No channel 4 content still sucks. I have no legal avenue to even pay to watch the Stand Up to Cancer Bake Off episodes, unless I move to the UK.
I'm pirating something that I would gladly pay for if they'd just let me. I'm not going to do a VPN; that would be more work than piracy in the first place (and besides, Channel 4 demands a UK address and even a UK credit card). It's downright ridiculous.
Most people I know went from dealing with live TV, high prices, and having to pirate what wasn't airing to paying for one or two streaming services to get everything they want.
Then half of them kept getting new services and pay more than they did for cable in the first place, and the other half rotate services, pay less than they did for cable, and still have to wait to watch what they want and pirate some things.
It's better than cable was, no argument, but it's like we passed right through the bright future, ripe with possibilities, and landed at marginal improvement.
I guess in my case, there's just very little that I feel I have to watch. So a few streaming services is fine and every now and then I'll buy/rent something a la carte either digital or physical. And once in a great while I wish I had live TV but not enough to pay for it. (I can't get anything over the air.) So, overall, it feels like a vast improvement and much cheaper.
I feel the same way, but people I know like their TV and I don't judge them for that. I have my own idle happinesses. If my favorite things to do were available on the same terms as modern television, I'd probably be pretty unhappy about it.
Fair enough. Certainly, many people watch sports and/or like to have the TV on as background. And then they end up, as you say, either adding on a lot of services so they have access to "everything." (Or they have to spend effort managing their subscriptions.)
That's only true if you need a lot of speciality packages. For the vast majority of people using LaTeX, they only need the core packages like the basic features of hyperref, geometry, amsmath, amsthm, and in that case, they are quite stable.
I've never had a problem recompiling documents. Yeah, you might have a problem if you're using LaTeX for a fringe use but most people don't.
Yeah, it's probably a regional thing. Here in Colorado, most cars don't really get that gross. I take a hose to mine like 3 times a year and dry it with a towel and it looks pretty nearly pristine. They'll only get very dusty if you take them on dirt roads a lot, or keep them in a garage all the time without ever cleaning them. Ones kept outside will keep mostly clean due to the rain, with maybe a little bit of grime under overhangs, and some sun damage on the paint.
This is a 2.4 million year cycle, not something that can lend any credence to the idea that the arrangement of the planets at birth has any effect on a person.
The arrangement of your house or neighborhood has a stronger gravitational effect on you at a young age than the planets. Feng shui would be a better predictor of people's personalities than astrology.
Astronomical signs (in the west) are entirely related to the time of year when you were born and not at all related to the "arrangement of the planets", besides of course the position of the earth relative to the sun. The idea that some voodoo around the position of your bed relative to your chair relative to your door has more impact on your life than your spawning phase shift in the (second?) most significant cycle of our existence is pure absurdity.
As a simple test: ask N self-proclaimed astrology experts to guess your sign, and perhaps the signs of some others around you. Run a Chi-squared on the results. Come to your own conclusions.
Alternatively, plot some user data against birth month. Observe dependence.
> the position of your bed relative to your chair relative to your door
IIUC, the idea behind Feng Shui (traditional Chinese interior design) is that if your furniture is arranged in a logical way, it has a positive mental impact and is therefore conducive to allowing you to thrive. On the other hand, if your furniture is incoherently arranged, it can lead to frustration and clutter, which have a negative mental impact.
I don’t think there are any studies on this, but at least intuitively, it seems to make sense to me.
Example: if you put your desk directly in front of your door, it’s in the way and therefore will be an (unconscious) source of frustration every time you enter the room (because you have to walk around it all the time). In Feng Shui this is described as the desk blocking the ‘energy’ of the door; I find it useful to think of ‘energy’ as a synonym for ‘traffic flow’ in this context.
If you want to know more about this, check out the excellent YouTube/TikTok channel ‘Dear Modern’, especially his short-form videos. (no affiliation)
Also, consider which direction windows of various rooms you have face. Rooms are used differently during the day so for example morning sun in the bed room might be helpful if you need to wake up when sun rises. Also before modern houses things like air circulation and so on could have real effect of livability.
> IIUC, the idea behind Feng Shui (traditional Chinese interior design) is that if your furniture is arranged in a logical way, it has a positive mental impact and is therefore conducive to allowing you to thrive. On the other hand, if your furniture is incoherently arranged, it can lead to frustration and clutter, which have a negative mental impact.
That’s an incomplete description. Traditional Feng Shui says if your furniture is incoherently arranged, it disrupts the flow of Qi, and causes spirits to grant you ill fortune. Which sounds less plausible
Sure, but you can change one description into the other, while keeping the practical application the same.
