If a cop just acts like some random "guy with a gun" who might shoot you at the slightest provocation they probably shouldn't have a gun.
Or be a cop.
An honest cop should be keeping a close eye on that guy.
nednobbins
joined 1 year ago
I'm not talking about any particular language.
Modern programming languages are as complex as natural languages. They have sophisticated and flexible grammars. They have huge vocabularies. They're rich enough that individual projects will have a particular "style". Programming languages tend to emphasize the imperative and the interrogative over the indicative but they're all there.
Most programming languages have a few common elements:
Some way to remember things
Some way to repeat sets of instructions
Some way to tell the user what it's done
Some way to make decisions (ie if X then do Y)
Programmers mix and match those and, depending on the skill of the people involved, end up with Shakespear, Bulwer-Lytton, or something in between.
The essence of programming is to arrange those elements into a configuration that does something useful for you. It's going to be hard to know what kinds of useful things you can do if you're completely fresh to the field.
Python and Javascript are great. The main reasons I wouldn't recommend them for an absolute beginner is that it takes some time to set up and, even after that, there's a bit of a curve before you can do something interesting.
If they go and change configuration settings in an app, they're learning to manipulate variables.
If they click a "do this N times" they've learned to create a loop.
etc.
I’d actually start by playing around with the automation and customization functionality you already have. Learn to set email sorting filters, get some cool browser extensions and configure them, maybe even start by customizing your windows preferences or making some red stone stuff in Minecraft.
Computers are just tools. Programs are just stuff you tell a computer to do over and over again. All the fancy programming languages give you really good control over how you talk to a computer but I’d start with the computer equivalent of “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
It's YouTube. I don't need a little taste. I can just start playing a video and skip around.
I'd be less annoyed at them if I could turn them off.
Since Google keeps trying to shove them down my throat it's safe to say they exist for Google's benefit, not mine.
Insurance can work just fine for things like hurricanes. Insurance companies have several methods to address it. They're all effectively variations of buying insurance policies themselves.
Re-insurance pools are a close analog. It's basically a bunch of insurance companies from around the planet getting together and agreeing to pool risks. Big companies also use a bunch of funky financial instruments to simulate insurance.
There's some risk of increased systemic correlation (eg climate change may increase the risk that major hurricanes hit multiple areas around the planet simultaneously). That's largely mitigated in that we can see it coming. Climate change is pretty prominent in their models and they can adjust premiums or stop offering policies, over time.
The bigger risk is in synthetic systemic risk. It's burned us a bunch of times already and it's gonna do it again. Those giant global re-insurance pools are almost certainly fine, and worth the risk, if we just use them for their intended purpose. But history shows that we'll end up creating derivatives contracts on them and those contracts will get leveraged. Those leveraged pools end up merging and turning into giant financial time bombs.
There’s significant investment in green alternatives. Particularly in China, but in many other places as well.
If I'm being honest with myself I do steer towards and away from certain news outlets based on my perception of their overall trustworthiness. In my ideal world I'd judge articles on their individual merits.
For example. When I was a kid, the Wall Street Journal was top tier in reliability. Nothing changed immediately after Rupert Murdoch bought them but over time I noticed some changes. In particular I started seeing editorials less clearly marked as such and mixed in with regular articles. That struck me as shady editorial decisions. I've read enough shoddy WSJ articles since then that I don't really trust them anymore. That said, they still put out individual articles that are accurate and well sourced.
For practical administration reasons I suspect you'll have to take the broad approach of just banning some sources that are egregious repeat offenders. Ideally I'd like to see a set of criteria that define what gets sources on that ban list and what can get them removed. If we can identify reliable fact checking organizations perhaps we could use them as a metric (ie any publication that has more than X fact corrections in an N month period is auto-banned).
I hate clickbait but I don't know how to define it. How do we differentiate them from well written, attention grabbing headlines?
I'd love to see more attention paid to self policing. Eg Ira Glass did the most epic retraction I've ever seen. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/460/retraction When they figured out that their story was wrong they didn't just say, "Oops sorry." They invited the source back on, and spent a whole hour analyzing where they went wrong. My respect for NPR shot way up that day. It would be great to see a score of how good media outlets are at admitting their mistakes. That would greatly increase my trust in them.
edit: typo
replacement theory
I had to look that up but it was basically what I expected it to be.
Short answer. No. I have no particular fear of white people (or anyone else for that matter) being replaced.
I'm talking less about any concerns of what the demographics should be and more on identifying what we're talking about. That's why I brought up the two contrasting demographics of the US vs the world.
Americans, even those with diverse ancestral backgrounds, tend to view the world through the lens of Americans. Individual subgroups within the US tend to view America through the lens of their subgroup. I've noticed that diversity means different things to different people and I'm wondering what it will mean here.
A comment elsewhere in this thread illustrates the potential conflict. They note that we want to avoid islamophobia, which I agree with and we want to avoid homophobia, which I also agree with. But they make it sound like it will be easy to reconcile the two on a global scale. I suspect that will be much harder to pull off.
No ulterior motive. My post is intended to be interpreted literally. You seemed to be saying that the MBFC rating is good evidence that we should trust MJ. I'm following up and saying that DN meets the same criteria and should be judged the same way.
The first post in this thread questioned if either DN or MJ should be included in the list of reliable sources. You pointed out that while MBFC cites MJ as having a left bias they also cite them as highly accurate.
DN gets basically the same grade from MBFC as MJ.
Even though "high" accuracy is only their second highest rating, "very high" is typically reserved for academic journals and that makes "high" the best rating that you can reasonably expect from a non-academic journal.
The page for DN also notes that there have been 0 corrections in the past 5 months.
They consider Democracy Now! to have a bias left of Mother Jones but also highly accurate. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/democracy-now/
Asside: I just discovered https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/2023/07/17/the-latest-fact-checks-curated-by-media-bias-fact-check-07-17-2023/ I found that when I was looking at what it takes for MediaBiasFactCheck to consider a source to have "very highly" reliability rather than simply "high" reliability. Spoilers, you basically need to be an academic journal.
I'm with you on opinion pieces but I wouldn't over pivot on the objectiveness of "news".
I'm not sure there actually is such a thing as true objectivity, in practice. There are a ton of ways to inject subjectivity into seemingly objective news. An obvious one is selection bias. Journalists and editors decide what to write about and publish. They decide who gets quoted and which facts get presented. Even if they tell no lies, that leaves a lot of room to present those facts in a variety of different lights.
I think the best we can hope for is independent verifiability. If an article makes a claim, do I just have to believe them or do I have some reasonable way to check, that doesn't involve the author?
Interesting point. I looked into it a bit more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country
You can sort that list by Muslim population.
The top one, Pakistan had a minimum marriage age of 18M/16F but recently changed it to 18 across the board.
Indonesia is at 21M/19F.
India has 21M/18F.
Bangladesh is 21M/18F.
Nigeria is 18+.
It looks like when a bunch of Muslims get together the trend is that they reject child marriage and enshrine that rejection in law.