. But then again, so have blueberries, and they contain other valuable nutrients, so I go with those instead.

Bottom line: There are some people who have real health problems and haven't gotten any help from doctors. I'm sure it'll be another 20+ years before "chronic fatigue syndrome" is figured out, at least for some fraction of the people who report problems with general fatigue and brain fog. It's unfortunate that they can't get help. But what really sucks is when medical challenges faced by a minority of people are blown up and turned into money-making bullshit.

There are also a lot of lazy people avoid work because they "feel a little tired." Those morons don't know what being tired is. If I decided in 1994 to stop and wait until I felt better before moving forward, I wouldn't have had a successful career as a software engineer and digital circuit designer, I wouldn't have gotten my PhD, and I wouldn't now be working as a university professor and consulting as an expert witness in my field. So fuck all you people who want to sit around and whine about not feeling like a god before getting off your asses and doing some work. And go fucking read some wikipedia or something about these real and bullshit supplements you can get.

If we had fusion power, we could economically grow crops in vertical farms. If we did this, then we could house many times the whole planet’s population JUST along the coastlines in tall buildings and give every person ample personal space.

Even if we didn’t do that, there’s plenty of uninhabited space on earth that we could utilize as long as we brought water in and improved farming efficiency.

While I agree that we’re wrecking our environment, any other place in the solar system will be far more inhospitable.

What we have here is a bunch of average coders who have nothing better to do than take surveys, and we find that among them there is a correlation between the use of spaces and a *slight* boost in salary.

What about the rock stars? What do they do? And what about the people who don’t consider themselves “programmers” who can code rings around those survey-takers? I know electrical engineers whose code looks like shit to me but beats the hell out of most of the stuff I see on github. Some use tabs, some use spaces. Who cares! These people make a minimum of $150K/year, putting them outside of the range of this sample.

In my history of doing software engineering and digital circuit design, I have used tabs, spaces, and combos. After a while, I gravitated to using spaces in order to ensure that the code formatting would not change for different people. But what I actually use varies with the language.

In C and C++, I use four spaces to indent. In Ruby, my two editors (vim and TextMate) do not have the same settings, so some code is indented 2, some 4. For Python, I use Jupyter, which I *think* defaults to 4 spaces, but I’m not totally sure, but I don’t care because I hate Python and only use it for sympy. For Java, I mostly use Netbeans, which I *think* uses 4 spaces. My Verilog code looks like a C programmer wrote it, because I can’t stand to put “begin" on separate lines, so I end up with things like “end else begin”, and I use four spaces to indent instead of the usual 2; I’m a maveric. I can read VHDL just fine, but I avoid writing it as much as I can. Assembly generally isn’t structured, so its indenting is really unimportant. I haven’t programmed Fortran since the days when you had to start in column 7. My Javascript code is indented like my C code; same with PHP. I can code in other languages too most of them require very little reading to get competent with the basic syntax, but the libraries can take a while to really master, so instead of investing time into “learning” them, I just google what I need as I go along.

My favorite code-oriented job, however, is “expert witness.” There, I get to pick apart other people’s code and show how it does and does not match patent claims. I don’t have to write a single line of code, and I make $250/hour or more. The free trips to Washington, DC are nice too. Of course, this is no cake walk either. It takes a lot of concentration and energy to interpret patents and make sense of mazes of horribly structured code, which is why it pays that well. I keep getting called because I’m an expert in both graphics and digital circuit design, so the lawfirms always get a bargain.

I would agree, but I use goto in just about every C++ program I write.

The security measures we put in place in IT systems aren’t just about keeping out malicious users. They’re also about granting access only to those who understand how to use them properly. You don’t give guns and knives to toddlers, and people who do are the ones responsible for the carnage.

That being said, I recall one time that a friend wanted to back up his hard drive before upgrading his OS or something. He had lots of music and photos and stuff, so that made sense. So he asked our sysadmin to help, and the sysadmin used some disk imaging software to do it, to copy from one drive to the other. Unfortunately, he got the drives backwards.

Hillary lost because the democrats pushed through a weak candidate with lots of strikes against her. Despite all her mistakes (some serious ones, like the email server debacle), I liked Hillary and was and still am very afraid of Donald Trump and the alternative-fact culture currently dominating the Republican party. But she was far from squeaky clean, and voters were also angry over the Democrats nominating someone who was not their strongest candidate. She was nominated because she was a woman. Admittedly, I believe she’s a strong woman with the constitution to be president, and I think that America really needs to have a female president in order to create a historical precedent that gender is not really a factor in what it takes to make a good president. I think she could have done a decent job of it, better than Trump anyhow, although we’re still at a point where women will get more flak than men for exactly the same mistakes.

Anyhow, bottom line is that American voters felt they were let down by the Democrats and went and voted for Trump. DNC IT infrastructure may have sucked, but that’s not why she lost the vote.

Ok, is Switzerland, so maybe they have different laws from what I’m used to. But in the civilized world, we value free speech. The right to free speech often translates into the right to be a total asshole, but that’s the price we pay to ensure that well-meaning people don’t have their rights stomped on by a fascist government.

Now, speech can be INVOLVED in criminal behavior. For instance, libel and slander. These come down not to the speech but the consequences of the speech. You can “defame” a fictional character all you want, and you can say really asshole things about non-specific people.

