They/them
kithpendragon
Karma: 734
tone:neutral, noncritical
As I understand it, there are many strategies that can cause significant and safe weight loss over a number of months. But, and this is critical, none of those strategies appears to consistently produce effects on the scale of years. Human physiology seems to be designed to hoard weight for times of famine, not to permanently lose it. Only a few people in a hundred seem to be able to keep weight off after losing it.
And this makes sense: for nearly all of our evolutionary history we’ve had a hard time finding enough calories to sustain a large population. Currently, most of us live surrounded by more calories than we can reasonably consume pretty much all the time. We just aren’t built for the environment we’ve created! And all that before we discuss manufactured and superstimulus foods complicating the matter.
I’m more interested to see your data going forward over a 5 year span.
I don’t recall having ever read any claim that the placebo effect extends to contraceptives.
The meaning of “life sentence” appears to vary wildly from one jurisdiction to another. Anywhere that specifies a duration, people would probably just serve out their time. Elsewhere, some new law would have to get written in light of the new human lifespan.
Depends on how much she can wiggle the frame, I would expect. There may be value in adding a screw through the strap into the rail just to be sure.
That ought to buy you a couple weeks, anyway. ;)
Any pinching concern with those straps?
Security note: you probably don’t want to leave photos of your keys on the Internet. They can be copied pretty easily from only an image, even at a surprisingly oblique angle.
Level 4 is the reason I hated high school.
This is a good explanation; I feel like I understand the concept much better in a way I wasn’t aware I didn’t understand it in the first place!
My initial thought is that the public would almost certainly not be offered details, but the State would want the existence of the an atomic bomb project generally known. That information would be calculated to intimidate the “enemy” and provide a sense of security for the public.
That, combined with the number of people needed to complete the project, sends the possibility of secrecy firmly out the window.
So the plan is to add layers of human and dubiously-aligned-human-level-AI intervention in an effort to discover how to keep AI aligned. That is to say, “If we throw enough additional complexity at it, the systems that we already don’t understand won’t hurt us!”
Like the man said, “the bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe”.
Yes, but bumping requires a carefully modified key. These are tricky to get right, only fit one keyway each, and are often illegal to carry.
You could also use a picking gun for a low-skill attack, but they tend to be expensive and noisy.
On the other hand, decoding the kind of lock pictured in the post can sometimes be done without any tools at all, or may require a cut-off bit of metal from a soda can. And an alarming number of key safes (and, worse, gun safes) can be opened by inserting a bent wire between the lid and the case, and manipulating the locking mechanism directly. Once you know the easiest way in, no real skill is required.
Oh, and we can copy keys from a photo now, so an attacker doesn’t even need to put hands inside the box to silently compromise security.
In general, we should prefer to never protect a security device with a weaker security device.
These boxes are generally less secure than the locks the keys are meant to access, decreasing the overall security of the house. Combination boxes can often be opened or decoded quickly with a lower-skill attack than most pin-tumbler locks. An attacker then has direct access to the key, which can be used to make a copy.
Maybe that’s not a deal breaker, but it should be acknowledged.
Eyes open.
I’ve seen estimates of moral weight before that vary by several orders. The fact of such strong disagreement seems important here.
Had a similar problem that we solved with a blob of Sugru. That rag looks like it would work about as well! Question is, why do we insist on putting sharp corners in places where we can walk into them? Seems like we ought to know better by now. I mean, how long have we been building our own dwellings?
LessWrong tends to flinch pretty hard away from any topic that smells even slightly of politics. Restructuring society at large falls solidly under that header.
Would your thoughts on this issue be different if the question “Is X conscious?” turns out to be malformed malformed due to the way it collapses consciousness to a binary?
Short answer: Yes.
One of the key powers of open source code is that it can (and will) be reviewed by thousands of extra pairs of eyes compared with its proprietary counterpart. Each reviewer will have a slightly different approach and philosophy from all the others. As a result, deeper and more obscure issues are naturally exposed (and therefore made available for correction) sooner with open source than they are with any program whose code cannot be freely examined.
Sounds like positional calling at least needs more development before it surpasses gendered calling[^1]. I think positional could surpass gendered calling because it’s more flexible. It should even allow the creation of new forms that have more complex results by breaking the symmetry created by always having to refer to the left- or right-starting individuals as an indivisible set. Perhaps a mixed approach is optimal?
I think indicators like “the person with your right hand free” will likely compress to “with your free right hand” or “start a right-handed”. Accounting for different variants of each movement will still be tricky, but during the teaching phase the expected variant can be indicated to soften that difficulty.
[^1] Quick technicality (you can ignore this if you don’t care): the “robins and larks” scheme is still gendered, though it has the advantage of divorcing dance genders from social genders.
Actually, I think that arm really adds to the silhouette if the instrument! It’s got me thinking: if you softened the corners and/or added some leather padding it would probably be more comfortable, and if you painted the wood to look like tin or brass it would really lean in to the steampunk aesthetic. If you wanted to put more work in for extra credit, you could attach the rocks by hanging a sack on a chain instead of the tape and maybe put some rivet-looking bumps on visible faces. How well will it travel? Do you need to add folding? Or a way to easily take the arm apart? Maybe not much of an issue if you don’t plan on using the instrument much, but it’s fun to think about!
List of candidate glitches (off the top of my head)
Either gravity or mass doesn’t seem to work right on the largest scales
The properties of very small things don’t appear to render completely until we are already looking at them
We can break apart isolated systems of information and poke at one part to affect the other instantaneously at arbitrary distances
There’s an upper bound for speed and a lower bound for temperature, but you apparently can’t actually get a physical system to either bound without infinite energy input
The universe is definitely getting bigger and we can measure the rate of that in at least two distinct ways, but the better we get at those measurements the more they definitely disagree.
I’m sure I’ve missed at least a few.
It’s helpful to expand the “thank you” into a “thank you for...” statement. This completes the conversion from mechanical submission to thoughtful and specific gratitude. From the examples above, the expansion would be “thanks for the correction” and “thanks for the support”.
If someone chooses to help you, you don’t need to apologize for needing that help.