Some electric BMWs do the same on the literal automobile, too. It’s an EV that sounds like a high performance ICE both inside and outside the car.

Yeah, sounds like a phone call recording app that is allowed to operate on the App Store under the condition that the recording is loudly announced.

Or is a by product of its former format, the live laughs with a crowd while filming?

This is the reason. Television comedy derives from stage shows where the audience sits in one direction from the stage.

A lot of early television comedy programming was often from variety shows, where the live studio audience is an important feedback mechanism for the actual performers. A standup comic needs a laughing audience to respond to (and often, so do other stage performers, including sketch comedy).

So television comedy comes from that tradition, and a live audience was always included for certain types of programs. Even today, we expect variety shows to have audiences. For example, John Oliver’s show without an audience felt kinda weird while that was going on in 2020. And even some pre-filmed sketch comedy shows, like Chappelle’s Show, would record audiences watching the pre-recorded sketches as part of the audio track for the broadcast itself, while Chappelle himself was filmed essentially MCing for that audience and those sketches.

So sitcoms came up on sets with live performances before studio audiences, just like sketch comedies and variety shows or daytime talk shows. That multi camera sitcom format became its own aesthetic, with three-walled sets that were always filmed from one direction, with a live audience laughing and reacting. Even when they started using closed sets for safety and control (see the Fran Drescher stuff linked elsewhere in this thread), they preserved the look and feel of those types of shows.

Single camera sitcoms are much more popular now, after the 2000’s showed that they could be hilarious, but they are significantly more expensive and complicated to shoot, as blocking and choreography and set design require a lot more conscious choices when the cameras can be anywhere in the room, pointed in any direction. So multi camera still exists.

I sync if I have a good Internet connection, like from my hotel room or whatever, by VPNing into my home network where my NAS is. There are distributed DNS type solutions for a lot of the big NAS brands, where they’ll let you access your data through their service, but I never set that up because I already have a VPN. So my NAS and firewall are configured not to allow outside connections to that device.

But if I haven’t synced laptop to NAS yet, then copies exist on both my camera SD cards (redundant double SD card) and my laptop.

3-2-1 backup is important. I’ve been burned with lost files before, so I now make sure they’re available in multiple places.

I also encrypt everything. My laptops can’t be unlocked by anyone except myself: Apple Filevault on my Apple laptop, LVM on LUKS on my Linux laptop. If something happens to me, my laptops must be wiped completely to be useable as a used device.

My NAS keeps my backups of all my documents and media (and as a hobbyist photographer, I have over a terabyte of photos and videos I’ve taken). It’s encrypted, but I’ve written the key down on paper and put it in my physical documents. If something happens to me, someone who goes through my physical documents will have access to my digital files.

I pay a cloud service (Backblaze) for cloud backups. I trust the encryption and key management to not actually give the service provider any access to my files.

I’m still a skeptic of the Nova system into the 4 categories (1: unprocessed or minimally processed, 2: processed ingredients, 3: processed foods, 4: ultra processed foods), because it’s simultaneously an oversimplification and a complication. It’s an oversimplification because the idea of processing itself is such a broad category of things one can do to food, that it isn’t itself all that informative, and it’s a complication in that experts struggle to classify certain foods as actual prepared dishes being eaten (homemade or otherwise).

So the line drawing between regular processed food and ultraprocessed is a bit counterintuitive, and a bit inconsistent between studies. Guided by the definitions, experts struggle to place unsweetened yogurt into Nova 1 (minimally processed), 2 (processed culinary ingredients), 3 (processed food) or 4 (ultra processed food). As it turns out, experts aren’t very consistent in classifying the foods, which introduces inconsistency in the studies that are performed investigating the differences. Bread, cheese, and pickles in particular are a challenge.

