tripu @tripu@qoto.org
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
Happy #WoDES!
World Day for the End of #Speciesism
(I don’t like “speciesism”: I suspect as an idea it is wrong, and a bad concept to try to rally people around. But I’m a #vegetarian/#vegan, and whatever draws attention to animal welfare is a push in the right direction.)
“The core of effective altruism is the Drowning Child scenario. The world is full of death and suffering. Your money (or time, or whatever resource you prefer to spend) could fix more of it than you think — one controversial analysis estimates $5,000 to save a life. You would go crazy if you tried to devote 100% of your time and money to helping others. But if you decide to just help when you feel like it or a situation comes up, you’ll probably forget. Is there some more systematic way to commit yourself to some amount between 0% and 100% of your effort (traditionally 10%)? And once you’ve done that, how do you make those resources go as far as possible? This is #EffectiveAltruism, the rest is just commentary.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of
❤️
(Although I have some doubts about this increasingly popular format of very expensive public live sparring…)
tripu
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Turns out when you put 5 people from 3 continents in front of a pool table there are 125 different ways to play pool
tripu
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Fantastic idea: generating a noise every time the browser sends data to google:
https://twitter.com/bert_hu_bert/status/1561466204602220544
tripu
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“If something must be sacred, let it be #math.”
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/08/is-nothing-sacred.html
#MMM agrees with me, of course:
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2019/11/18/pizza-delivery-is-for-millionaires/
👏
Home-delivered meals have always bothered me. It looks like the perfect example of overlooked irresponsible #consumerism. You have a fridge where y...
tripu
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Our national ID card (“DNI”) is 78 years old. Mandatory ID cards are anathema in some places (US) and to some ideologies (libertarians) — but they're so convenient and solve many day-to-day problems. In #Spain, most people don't give it a second thought and can't even imagine red tape or mundane chores without the #DNI. I despise #surveillance as much as anyone, but I fail to see how an #IDcard makes things much worse, compared to the plethora of information governments have about us already…
https://qoto.org/@tripu/108817322350690142
In the same vein (more sophisticated, but still quite naïve):
I remember chatting with a classmate during our first (or second?) year of college (MSc in CS and Software Engineering) and suddenly realising that although we knew already a lot about the basics of programming, computer architecture, OS’es, etc we had no clue about how to make a computer do two things at the same time (concurrency, multithreading, etc). We knew how to program linearly, and how to manipulate OS interruptions to respond to events such as the user pressing a key or a certain timer ticking — but we didn’t know what parallelism even looked like.
It’s so enlightening to remember what one once didn’t know.
Around 1996 I was programming in BASIC and reading about that thing, “the internet” (I used it for the first time one year later). I was so confused by the apparent ability of e-mail to live in the ether: how come one could send mail to someone whose computer was off, then shut down their own computer, and the message would still arrive hours or days later when the recipient switched on their computer again? Where had that mail been lurking in the meantime??
tripu
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Enviro rant, Europe drought, fecking cows
In drought conditions, people consider the water usage of different crops, and you'll often hear opinions voiced about whether crop X or Y should be allowed because of high water use.
But cattle farming uses more water than practically any crop, indeed cattle will often require *drinking quality water*, and lots of it, but you don't hear people suggesting herd sizes be reduced.
Maybe they fecking well should, though. Ireland is close to a drought right now and we have far more cattle than people, competing with humans and with nature for premium quality water and air and food.
You can help, human! Incentivise fewer cattle by buying less of the associated produce. And maybe ship a letter to a representative about adjusting agri incentives. There are exciting alternatives that will improve your health and require a fraction of the water or land or carbon to produce.
tripu
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RT @Rainmaker1973@twitter.com
In 1951, Adelbert Ames created the mind-boggling ‘Ames Window’. It’s so effective that even when you know how it works you can’t break the illusion [video from The Curiosity Show: https://buff.ly/36DvRNs]
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1556690024527273984
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
