• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • It’s not only not a valid question, it might not even be a legal question.

    I’m a hiring manager for a very large tech company in California. I cannot ask any questions about age, ethnicity, country of origin, citizenship status, veteran status, marital status, health, and so on.

    HR can ask if they’re eligible to work in the US, and I can ask whether they have the skills and talents I need for the position, but it’s tightly limited.

    It still crops up all the time. There are decades worth of studies showing how having a non-white looking name or having age indicators present in work history or graduation dates influence reviewers to reject applications they’d otherwise accept.



  • There are certainly a lot of species that live in what we might consider inhospitable conditions, and there have been massive ecosystem and environmental shifts in the history of life on earth.

    However, the chemistries and conditions needed to form macromolecules and lipid globules that could protect and contain them (which is one candidate for proto-life) might not have that full range of adaptability. Keeping chemical integrity in potentially harsh conditions (in terms of temperature or environmental chemistry) depends on a whole cascade of cellular chemistry that’s unavailable to prototypes-cells.

    Finding even a single example of extraterrestrial life - even bacterial mats - would absolutely revolutionize biology, and I hope we manage to do it, especially if I’m still around to see it.







  • Oh, I mean the guy himself. I know two women who knew/worked with him.

    I always took Paradise as more funny than creepy because I interpreted it as a parody of stereotyped guy/girl behaviors and agendas rather than advocacy, but the guy himself wasn’t someone you’d particularly want to see your sister dating.


  • I’m going to hazard a guess it’s a combination of falling budget and an over reliance on autocorrect. If it’s like other industries, they’re trying to get more articles out with fewer people.

    I know that I often have an atrocious number of typos - but some are entirely the fault of autocorrect either changing a correct word to something else or correcting a typo to a word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. I’m hoping that the next generation will improve this.

    If anything a now - not typo at least indicates that it was written by a human. LLM errors generally don’t involve that sort of thing.


  • Between the “I have an immune system and I don’t need no mask and covid isn’t real anyway” crowd and the munchausen patients, there’s a lot of people. One reason why “whole body scans” as a diagnostic tool on healthy patients is controversial is that you end up making the patient think they have something that they demand treatment for. In this case, patients will request specific meds or tests based on a marketing campaign specifically designed to sell drugs. Patients don’t need that kind of input, and it’s potentially harmful - not because people want to be sick, but because of the kind of phenomenon that makes WebMD users think they must have cancer.




  • Seventeen is also easier to fit into lyrics. Dancing Queen by ABBA. Sexy + 17 by the Stray Cats (although the song was about ditching high school classes). At Seventeen by Janis Ian (who was singing about herself at 17). Paradise by the Dashboard Light by Meatloaf (again about both being high schoolers, but he’s a bit of a creep anyway).

    I might be giving my age away here.


  • No, computer engineering tends to focus more on hardware. When I was doing that kind of thing in college, computer engineering did things like chip design and logic boards and so on. I had courses on DSP and VLSI, multiple assembly languages, RISC vs CISC systems, and so on. In my university, it was considered a subspecializqtion of electrical engineering, with the first two years of undergraduate study being identical.

    When I switched over to CS, I was doing things like numerical analysis and software systems architecture.

    Both majors used math, but CE (as an EE major) required students to go through (iirc) calculus 5, and I think that CS majors could stop at calc 3 but would end up having to do different kinds of math after that.


  • I’m a theoretical biologist.

    The best book I read on multilevel selection theory was actually written by a professor of philosophy. The author broke down the individual concepts, as they do, so that anyone reading it knew exactly what each technical term referred to. Biology is my favorite subject because there’s so much that we’re still figuring out and it’s just ridiculously complex.

    I might have had a similar hot take as an undergrad when everyone has an ego based on their major - and I was even a computer engineering student for awhile, and engineers tend to be even worse at that sort of thing.



  • One of the main jobs of the president is assigning work to other people. The president isn’t supposed to be the best economist, the best strategist, the top scientist, or the best trade planner. They’re supposed to make decisions based on the input of the people they selected for the position.

    My biggest concern with Bernie (who is someone I absolutely admire and who I’ve supported for decades) is that he is total crap at picking staff and then he stays loyal to them.

    There’s a tendency in western political philosophy that basically says that the king himself is a good person, but he has bad advisors. This is done for ego-saving, as people would rather criticize advisors than the king.

    RFK is truly unhinged. He’s a conspiracy theorist. He’s the weird uncle you don’t invite to Thanksgiving. I wouldn’t let him house sit for me. If the guy can’t even win over his family members, I don’t think he’s promising. He’s being funded to run as a spoiler by the opposition, and I expect his support to plummet as soon as he’s actually put in front of a mic and gets national attention. Remember when Herman Cain was the Republican front runner until people figured out more about him? I think this is basically that.