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Comment Re: China and US govt wouldn't lie (Score 1) 303

Considering how you repeat lies about "injecting bleach" [Snopes: "... the transcript of the briefing clarifies that while Trump's remarks were erroneous and confusing, he did not at any point instruct people to inject disinfectants or any other substances (including bleach) into their bodies."], I am not surprised by the naive view of scientists and their supposedly best intentions. Some scientists, who tried to publish their votum separatum, were dehonested and literally destroyed (Robert W. Malone, J. Bhattacharya) by the media and were given no chance to defend their claims. All the while the "beagle-loving" Fauci got a free pass for every claim without closer inspection. "Trust the science" was said, the most unscientific sentence possible.

Comment Wrong tree to bark at (Score 2) 144

Some charts from Our World In Data - there are regions where oil consumption decreases (e.g. Europe), US remains rather stable. But not China - China shows a massive growth since around late '90s.

By the way, can any country in the world sustain its army without oil? Especially in a conflict with equal-strength adversaries who don't limit themselves in this aspect? I believe a collapse of western fossil fuel industry would be a nice bonus for Xi's plans.

Comment Re:A laughable AND dumb idea (Score 1) 352

Exactly. I can imagine Chinese officers commenting this panic with "Comrades, this is our chance!" On the other hand, I can also imagine engineers of OpenAI, looking at their poorly written Python scripts, crashing servers and logs full of errors, wishing that The Evil attributed to them would have smaller technical debt.

Those who started this collective neurosis muse be great fans of Dune (The Butlerian Jihad) and Hyperion. I prefer works where sentient AI isn't portrayed as completely evil, like Golem XIV and Neuromancer, therefore my view of current AI trajectory is optimistic.

Comment Re:*eye roll* (Score 4, Informative) 640

Other than argue it could be an honest mistake when someone has sex with an underage sex worker.

Did you read the opinion of Nadine Strossen expressed here?

And are you familiar with illusory truth effect, when you are one of many repeating increasingly bigger lies ad nauseum?

Comment Useful on small keyboards (Score 1) 130

Many notebook and ultrabook vendors seem to pay no attention to an ergonomical keyboard layout, they just cram all necessary keys together. I feel my key layout tastes are a bit strict, I can tolerate Dell and Lenovo, a little bit of Toshiba, but that's it. Trying to use key combinations like Alt+Arrow or PgUp/Down are often a hassle (tiny, misplaced, in some cases even involving the Fn key). Especially when travelling, I actually like to have prominent keys like Space and Backspace that have clearly defined and frequently used functions. (On the other hand I really hate websites that autofocus form fields.)

But hey, we are talking about Mozilla here, removing useful functions is their expected behaviour. It would be sooo difficult to put a toggle to about:config; I can hardly imagine how many talented engineers would have to be dedicated to such a task.

Comment Re:Decision in January (Score 3, Insightful) 108

Watching recent development, it looks that China grows impatient with Taiwan. I wouldn't rule out an invasion attempt within next 5 years. Another thing is that PLA would love to get their hands on existing designs, it's much better than clandestine sourcing and reverse-engineering.

Comment Re:Please don't use R (Score 3, Insightful) 101

I believe there are 2 main factors involved in this perceived popularity jump - RStudio and TidyVerse. While I admit that the core R is sometimes a bit cryptic (OK, sometimes too cryptic), limiting myself to the TidyVerse paradigm shields me from the most painful aspects. The result is that I can have a smooth pipeline from a DB to a PDF full of advanced charts that is reusable and avoids any spreadsheet tool.

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