And if the whole premise is that practical nutrition is more than just a list of ingredients, then you have to handle the fact that merely mixing ingredients in your own kitchen might make for a food that’s more than a sum of its parts. Adding salt and oil catapults pretty much any dish to category 3, so does that mean my salad becomes a processed food when I season it? Doesn’t that still make it different than French fries (category 3 if I make them myself, probably, unless you count refined oil as category 4 ultra processed, at which point my salad should probably be ultra processed too)? At that point, how useful is the category?

So even someone like me, who does believe that nutrition is so much more than linear relationships between ingredients and nutrients, and is wary of global food conglomerates, isn’t ready to run into the arms of the Nova system. I see that as a fundamentally flawed solution to what I agree is a problem.

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here’s a list of major legislation.

• Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
• The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
• The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
• Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
• School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
• Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
• Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That’s a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn’t include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

The idea that these models are just stochastic parrots that only probabilisticly repeat their training data isn’t correct

I would argue that it is quite obviously correct, but that the interesting question is whether humans are in the same category (I would argue yes).

Harry Frankfurt’s influential 2005 book (based on his influential 1986 essay), On Bullshit, offered a description of what bullshit is.

When we say a speaker tells the truth, that speaker says something true that they know is true.

When we say a speaker tells a lie, that speaker says something false that they know is false.

But bullshit is when the speaker says something to persuade, not caring whether the underlying statement is true or false. The goal is to persuade the listener of that underlying fact.

The current generation of AI chat bots are basically optimized for bullshit. The underlying algorithms reward the models for sounding convincing, not necessarily for being right.

Two important concepts:

1. The First Amendment allows government to impose “time, place, and manner” restrictions on protected speech. So if you give a speech protected by the First Amendment, the government can still regulate your use of sound amplification, including things like regulating noise levels at night or in residential areas. If you assemble in an assembly protected by the First Amendment, the government may still enforce fire code restrictions like occupancy limits in a building or weight limits on a platform, or even permitting requirements for all of the above.
2. The First Amendment also distinguishes between public forum, limited public forums, and nonpublic forums. The government must allow people to use things like theaters and stages for First Amendment speech and expression, but doesn’t have to do things like let protestors onto restricted military bases to protest.

Permitting is one way to regulate time, place, and manner. Also, it’s a way to prevent double booking. A city-run community theater might allow for one church to hold services on Sunday, and a first come first serve policy might cause the city to deny access to another church that wants to use the exact same place at the exact same time.

So a specific lawn on a public university campus might require permitting in a way that complies with the First Amendment, if the permitting is used to:

• Prevent overcrowding beyond safe limits
• Prevent excessive wear and tear on the grass/landscaping
• Prevent multiple groups holding incompatible activities in the same space
• Prevent interference with actual governmental functions (e.g., not disrupting classes being held)
• Keep the First Amendment protected activity within the actual zones where that is permitted

People can and do engage in First Amendment protected activity outside of those lines, of course. Sometimes the point of a protest is to break the law: civil rights sit ins, marches on specific streets, etc. But the organizers and the governmental authority generally need to work at defining those lines clearly, so that any decision to break the law is conscious and planned.

A big part of parenting is simply modeling your own values. If I think it’s important for people to be beautiful, and treat beautiful people better, then the kids will pick up on that and internalize those values. Regardless of what they look like themselves.

I’d like to think my values are different from that, where I value other characteristics (intelligence, knowledge, humor, compassion, empathy) in the people around me, and tend to try to build friendships and spend quality time with those people rather than the most beautiful people I can find. And for strangers and one-off interactions (as a customer or whatever), there’s no reason to be more deferential or more kind to the beautiful people.

Yup, this is exactly it. When I praise their appearance, it’s always something my kids actively did: picked out an outfit, styled their hair, etc., or even grooming and hygiene choices.

My kids have a book called “solitary animals,” explicitly framed as introverts in nature, and from what I remember of it, it mentions pumas, octopuses, sloths, and eagles.

