Zompist Bboard Again

Quite honestly, I never understood why we need AI in the first place. It seems difficult to imagine any use for AGI apart from displacing humans from the economy or even control of civilization in general. We have quite a good thing going as relative masters of our own existence and it really baffl...

I hear vox + PP cannot form a government... that's something, at least.

for the record, i also do not know what is an Jeffrey Henning. (...)and in fact for it to work well you have to keep only one language, that of the two speakers(...) no? like, interlingua, for example, is fantastically successful at being intelligible by a bunch of people... any speaker of spanish i...

ooo, nais. let's see 1 is a contributing factor, as in it removes a possible inhibitor to the dependent variable. people are less likely to say or give weight to others saying "man, this is kinda like the nazis". like, yeah, i think there's evidence for this, we treat "that's like the...

news from the long country: the right wingers are trying to steamroll the new constitutional document, which they totally can do based on the seats they got: bans on abortion, unions, and lgbt people doing this or that have already been announced, as well as constitutional protections for the privat...

thing 1 really underlines how feudaloid the russian elite is.

Bret Devereaux's blog post from yesterday seems relevant to the conversation here. that was a good read. The only point where I substantially disagree with his analysis is in the -admittedly useful- abstraction that countries have monolithic interests: I -predictably- think it ignores the class asp...

Ah. nitrogen as in ammonia etcetera. man, parliamentary politics is very different.

nitrogen policy ?

Does this mean that trains cannot work on a world with 2G of gravity? not by any means! for one thing, there's more incentive for trains in such a world: everything is twice as heavy, and so people would be willing to invest more resources (pay more in a market economy, for example) in anything that...

so, in summary, rolling resistance scales linearly with gravity, so that if you have 0.5 G you can, with the same power, pull twice as much freight. Also, the less gravity you have, the easier it is to climb inclines, also linearly. let's look at another fun physics concept: traction . _________ fri...

Not with Western Europe as a whole, I guess, but despite various efforts at political integration, "Western Europe", as a single entity, still doesn't really exist; it consists of a lot of individual countries. If Ukraine had worked out well for Putin, or if it still should work out well ...

I get the attractiveness of the single-villain ideology. You never have to think of who the villain is, you never have to worry about nuances, you just bask in the warm glow of your righteousness and eternal powerlessness. It's probably almost unavoidable in Latin America, where the idea that there...

i try to always have cash, but use it mostly for the purchase of vegetables of dubious juridical status. or when a shop goes "system is down", which happens rarely but not never.

Yes, of course, since last year. There was a pretty big shrug in 2014 when Russia grabbed Crimea, and a series of shrugs when Russia created enclaves in former USSR or Soviet Bloc countries (e.g. Moldova). true. also with the syria business... but I think that's comparable with the kinds of shrugs ...

is it really the case that "everybody fails to condemn russian imperialism" ? even accepting that imperialism is expansionism, invasions etcetera (which let's do), it seems to me that the pro-russian position is a minority in the west and in general throughout the world and that a sizeable...

i wonder what kind of effect this sort of thing had on the morale of the russian soldiery. is anyone else getting an east india company kind of vibe from wagner ? like, it's a dangerously powerful servant of the state, but the state needs it because it needs the gold it extracts from poor and faraw...

yeah, comparing prigozhin with napoleon a bit far-fetched. besides, this from his communications and the kind of thing one would see in pro-russia and pro-prigozhin telegrams, it felt more like a protest / march / feudal uprising to demand the removal of the vizir, rather than an uprising against th...

I have a spanish passport: it's a nice little thing, dark pink and with pictures of vehicles in the pages. as for the new republican constitution... honestly they're sort of working as quietly as possible, and because I've lost hope in the whole constitutional affaire I'm a lot less informed about t...

Glad you guys liked it. If I remember, the steel-on-steel interaction of train wheels on rails also produces less friction and wear on the wheels and rails than rubber-on-asphalt interactions for tires and roads. Maybe wood-on-wood interaction works the same way, being less frictious and damaging to...