greylag

I for one warmly welcome Drunk Edward Tufte to LW!

Data scientist (frowning) “this here are the culture war edgelords, these (gestures) are people who repost memes wantonly, but THESE (points at much taller larger treemap cell, on a log scale) are normies who had a bad breakup and said something like “f* men”. Oh, and these guys over here are sex positive and used the same words while meaning more or less the opposite”

average price throughout the whole day

Oh, right, that’s the important bit. Solar glut can’t increase the instantaneous price but its effects on average (mean?) price are less clear

What's the point of building a solar farm when the grid is already flooded when the sun is shining?

Batteries, yes, but also, the sun is non-binary! Additional solar/wind capacity won’t generate power in still conditions at night, but slower winds and overcast weather and low evening sun all will, and depending on the relative price of solar (increasingly cheap) it may be optimal to oversize solar such that you have absurd overcapacity at summer noon, but require less (relatively expensive) storage (paraphrasing Tony Seba)

solar actually makes power more expensive because you still need all the non-solar generation after the sun goes down but you leave it idle during the day

How can you possibly make something more expensive by producing a glut of it? Making prices more variable, yes; making plant that has been optimised for baseload less well optimised for its new job, sure.

Increasingly activists are seen as defect-bots

To coin a phrase, huge if true. 

Priming, since debunked

The more dramatic “talk about getting old to people and they’ll walk slower” examples were debunked. The more pedestrian examples, as with word-association, “appear to be well-established” (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.345.6196.523-b), judging by a few minutes’ examination of Wikipedia (which common-sense supports: trying to NON-word-associate, as with certain panel & improv comedy games, is strikingly difficult)

In the meantime, large language models were created by mass-producing epicycles and training them (What ... (read more)

"A slow sort of country!" said the [Red] Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" -- Alice through the Looking-Glass

THANK YOU! In personal development circles, I hear a lot about the benefits of spirituality, with vague assurances that you don't have to be a theist to be spiritual, but with no pointers in non-woo directions, except possibly meditation. You have unblurred a large area of my mental map.

(Upvoted!)

(Epistemic status: shitpost)

You‘re a kitty!

How does knowing about Ukraine’s draft affect an NYT reader’s opinion of the war? I mean it’s not going to be like

• Reader: “Ukraine’s justified in defending itself from Russia!”
• NYT-whistleblower: ”But Ukraine drafted soldiers to do it, and the NYT didn’t tell you!”
• Reader: ”Oh, well, screw those guys, Ukraine should lose!”

… so what is it like?

Some ways a reader could respond include:

• More instinctive patriotic fervour (Glory to Ukraine’s presumably-voluntary heroes!) (… and this seems like the likely propaganda angle in question)
• Increased salience of hellishn

downvoted for the "affiliate link" rickroll.

(Epistemic status: shitpost)

You know the rules, and so do I

I am confused. None of these are particularly social-status-improving, or, for that matter, social-status-worsening, because none of them are conspicuous. If you buy a tailored suit or an expensive car or an expensive house, people can see that you own it, and the extravagance signals wealth (or can be interpreted as materialism or lack of prudence); none of the things on the list seem to qualify. What am I missing?

Hm. Now I thought I’d heard of gender dysphoria/transgender/etc showing up in brain imaging (eg. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766406/) and while “develop like female brains” would be bounding happily ahead of the evidence, that seems at least like sporadic snorting noises from the garage in the night time

(Epistemic status: shitpost)

Plan to uplift Royal Corgi may cause constitutional crisis

… climate change is not an existential risk… Earth isn't going to become Venus, or anything like that

Last I heard, the big question was what positive-feedback “tipping points” exist, and at what CO2-level they become triggered. This would give quite wide error bars on what average heating is caused by a given quantity of cumulative emissions. If we can burn all the fossil fuels, turn the rainforests to desert, and vaporise all the methane clathrates, and still not end up like Venus, that’s… reassuring, I guess

A town in Norway did it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170314-the-town-that-built-a-mirror-to-catch-the-sun

(Epistemic status: lyrics)

I’m not too clear about what you just spoke. Is that a parable, or a very subtle joke?

Or to take a stronger example, someone you deeply care about must be alive because you deeply love them, and at the same time you also know for certain that they are dead.

Isn’t this the “denial” psychological defense mechanism, famous for its role in Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief? In the reality the unfortunate thing is true; the impossibility is in the mind of the observer tripping circuit breakers.