I really recommend watching the following video, which introduces Feng Shui principles in a non-superstitious way:
“Feng Shui does make sense! The basis of how to plan your home for comfort and practicality” (runtime 6 min 34 sec) — https://youtube.com/watch?v=YsBPqO3pv_Y
You could also provide some evidence instead of telling me to gather my own. I'd happily read some more double blind studies on the effectiveness of astrology, most of what I've read points to it all being complete bunk.
Science is observation, not consumption. I ran the experiments, I got the data I needed to inform my opinion. You're more than welcome to do the same. But if all you will listen to is what scientific journals want to publish, you've already made up your mind, and there's little use pretending otherwise.
If you ask me, nothing could be more "complete bunk" than some "scientist" claiming they've somehow blinded someone to their own birthday.
Science is specifically a process of cooperative knowledge building, using testable explanations and minimizing human biases. I would like to hear about your experiments, though. I don't have full faith in scientific journals, and they've had loads of problems in regards to reproducibility and legitimacy of data, but the process is the best we have for determining truth.
You don't blind people to their own birthdays, you mix real astrological predictions and readings with randomized ones, and see if the results fared better than random chance. I'm very skeptical of astrology (to be completely honest, I completely reject it), but I am trying to take part in a real conversation here. I believe that astrology is complete bunk, wall to wall, but I'm open to reading more on it and talking to you about it. I don't want to attack anybody for their beliefs.
I'm not particularly interested in what constitutes a "real astronomical prediction", I'm more interested in the crux of the topic: Are there common traits shared amongst people with similar birthdates that experienced astrologists can identify and use to correctly place an individual into one of 12 buckets based on a short interaction?
I originally was like you and thought the answer was "no, my birthday says nearly nothing about me". However, over the past few years I've made a point to ask all new strangers I meet ("met at a bar" type folks who I had 0 prior connection to, so excluding friends of friends/etc.) who display an interest in astrology to guess my sign and state their astrological confidence. Roughly 85% folks who are "very confident" in their knowledge of astrology correctly guess it first try, often with little to no hesitation (N = ~8). The folks who are not as confident vary: some will also get it first try, some will take a couple, some give up after like 6.
That's an experiment that is extremely susceptible to biases and unintentional information sharing, including things like expressions on either party's face. Not to mention your very subjective determination of whether or not the predictor is confident, or the fallibility of human memory and experience.
For that experiment to be fair, you'd have to interact with them, and then they would have to write their guess and confidence down without you knowing what they're writing, and then afterward you'd have to collate the information.
This is the common thread that I've always seen, as someone who used to be very interested in the paranormal and supernatural. When you actually start measuring things properly and controlling for biases, the supernatural mysteriously disappears. It's only there when it can't be proven. Human imagination is extremely powerful. Remember the story of Clever Hans. Everybody, including the trainer, believed the horse could do math: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
This story comes into my head whenever I see psychics and readers of anything like this. Nobody is lying. Everybody believes it, even when it's not real. You can read body language and pick up on things without even understanding how. It's interesting, because you seem to be the opposite of me. I started out open to much of what I now consider hoodoo, and became a naturalist and a skeptic through my experiences. You had the reverse path. I suspect the answer may lay closer to the middle than either side, but I'll keep with what can be objectively shown in well-controlled tests.
I'm well aware of the tricks that can be played, but there's simply no other explanation for the sheer volume of people who have said to me point blank, no hesitation, no beating around the bush, no listing out options to gauge responses, no nothing: "Oh that's easy, you're a XXX". Even totally disregarding confidence filtering, it's a staggering proportion.
There's really nothing not "fair" about it, but folks like you are so perverse to the idea of anything that doesn't fit your perception of the "scientific consensus" that you'll make up hoops in the name of "bias" to throw out every experimental result that doesn't agree with your preconceived notions up until the point all you have left are those experiments that you didn't see fit to invent hoops for because they already matched what you think you know. It's honestly terribly ironic, when you take the time to examine it.
I really do hope you can take the time to try this yourself and see for yourself what your own personal results are, there's no use at all for me to waste my time debating my own personal experience with someone so hell-bent on discrediting it on the basis of "actually I once read a paper that said..." and "well actually I know X Y Z errors with your experimental setup that you've told me next to nothing about and I never was able to even observe..."
The unfair bit is the filtering happening in your own brain. Without actual hard statistics, it's an anecdote. I don't care about scientific consensus, but I do care about process and data.