Precise measurements are still helpful for learning. When I first started baking bread I had to measure by weight to get 60, 65, or 70% hydration, but at this point I can figure it out by look and feel, at least for the specific flours I’m familiar with.

Imperial measurements were based on arbitrary things, metric has specific scientific definitions for their weights.

What do you mean? A pound is legally defined as 0.45359237 kilograms.

And the kilogram is defined:

The kilogram, symbol kg, is the SI unit of mass. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10^−34 when expressed in the unit J⋅s, which is equal to kg⋅m^2 ⋅s^−1, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and ΔνCs.

These are all currently defined off of the same universal constants, just with different multipliers, which are all arbitrary numbers: 6.62607015 is just about as arbitrary as 0.45359237. Hell, the number 10 is arbitrary, too, so we still use a system for time based on dividing the Earth’s day into 24 and 60.

Like, I get that there’s some elegance in the historical water-based definitions derived from the arbitrary definition of length, but the definition of “meter” started from about as arbitrary a definition as “foot” (and the meter was generally more difficult to derive in the time of its adoption based on the Earth’s dimensions).

Look at the Diffie Helman scheme, with the example used in the Wikipedia page.

• Alice and Bob agree in public, for everyone to see, that they’re gonna start with p=23 and g=5.
• Alice has a secret key 4, and doesn’t tell anyone (not even Bob). She plugs her secret into the formula g^secret mod p, or 5^4 mod 23. 5^4 is 625, and dividing 625 into 23 gives a remainder of 4. So she tells Bob in public that she derived the number 4 from her secret.
• Bob has a secret key of 3, does the same thing, and calculates 5^3 mod 23, which results in the number of 10, tells Alice.

The magic of this scheme is that taking each side’s result and applying the same secret gets to the same final result. 10^4 mod 23 turns out to be the exact same number as 4^3 mod 23. So both sides get to the secret shared key 18, without disclosing that their secret numbers were 4 and 3, respectively.

But if you try to drive the secret key from the information publicly exchanged, you’ll basically have to try each number until you get to the right one. It’s inefficient, and basically impossible to do once you’re using very large integers (300+ digits long).

To add to this, the force of gravity at the top of Mt Everest is about 99.7% as strong as sea level. So you’re right that it’s not about the strength of gravity itself at that particular point, but about the weight of all the air above that point.

Good writeup.

The use of ephemeral third party accounts to “vouch” for the maintainer seems like one of those things that isn’t easy to catch in the moment (when an account is new, it’s hard to distinguish between a new account that will be used going forward versus an alt account created for just one purpose), but leaves a paper trail for an audit at any given time.

I would think that Western state sponsored hackers would be a little more careful about leaving that trail of crumbs that becomes obvious in an after-the-fact investigation. So that would seem to weigh against Western governments being behind this.

Also, the last bit about all three names seeming like three different systems of Romanization of three different dialects of Chinese is curious. If it is a mistake (and I don’t know enough about Chinese to know whether having three different dialects in the same name is completely implausible), that would seem to suggest that the sponsors behind the attack aren’t that familiar with Chinese names (which weighs against the Chinese government being behind it).

Interesting stuff, lots of unanswered questions still.

By default, Teslas are set in “one pedal driving” mode, which makes it so that the wheels won’t turn without the throttle/accelerator being pressed. That’s a different interface and behavior from the traditional automatic transmission, where simply lifting the foot off the brake pedal allows the vehicle to roll either forward or backward, depending on whether it’s in D or R.

The selection of the “transmission” setting of P R D in a Tesla also doesn’t have tactile feedback that subtly communicates which direction it’s set to.

The combination of the two means that the car is different in these ways and can contribute to mistaken gear selection plus application of the throttle, compared to a typical car.

The meaning of words is consensus-based. If you want to make the point you’re making, you probably should avoid making up your own definition of “light truck.”

Also, I don’t think this is a lift package. I think this is literally the factory specs.