In this specific case there’s this “third party” who said defamatory things about an animal rights activist — who are THEY? Why aren’t we hearing more about this third party? Why aren’t they in trouble? Why is some moron with a like button fined $4000 when the original defamer is left unscathed?

I’m really liberal, but this sounds like some of that SJW shit the conservatives are always going on about.

I live in BFE upstate new york. I can’t go anywhere without a car. We are lucky enough to have the only Target within 60 miles, and we have to drive over 100 miles to get to any kind of decent mall. A friend of mine lives in Montana, which is a huge state that has a whopping million people. There are other states out there that have even lower total populations or population per square mile.

People who live in big cities like LA or NYC or many places in Europe are spoiled by the fact that they have good public transport and a large part of the population doesn’t HAVE to own a car.

Now, this article is ostensible about petrolium-fueled cars being replaced by electric ones. Well, when you can drive 2000 miles on a single charge, and recharge within maybe 30 minutes (try to imagine how much current you’d have to draw for that!), then maybe this kind of transition will happen. But there will still be a large spread out population that gets royally screwed by this, and there are enough western states in the US that will face this problem that their votes and voices in Congress will create some serious challenges to legislation in this area.

There are places in the US where you would make less money working than you would on welfare. And since basically any kind of income can disqualify you from welfare, not only is work discouraged buyt working your way up is discouraged as well. Basically, since welfare isn’t on any kind of sliding scale, it actively discourages working.

UBI would be abused. For sure. But if you’re not at risk of losing the income, then plenty of people will get part time jobs just to deal with the boredom.

Maybe a bunch of the rest of them will spend their free time making more minecraft videos for youtube. (Did you know that there are a lot of people who make a comfortable living just playing video games and recording them for youtube? Amazing. This one guy Mumbo owns a Merc!)

What I’d like to know is how much the welfare system, with all of its admin overhead, costs that doesn’t go to people’s welfare checks. Compare that to the admin overhead of just issuing everyone a check. Of course, different places have different costs of living, and that complicates things too, because it’s hard to work out what’s fair and equal.

I don’t think it’s a matter of being in their 40’s. I’m in my 40’s and I pick up new languages as I need to. But I really enjoy this stuff. Computer science is as much a hobby for me as it is a profession. A lot of people get into tech fields because they want a job, not because they give a crap about the topic. For someone who lacks enthusiasm, learning a single programming language is a super big deal because it’s effort they don’t want to expend. Those people won’t be retrained in their 20’s or 30’s. Indeed, someone who has had this attitude may be *more* inclined to pick up new languages in their 40’s if their experience has taught them some discipline and the value of hard work.

I grew up in a Christian home, so I’m one of those people who rebelled against their up-bringing, etc., etc. People like me also get riled up by Christian fundamentalists, like those weirdo creationists who are the poster chldren for cherry-picking evidence. Personally, it’s more important to me to experience the excitement of a new scientific discovery than to derive some kind of false comfort from an ancient philosophy. Nevertheless, I can see its value for others.

The truth is that we all live in a world of delusions. Even in science, we know that the latest and greatest or most advanced theories are just approximations of reality, so we choose to apply what we know now as if it were true because it gets the job done. Improved versions of the theories in the future may or may not get the job done better. (Relativity and QM don’t always improve over Newtonian physics, because the added complexity is usually not worth the often immeasureable improvement in accuracy.)

In many ways, religion is effective as a meditative philosophy. Things like yoga, martial arts, Buddhism, etc. all come with psychological/spiritial/traditional baggage beyond the practical effects of teaching discpline, exercise, and other things. But people actually NEED a basis for finding emotional comfort and psychological stability, and religions often get the job done (even if they’re mosty fictional). Do we pick on people for reading fantasy novels, watching Star Trek, and playing video games? It’s all the same.

As Richard Dawkins has said, compared to “certain” relgions, Christianity is relatively benign. And choosing between one “relatively benign” religion and another is like choosing between Karate and Kung Fu and also indulging in the quasi-religious philosophies that come with them. 6 of one, half dozen of another. What difference does it make which delusion you choose? The value in choosing one is the comfort or practical value it brings you. And for many peolpe, they are involved in their religion primarily to belong to a community, with the beliefs being secondary.

Yes, there are those prominent people that turn religion into a weapon, tell you all about how you’re going to hell if you don’t believe EXACTLY as they do, etc. Well, there are “scientists” who regularly engage in fabrication and falsification. Computers have no positive or negative moral aspect per se, but there are people who utilize them to commit crimes. We don’t disavow something just because some assholes abuse it. And we don’t completely disavow something just because it contains ideas we realize are inaccurate.

When we want to pick on Christians, maybe the first representative we think of is Ken Ham. Yeah. He’s a bad guy. (He doesn’t mean to be, but he causes a lot of damage.) Instead, why not think of Kenneth Miller? Despite being a devout Catholic, he has been one of the most vocal opponents to religious bullshit impinging on science since the 1970s. We could all use him as a role model. And BTW, he benefits from his religion.

It would have been nice if the summary hinted at the nature of those optimizations, unless all they are have to do with the SMT and cache topology.