That’s true. A lot more could be said about this, on various levels in various directions. Ultimately I don’t think this systemic crisis can be solved on a consumer level. The attempt leads to the status quo; different subcultures with some people paying extra to calm their consciousness, while most don’t care or cannot afford. I’m afraid if we try to work with individual sacrifice against economic incentives, the latter will win.

It’s also true that some companies use their economic power as a political lever, to influence legislation in their favor. Or as a societal lever, to sway public opinion in their favor. I guess this meme here tries to address that. I honor the motive. Just the chosen vehicle is broken. With mountains of evidence supporting the cause, however, there are plenty of other, perfectly fine vehicles available.

This meme is so wrong it is deliberate misinformation. The Guardian made an article which is probably this meme’s source. It even linked to the original source, the Carbon Majors Report. But blatantly misquoted the CMR. For example, CMR says something like “100 fossil fuel producers responsible for 71% of industrial GHG emissions”, but The Guardian (and meme posters) omit the italic bits.

What do they mean with producers? Not companies like Apple or Heinz, but simply organizations which produce fossil fuels. Duh. Shell, BP, but also entities like China’s coal sector (which they count as one producer, although it consists of many entities). CMR also states 3rd type emissions are included. Which means emissions caused by “using” their “products”, e.g. you burning gasoline in your car.

So yes, the downvoted guy saying “Consumer emissions and corporate emissions are the same emissions” is pretty spot on in this case, albeit most likely by accident. Rejected not for being wrong, but for not fitting into a narrative, which I call the wrong reasons. Please check your sources before posting. We live in a post-factual world where only narratives count and truth is just another feeling, because of “journalism” and reposts like this. Which is the infuriating part in this particular case. I guess you want to spread awareness about the climate crisis, which is good, but you cannot do so by propagandizing science and spreading lies.

All that from the top of my head. Both the ominous TG article and the fairly short report are easy to find. In just a couple of minutes you can check and confirm how criminally misquoted it was.

Eventually, things settle at almost perfect ratios. Everything between creates some kind of friction.

This ambiguity is what I had in mind when I read “let me be clear”. Though now I get it.

One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.

You can use more debug outputs (log(…)) to narrow it down. Challenge your assumptions! If necessary, check line by line if all the variables still behave as expected. Or use a debugger if available/familiar.

This takes a few minutes tops and guarantees you to find at which line the actual behaviour diverts from your expectations. Then, you can make a more precise search. But usually the solution is obvious once you have found the precise cause.

Romantically speaking, aren’t we all just genitals with attached life support?

That’s a very long list of different techniques with examples, very cool!

Though I wonder, is there some connection to image processing, high dynamic range?

Or audio compression, the kind which brings out the kick in the mix, not the kind which saves disk space?

The similarity I see between all three fields is, they try to bring down extreme values, outliers, to level the field, while still retaining characteristics.

at that point it will become clear that this is a stupid thing to do

While you’re technically right, I’m afraid things don’t work that way. Pushing people into a corner can have the paradoxic opposite result of strengthening their position, even if it is “clearly” wrong.

Thank you, great post!

I recognized the constellation. Though it’s good to have a refresher, and I learned something new.

Consider these two pixel-oval portals:

  xx         oo
x    x     o    o
x    x     o    o
x    x     o    o
x    x     o    o
  xx         oo

They are the same size, and you can easily make a bijective mapping for each of their pixels.

Rotate one two times in 3D space by 90°, and it fits through the other. If you want more wiggle room, make them taller.

There’s a very naive, but working approach: Ask it how :D

Or pretend it’s a colleague, and discuss the next steps with it.

You can go further and ask it to write a specific snippet for a defined context. But as others already said, the results aren’t always satisfactory. Having a conversation about the topic, on the other hand, is pretty harmless.

Those LLMs are great fools, but I am just paranoid to use it in that manner.

Exquisite typo. I also agree to everything else you said.

You can do that when you control the frontend UI. Then, you can set up the input field for their name, applying input validation.

But I would rather not rely on telling the user, in hopes they understand and comply. If they have ways to do it wrong, they will.

If you’ve ever tried to hold in a sneeze, this new medical case report might make you think twice.

“In world’s 1st known case”

Contrary to what other people seem to take from this, it rather shows how unrisky holding in a sneeze is. If it was significantly dangerous, we’d know more than one case.

I actually had a relative who died from drinking a sip of water from a glass. Got it in the wrong pipe. I still would not warn people from drinking water after I learned about it. Again, after all, the overwhelming majority of evidence points to the opposite; it’s perfectly safe.

It’s not a great comparison, since there is a good alternative to holding in a sneeze, whereas there is no good alternative to drink water.

Then null will be returned, as the value of b.

A decision can be based on either determinism or randomness. Neither is what people consider free will.

If there was a third option, what would that be? Explain how a decision can be neither determined nor random nor a mixture of both.

For large estimates, it would be suspicious if it wasn’t round.

The number is 40,000,000,000,000,000,000. That can mean two different things.

1. It’s exactly that many. Not ,001, not ,999. That is your “assumption”.
2. Not all of those digits are significant digits.

To illustrate with an example of that article:

if a length measurement yields 114.8 mm, using a ruler with the smallest interval between marks at 1 mm, the first three digits (1, 1, and 4, representing 114 mm) are certain and constitute significant figures.

Let’s assume they measured these 40 quintillion with a “ruler” which has a resolution of 1 quintillion. In that case, they could just as well say the number is 40.1539577 quintillion, or dream up any other combination of digits after the leading ‘40’ (like, for example “000,000,000…”). Because they don’t know.

But if they noted a non-zero string of digits, readers would wrongly assume their ruler has sufficient precision to measure these smaller digits.

So this notation conveys two insights:

1. We know the first digit(s): It’s 4. (and maybe 40, 400, …)
2. We don’t know the smaller digits, but we do know the magnitude.

So a non-round number would be suspicious, because it pretends to have precision which it most certainly cannot have.

The trick is to find a partner while you’re still alive. Screw those single persons!

Black holes still have finite mass, and can be lighter than Earth.