If I try it myself, it'll be done right, and I won't keep the stats in my head. I know how fallible my own perception is, and as somebody with an anxiety disorder, I know how easy it is to read patterns out of thin air. For some people, reading patterns that don't exist seems mystical or illuminating, for me, it's a sense of constant unease and fear. I can't be universally open to just accepting things, or reading patterns with my intuition, because my intuition is that everything is potentially poisonous and I'm definitely going to die in less than a week.
Ok then just try it yourself. I'm sick and tired of an online person I've never met acting like they know more about statistics and experimental design than me regarding downright trivial experiment with results as obvious as day that they've never even bothered to run themselves. Good day.
Edit: You could have mentioned that you have a mental condition characterized by an irrational fear of pattern recognition in your diatribe about biases. I'd have known not to waste my time.
That's fairly rude. My point was that what manifests in myself as being negative manifests in other people as simply reading more into things than is actually there. Even trivial experiments are prone to biases.
Your point has been telling me my experiment isn't valid because it doesn't align with your preconceived notions, telling me I'm "seeing things that aren't there" and that you know better than me about what I went through, then coming up with bogus claim after bogus claim to try to justify that position, then back in reality after a half dozen messages you finally self-admit to having a mental condition that makes you reluctant to see patterns clear as day.
Seeing patterns clear as day is, in fact, bias. My condition heightens my biases and makes me confront how flawed reasoning about the "obvious" is. I wouldn't have brought it up if I thought you might try some weird ad hominem about how anxiety makes me immune to "real science". I haven't been attacking you. I just don't think your methods are sound. I don't know what your quote is coming from either, because I didn't say "seeing things that aren't there" either. I said reading more into things than are there and seeing patterns where they don't exist. This is the basis of things like numerology, homeopathy, racism, and many other human failings. The obvious, "clear as day" things can be actively dangerous.
How about your data? Like I said before, I'd be happy to see the data. You've thrown some numbers off the top of your head, but I'd rather see the raw gathered data.
Collect it yourself. I don't have a detailed log because the results were immediately obvious. You pretend to claim nothing can be obvious. I'm sure if you saw 12 people in a row guess your sign you'd think the correlation was obvious. My experience was similar.
> I didn't say "seeing things that aren't there" either. I said reading more into things than are there and seeing patterns where they don't exist.
Ha.
And it's not an ad hominum when the trait is something directly related to the topic at hand.
Fair criticism, but then look how many Scientific Materialist fundamentalists in this and other threads would have you believe they are omniscient Oracles, but then cry foul if one dares to critique or have a bit of a laugh at their hallucinations.
The only saving grace of this simulation that I can see is how absolutely hilarious it is, it's like living in one of those old British sitcoms.
I can agree to a point, but it's not very scalable. Imagine if the safety of every bridge and building came down to each construction worker caring on an individual level. At some point, there need to be processes that ensure success, not just individual workers caring enough.
Secure software happens because of a culture of building secure software, or processes and requirements. NASA doesn't depend on individual developers "just doing the right thing", they have strict standards.
I hate that behavior of GNU sed (and also of mktemp). Having a flag optionally take an argument is just so weird and surprising, and the syntax is always unexpected and inconsistent.
Don't all work the same. The argument is only actually taken if it's attached to the flag directly. In the latter two forms, no backup is made.
GNU mktemp is similarly annoying, but different, with the --tmpdir flag.
-pDIR, --tmpdir=DIR, -p DIR, --tmpdir NEXTARG
Only the last one is different. If you use --tmpdir literally without attaching an argument to it, it defaults to $TMPDIR, otherwise it takes in DIR.
This is inconsistent and unpredictable. A flag should either take an argument or not.
I also dislike Python's argparse variable-length nargs behavior for similar reasons. Even with an integer nargs, it makes for an ugly command line, but with variable-length ones it just gets hideous, and can make it impossible to pass an argument beginning with a hyphen to a flag.
It's not just "progress" vs "no progress". Some technical innovations, like leaded gasoline, have had more of a negative impact than a positive. It's not a binary, and not all technology is without cost.
The argument against current AI progress isn't anti-technology, it's pointing out that these things can have a hugely negative impact that's mostly being shouted down or swept under the rug in the name of "progress". The climate crisis is pretty serious business, and the AI power consumption is making it worse, not better. The risk of huge amounts of unemployment are being mostly handwaved away as "yeah, that's not gonna happen, we always make jobs out of somewhere".
I'm pirating something that I would gladly pay for if they'd just let me. I'm not going to do a VPN; that would be more work than piracy in the first place (and besides, Channel 4 demands a UK address and even a UK credit card). It's downright ridiculous.