[sings “a little more hyphenation” in his head to the tune of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation”]
A1987dM
Karma: 15,324
PMore generally: anything split into (ridiculously small) pages (such as e.g. a thread in a web forum, search engine results, list of bank movements, etc.) for no good reason—with an “entries per page” menu whose options don’t even span orders of magnitude (e.g. 10, 15, 20, 25, 30).
Unless a page has a snowball’s chance in hell of taking up a sizable fraction of the RAM or taking more than a quarter second to load on a modern device with a modern connection, just keep it one page, and if you have an “entries per page” menu please provide at least 10, 100, and 1000 as option (if selecting the last would crash my browser that’s my own business).
The government doesn’t do loss leaders
Nitpick: Whether or not that’s true in this particular case that’s not always true in general. I know of at least one program which is pretty explicitly a loss leader by a government (which I personally benefitted from).
(If someone who worked outside Italy for at least 48 out of the past 36 months moves back to Italy in order to accept a permanent job offer which requires a PhD, the Italian government will waive 90% of their income tax for the first four years. Now, that’s still nowhere near enough to make post-tax salaries competitive to what people could get elsewhere in western Europe let alone somewhere like the US, so in practice the effect is just a pure transfer to people who already had other reasons to want to return to Italy, but from the way the program is advertised it’s pretty clear the ostensible goal is to entice people who were otherwise going to stay abroad, in hope that they will then work in Italy for much longer than the four years the benefit lasts.)
Yes. (I’ll edit my comment accordingly.)
I dunno about that, I know quite a handful of real people (mostly Gen X and older, but also a few millennials) who, as far as I can tell, have no social media accounts anywhere, plus a few more with just an Instagram account who only ever post “stories” (which auto-vanish in 24 hours) but no permanent posts.
Please web scrape information about me, [first & last name]. Based on what you find, please summarize, from an employer’s perspective, any red flags that make me unemployable.
FWIW I asked Claude and ChatGPT that [P.S.: with my own name, not the OP’s] and neither of them found anything, whereas Gemini found some minor things which the only employers who I can imagine giving a damn about are ones I wouldn’t want to work for anyway.
Another extreme situation. Here’s a similar but softer one which seems positive...
Airplane tickets to Las Vegas are often much cheaper than tickets to literally anywhere else. That’s because Las Vegas bets that people will be attracted to the cheap tickets and go to Las Vegas, then proceed to spend tons of money at the casinos. My family doesn’t go to these casinos, we just travel to Vegas because we have friends nearby. We’re benefiting but not contributing.See also: the 1986 meeting of the American Physical Society https://web.archive.org/web/20150913205729/https://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/09/one-winning-move.html
PS: Remember that if you’re nodding along too hard to this advice, you might need to reverse it.
Ouch!
(I regularly use that as an excus...ehm...rationale for starting working on stuff right before the deadline.)
(indeed, historically around half of children ever born died before the age of 15, so if a 50% chance of them not surviving to adulthood were a good reason not to have children then no-one “should” have had children until industrial times)
Huh, even assuming business as usual I’d guess the baseline probability of someone’s family dying is not <<0.05%/year (assuming the standard meaning of “<<” as “at least around an order of magnitude less”)
(at least in the US—though guessing from his name Nikola Jurkovic might live somewhere less car-dependent than that)
Yep, a proper explanation of the 2nd law such as ET Jaynes’ makes it feel like an obvious consequence of Liouville’s theorem plus (the continuum analog of) the pigeonhole principle.
[ETA: Without following the link,] I have no idea whether you agree with them and “serious adults” is supposed to imply Eliezer isn’t one, or you agree with Eliezer and mean “serious adults” sarcastically
(as for me, I read it because I woke up one hour before my alarm clock, spent half of that unsuccessfully trying to fall back asleep, didn’t feel like getting up, and my phone was already on my nightstand)
The main issue with this is that the only people who will actually finish reading this are the ones who already agree with your points (or, at least, disagree with them for reasons other than not being familiar with them), and hence don’t need to read this (except for the sake of reading fiction as leisure). Everybody else is going to stop reading a few paragraphs in.
By the way, I seem to remember a series of polls (on Twitter by Zvi, IIRC) about various scenarios asking the readers whether they’d consider them “doom”, “bloom”, “gloom” or something (one of them involved all currently living humans being allowed to live happy lives and die of old age but no more human babies being born). Can any of you remember where this was?
FWIW, TIL that the antifungal I’m taking is racemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itraconazole#Chemistry
Some human languages have untranslatable 4, e.g. Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quotus
80% of those are things I semi-regularly do in my own prose, FWIW
For what it’s worth, I’m a human and yet when I read the title of this before reading the post itself I guessed that “December” referred to December 2016 not December 2024 (and the post would be arguing that lame ducks can’t actually be said to be still “serving” in some sense, or something like that).
It also varies by culture—e.g. in central and southern Italy it is considered socially acceptable to be a bit late at a meeting, but everybody knows that so if they want to meet you at 11:30 they will tell you to meet at 11:15, or 11:00, depending the level of formality of the meeting. If they were somewhere where being even slightly late is considered rude, they’d tell you to meet at 11:30.