Another good one:
Ist’s zu Sylvester hell und klar, ist am nächsten Tag Neujahr.
“If it’s bright and clear on New Year’s Eve, the next day will be New Year’s.”
Another good one:
Ist’s zu Sylvester hell und klar, ist am nächsten Tag Neujahr.
“If it’s bright and clear on New Year’s Eve, the next day will be New Year’s.”
Kräht der Hahn am Mist, ändert sich’s Wetter oder es bleibt wie’s ist.
-- Common German folk saying
Translates as “If the rooster crows on the manure pile, the weather will change or stay as it is.” In other words, P(W|R) = P(W) when W is uncorrelated with R.
Well, to be fair, the experimental group isn’t doing a lot better either, just yet.
T-Rex: Our bodies are amazing things! Check it, everyone!
We use our mouths to talk. We invent, remember and teach entire languages with which to do the talking! And if that fails, we can talk with our hands. We build planes and boats and cars and spaceships, all by either using our bodies directly, or by using instruments invented by our bodies. We compose beautiful music and tell amazing stories, all with our bodies, these fleshy bags with spooky skeletons inside.
And yet, if we have a severe enough peanut allergy, we can be killed in seconds by a friggin’ legume. And hey, 70% of our planet is water, but what happens if we spend too much time in it? We drown. Game over, man!
I used to make fun of Green Lantern for being vulnerable to the color yellow. Then I choked on my orange juice one morning and nearly suffocated.
My hotel doesn’t have a 13th floor because of superstition, but people on the 14th floor, you should know what floor you’re really on. If you jump out the window, you will die sooner than you expect.
-- Mitch Hedberg (Quoted from memory)
How is this experiment unethical? It was just a regular summer camp, with counselors that happened to be taking notes.
To be fair, it’s just the heads that rise again, not the rest of the corpse… ah, I’m not helping, am I? :-)
T-Rex: If I lived in the past I’d have different beliefs, because I’d have nobody modern around to teach me anything else!
FACT.
And I find it really unlikely that I would come up with all our modern good stuff on my own, running around saying “You guys! Democracy is pretty okay. Also, women are equal to men, and racism? Kind of a dick move.” If I was raised by racist and sexist parents in the middle of a racist and sexist society, I’m pretty certain I’d be racist and sexist! I’m only as enlightened as I am today because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants.
Right. So that raises the question: Is everyone from that period in Hell, or is Heaven overwhelmingly populated by racists?
-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics
You know in those stories where there’s this immortal guy and they talk about how bored they are and how boring life is after 5000 years or whatever? I am going to call something.
I am going to call SHENANIGANS.
You know who writes those stories? MORTALS. Folks using some of their PRECIOUS, FINITE LIFE to write a made-up story in which an imaginary person keeps going on about how being immortal is actually sucky and how they’re totes jealous that others get to die someday!
Ridiculous!
And kinda sad!
The Three Virtues of a Programmer:
Laziness—The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.
Impatience—The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don’t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
Hubris—Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about.
-- Larry Wall (Programming Perl, 2nd edition), quote somewhat abridged
Even a little bit of agenty-ness will have some lasting historical impact. Think of Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, or Tim Ferris.
Can you go into more detail about how you believe these particular people behaved more agenty than normal?
I know how you could do it. You need to come up with a detailed written strategy for maximizing karma with minimal actual contribution. Have some third party (or several) that LW would trust hold on to it in secrect.
Then, for a week or two, apply that strategy as directly and blatantly as you think you can get away with, racking up as many points as possible.
Once that’s done, compile a list of those comments and post it into an article, along with your original strategy document and the verification from the third party that you wrote the strategy before you wrote the comments, rather than ad-hocing a “strategy” onto a run of comments that happened to succeed.
Voila: you have now pulled a karma hack and then afterwards gone white-hat with the exploit data. LW will have no choice but to give you more karma for kindly revealing the vulnerability in their system! Excellent. >:-)
Unlike programs, computers must obey the laws of physics.
-- Alan J. Perlis, in the foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Is any other information publicly available at the moment about the theft? The total amount stolen is large enough that it’s noteworthy as part of a consideration of SIAI’s financial practices.
From the article, my semi-guess is that the SIAI has a number of things they’d like to fund, one of which is hiring Luke. If you think that hiring Luke is more important than other things the SIAI could be doing with immediate income right now, then you can specify that in your donation and make it happen.
Which brings up a question: what are the other things the SIAI would be spending new money on other than hiring Luke? Nothing against Luke, who is clearly awesome, but it’s hard to build an ordered list of preferences if every choice but one is labelled ”???”.
All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Man, I’m amazing! I’m a machine that turns FOOD into IDEAS!
-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics #539
When two people argue, and they both realize who is actually right, without drama or flaring tempers, then everybody wins. Even people down the block who weren’t participating at all, a bit; they don’t know it yet, but their world has become slightly awesomer.
If you already knew a movie, you wouldn’t watch it.
This example, and a few others in your post that follow the general pattern of “If you already knew X, then you would have no volition to go and learn X”, don’t apply to CEV as I understand it. The hypothetical extrapolated better-faster-smarter future yous are not being asked “What do you want now?”, they’re being asked “What should the past primitive-slow-dumb-you want?”
I might well advise someone to see a movie that I enjoyed, even if I have no particular desire to watch the movie again myself.
-- Benjamin Franklin
(To provide some context: at the time, the smallpox vaccine used a live virus, and carried a non-trivial risk of death for the recipient. However, it was still safer on the whole than not being immunized.)