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Comment Re: Cheating on your wife is a bad idea (Score 2) 80

I'm an atheist, so in one sense I have no horse in this race. But while there's no denying the Church hierarchy protected pedophiles, and for a lot longer than even many Catholics would like to believe, it's not a central tenet of the Catholic faith. The Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Theokotos, the Ascension, Papal Infallibility when speaking ex cathedra, and the soteriological nature of the Church, those are core tenets.

And so is Matthew 7:5, which is in Catholic and in most Christian traditions the very heart of Christian ethics.

Comment Re:Dangerous? (Score 3, Funny) 79

They said that about D&D and Judas Priest when I was growing up. You see, people a fucking idiots and easily frightened, so are easily convinced that playing a wizard in a dice game or listening to Rob Halford sing will cause young folks to kill babies and drink their blood.

Did I mention that people are fucking idiots? I don't think you can say that enough times.

Comment Re: Cheating on your wife is a bad idea (Score 4, Insightful) 80

Actually, he forgot a foundational Catholic/Christian value:

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye."
Matthew 7:1-5

I'm no Christian, not even the least bit religious, but there has seldom been a better proclamation of charity and forgiveness than this passage from Matthew.

Comment Re:Cheating on your wife is a bad idea (Score 4, Insightful) 80

The only sin that's anyone's business is that the CEO was having an intimate relationship with a subordinate, and the only people that matters to is their coworkers, the board and the shareholders.

1. The coworkers, because these kinds of relationships can actually be very demoralizing. Even the perception of favoritism, whether real or not, has a terrible effect on everyone else.
2. The board because it is their fiduciary duty to protect the company's reputation and eliminate to whatever extent possible any liability that can come from such a relationship (superiors having intimate relationships with subordinates opens up a number of issues surrounding sexual coercion and the risks involved if the relationship turns sour).
3. The shareholders, because reputational harm and lawsuits can negatively impact their investment.

Nowhere in there is your tender sensibilities a consideration, beyond the very limited context that you might be a customer or advertiser who might get turned off. Even if that's true, being self-righteous and vicariously inferring your superior morality largely erases that, and as a Catholic, I'm sure it's at this juncture that you should ponder your Savior's own words at Matthew 7:5 before you delight in building yourself up on an Internet forum at the expense of fellow human beings that made a sad and not terribly uncommon error in judgment.

For myself, I actually feel very sorry for them. Beyond the damage to their reputations and careers, they are human beings just like me, capable of great joy and then great humiliation and shame, and for them, this awful coupling, even if completely their own responsibility, all happened while the rest of the world decided amongst all the real and tangible problems, to mock them. I viscerally hate it when anyone is publicly humiliated, even if they are entirely responsible for the humiliation.

Comment Re:Privacy (Score 1) 59

6.5' is or isn't enough to keep casual observers from seeing into your yard depending on the surroundings

How near are the other buildings are any of them multi-story?

What is the grade like, if your yard falls away from the road, pretty common think walkout basements, and such some in a car might easily see into a yard as they approach or in their mirrors as they pass by.

I don't think without knowing a lot more detail about where the house is and what the land around it is like it is possible to draw any conclusions as to if 6.5' would afford a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Comment Re:Grandstanding (Score 1) 20

Yes or no, as to the lying it is really just semantics.

If some mid level management team uses a bunch BI tools, and pivot tables and 'what-if' projections to develop various pricing rules, and those get rolled into a 'pricing model' that is used quote fares, is that ML? I would would say it inst.

So "lying thru his teeth" seems a bit strong. That is the point though this isn't new price discrimination has been a feature of airline fares for as long as I have been buying tickets. My point is SWA insisting on using last century's approach to problem does not mean anything to me as customer in terms of what I am likely going to be paying buying tickets thru my preferred channels at a given date before I travel. Advertising they are not investing in contemporary methods and tooling is also not something I find impressive, desirable, as a consumer. Actually it just makes me wonder could i be paying less if I shopped around and found an airline that does get their staff the best most effective tools?

Comment Grandstanding (Score 2) 20

I mean price discrimination is not new. It isn't as if airlines have no used various signals to set rates before.

Booking early, obviously you have firm plans and you'll pay to keep.

Booking thru a given retail channel probably says some things about it, might mean a higher or lower fare

Nothing really new by adding ML to the mix, other than it might use more signals and perhaps be a little harder to game, for the consumer benefit; but again unless you were super flexibile there isn't much room to game the current system.

I don't get excited by SWA saying 'derp we are not going to use AI for pricing or revenue managment' either. A company should run efficiently. Guy might as well go out there and say 'hey everyone you know who uses the best tools availible? Not us!" yeah that makes me want to give you business..

Machine learning is real and useful, has been real and useful for a long time. GenAI/LLMs are clearly useful, it is also over hyped. Altman would have you believe there isn't a screw his hammer cant drive, but we are also past the point where you can say we're not monkeying with that newfangled untested stuff. You can't just ignore it, if you decide to not use it, you need to know why not (there probably are lots of good reasons / cases), or you are not really leading.

Comment I don't see how that could possibly work (Score 1) 106

TLDR version: "Good ideas" that are actually good are rare, more often than not they aren't.

Long version:

Now, that's not to say people can't experiment with ideas. We know, from US research, that you can temporarily (2 hours max) put humans into a dormant state and revive them successfully. It's used in some types of operation, when a beating heart is not a viable option.

If you do that, glucose uptake drops significantly in regular cells but not in all types of cancer. If the decrease in the most-active of human cells after hibernation is by a factor of X, then it follows you should be able to locally increase glucose-based chemotherapy around the tumour by a factor of X and guarantee healthy cells remain inside levels they can tolerate.

Since hibernation of this sort involves removing all blood and replacing it with a saline solution, washing the chemotherapy out would obviously be possible before reviving the person.

Would this work? Well, it'll work better than bleach, but a quick sanity check shows that this method is (a) impractically risky, (b) likely problematic, (c) likely to produce disastrous side-effects, and (d) unlikely to be effective. Shutting down the body like this is not safe, which is why it is a last-ditch protocol.

What does this tell us? Simply that "good ideas" on paper by someone who isn't an expert are likely very very bad ideas, even if "common sense" says they should be fine.

Now, there ARE cancer treatments being researched which try similar sorts of tricks to allow ultra-high chemotherapy doses, by actual biologists, and those probably will work because they know what they're doing.

Translation: No matter how good you think an idea "should be", it probably isn't. There will be exceptions to that, but you should always start by assuming there's a flaw and look for it. If the idea is actually any good, it'll survive scrutiny and actually improve under it.

Avpidimg confirmation bias is hard, but if you persist in looking for what is wrong with your idea and then try to fix the issue, you'll either avoid penning yourself in a corner or argument-proof your vision. Either way, you're better off.

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