This is slashdot; he has a penis.

There was a murder a while ago, and it came out that the murderer had 'preferred pronouns'... they/them, I think. The article about the murder was written in accordance, 'they killed the family...', 'they stood over the body'...

It was hard to parse out what happened; I'd almost argue that the article contained factual inaccuracies. I wish I had saved it, because it was a great example of how having pronouns depend on situational incidentals is absolutely unworkable.

There was a time when everyone in the world who knew of the existence of the GIF format, pronounced it with the 'J' sound. Then other people happened, who didn't know how to pronounce it. Now they declare the creators wrong.

I don't have a firm opinion whether ivermectin is effective as a treatment against Covid; if it has an effect, it doesn't seem like a strong one.

But it is clear that nobody calling ivermectin 'horse dewormer' is intellectually honest in the slightest, and those that do are probably not worth engaging with.

It almost certainly wouldn't have been as bad. Don't abandon rationality because you think your motives are noble.

People think that all excess revenue is going into some rich guy's huge pockets. It's almost painful how poorly they understand how economics and finance works.

The freedom to choose your lightbulbs. It's part of a greater freedom, like the ability to complain about a TV show is part of a greater freedom. I'm 90% LED, but occasionally buy an incandescent... the light's better, and fluorescents/halogens are a terrible alternative to either.

But I loved the Atari 800 keyboard. It was both clickety, and beeped on every keypress.

Not that I want ads... but I think I would prefer ads to the absolute crap that Pocket serves up.

The other day for some reason Pocket turned back on, and I was amazed at how low quality it was. Lowest denominator clickbait blog posts, as bad as any facebook stream... lowbrow political commentary, whackjob health advice, and so on. I'd rather see a laxative commercial.

Pocket is supposed to be a curated stream of higher-quality articles; it seems more like a stream where any quality or intelligence has been carefully filtered out. It was like a twitter stream.

The Wuhan leak hypothesis was always plausible, despite any and all accusations of racism that flew accompanied it. It's not certain, because there's no hard evidence beyond the circumstantial. There may not ever be; China has done a very thorough cleanup job of the lab.

Nor is there hard evidence for direct animal transition; again, it's just circumstantial. What's happened in the last few months is that more smart money has shifted to the lab-escape scenario.

The idea that it was genetically enhanced is less likely. Put through gain-of-function processes? Maybe.

>Reducing the probability of one of the errors increases the probability of committing the other type of error.

Rather, it may increase the possibility. If, for instance, you make your measurement more accurate, both probabilities can be reduced. But still something to watch out for.

Python indentation would have been so much better if the language standard just required spaces and forbid tab characters from the outset.

I can't imagine that the CEO doesn't examine, weekly or more frequently, a finance report listing budgeted and actual spend of all the major departments in their company. They'd be negligent if they don't.

If I run this through my Bayesian processor, I think it's far more likely Cook is simply lying than that he doesn't have a reasonable estimate of those expenses. But... I don't really blame him for lying. I'm sure he was told that this was the safe answer to any question fishing for particulars.

You need to have a fairly high IQ to understand them, though.

The brains of men contain stronger front-to-rear connections while those of women are better connected from left to right.

https://www.the-scientist.com/...

I don't want to say it's settled science, but... this has been known for many decades. Scientists can determine the gender a brain belongs to by examining its physical structure.