lmn's recent activity

  1. Comment on I'd like to talk about the world these days, care to join in? in ~talk

    lmn
    Link Parent
    Printing money to escape debt would fall into the category of taking more in taxes than we spend on our own population. Printing money incurs inflation, and inflation reduces the value of dollars...

    Printing money to escape debt would fall into the category of taking more in taxes than we spend on our own population. Printing money incurs inflation, and inflation reduces the value of dollars that people currently have. If we settle debts by creating currency, that's the same as paying back our debts by taking value from people with money, and using it to pay the debt.

    It's also not great that the debt is owed to our own citizens. If it weren't, if, for example, some foreign power owned all of our debt we could discharge it without hurting our citizens by defaulting, or consolidating the debt, or negotiating some cheaper deal, or just handing the foreigners a platinum coin while pointing at our huge military. As is, when we fail to pay the debt it will largely be American citizens who experience the loss, as the bonds they were certain were safe become less so.

    1 vote
  2. Comment on I'd like to talk about the world these days, care to join in? in ~talk

    lmn
    Link
    There certainly is a lot to worry about. Two issues that always concern me are the national debt and nuclear proliferation. With the debt, in the US it's something like 21 trillion dollars. It...

    There certainly is a lot to worry about. Two issues that always concern me are the national debt and nuclear proliferation.

    With the debt, in the US it's something like 21 trillion dollars. It seems to me that there will either come a time in the future where the government takes in 21 trillion more than it spends on citizens, or we'll default. The first choice sounds implausible and the second bad.

    Regarding nuclear proliferation, I think back to the various close calls between the US and the USSR. What are the odds of going through the cold war without setting off a nuclear exchange? Now we have to run that experiment again with India and Pakistan, Iran and Israel, North Korea and whoever, and who knows how many more countries will go nuclear?

    2 votes
  3. Comment on US President Donald Trump wrote Turkish President Erdoğan a letter warning him not to be "a tough guy" or "a fool" as his forces launched their attack on northern Syria in ~news

    lmn
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    In my imagination, this is the line that Christopher Soprano would write, were he writing a screenplay involving the negotiation of foreign affairs.

    Trump then referred to economic sanctions his administration used on the country to push for the release of an American pastor who'd been locked up in Turkey, calling it "a little sample" of what could be in store.

    In my imagination, this is the line that Christopher Soprano would write, were he writing a screenplay involving the negotiation of foreign affairs.

    3 votes
  4. Comment on A site to randomly stumble on to new and unique webpages - stumblingon in ~tech

    lmn
    Link Parent
    It sounds a bit like a "me too" feature for StumbleUpon wanting to be a social media company. I can see how it would be gratifying if a lot of people followed you though. Thanks for sharing the...

    It sounds a bit like a "me too" feature for StumbleUpon wanting to be a social media company. I can see how it would be gratifying if a lot of people followed you though.

    Thanks for sharing the perspective of a Stumble Upon champion though.

    2 votes
  5. Comment on A site to randomly stumble on to new and unique webpages - stumblingon in ~tech

    lmn
    Link Parent
    I don't think I ever noticed, or I've since forgotten, the social aspect. What did following someone mean on Stumble Upon? My own intuition is that StumbleUpon kept adding features and things...

    I don't think I ever noticed, or I've since forgotten, the social aspect. What did following someone mean on Stumble Upon?

    My own intuition is that StumbleUpon kept adding features and things until their site eventually evolved away from a neat toy to use when bored to an unusable thing.

    My own hopes for stumblingon are to add a history, so you can find pages you've stumbled on previously, and a like button. The like button would let you mark sites you liked so you could revisit them in the history section and also enable a recommendation system, so your stumbling might become 2/3 random sites and 1/3 sites the system predicts you may like.

    Other than that I mainly just want to grow the index and make the service more performant. At the moment my tests show it'll handle ~20 simultaneous getSite calls, but it's currently written in a fairly naive way.

    I'd definitely like to reach a stopping point and avoid evolving into something bad though.

    3 votes
  6. Comment on A site to randomly stumble on to new and unique webpages - stumblingon in ~tech

    lmn
    Link Parent
    Thanks! At the moment, my feeling is that such a setup would make stumbling faster and more frequent. In a way, I think that would distract from the websites you're visiting. It would be too easy...

    Thanks!

    At the moment, my feeling is that such a setup would make stumbling faster and more frequent. In a way, I think that would distract from the websites you're visiting. It would be too easy to leave them and stumble on to something else and you wouldn't give a website a minute or two that might be required to understand it.

    Also: my current index of sites is fairly small at the moment, so fast stumbles may lead to people quickly running out of choices.

    Ultimately, I could see it becoming a button in a browser extension in the future.

    5 votes
  7. Comment on A site to randomly stumble on to new and unique webpages - stumblingon in ~tech

    lmn
    Link Parent
    Glad you're enjoying it! Regarding the cross domain requests, I happen to have ssl certificates for the daily-yak domain. I needed to make an ssl request to keep the site https. I have an item on...

    Glad you're enjoying it!

    Regarding the cross domain requests, I happen to have ssl certificates for the daily-yak domain. I needed to make an ssl request to keep the site https. I have an item on my to do list for untangling the system. I expect to get to it in a week or two. Hopefully it'll be a bit more coherent then.

    Regarding the size of the index, I can't check exactly right now from my phone (though I plan to add this to a "metrics" page). The size is fairly small, though growing. Approximately 100 sites I'd say. People are submitting more fairly regularly though, so I expect this to grow.

    4 votes
  8. Comment on A site to randomly stumble on to new and unique webpages - stumblingon in ~tech

    lmn
    Link Parent
    Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying it. What is a StumbleUpon achiever? Do you have any thoughts as to what StumbleUpon did well or poorly?

    Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying it. What is a StumbleUpon achiever? Do you have any thoughts as to what StumbleUpon did well or poorly?

    3 votes
  9. Comment on A site to randomly stumble on to new and unique webpages - stumblingon in ~tech

    lmn
    Link Parent
    Hmm. Uh oh. I must've inadvertantly put something invalid in the index of sites to stumble on. I'll check my list of sites and try to find it. Thanks for the heads up!

    Hmm. Uh oh. I must've inadvertantly put something invalid in the index of sites to stumble on. I'll check my list of sites and try to find it.

    Thanks for the heads up!

    5 votes
  10. Comment on A site to randomly stumble on to new and unique webpages - stumblingon in ~tech

    lmn
    Link Parent
    I come down on the "pro" side of weird conspiracy sites. If, for no other reason than getting familiar with extreme examples of conspiracy thinking helps you spot more mild forms.

    I come down on the "pro" side of weird conspiracy sites. If, for no other reason than getting familiar with extreme examples of conspiracy thinking helps you spot more mild forms.

    6 votes
  11. Comment on A site to randomly stumble on to new and unique webpages - stumblingon in ~tech

    lmn
    Link
    Recently I tried searching for the old StumbleUpon. I was surprised and disappointed to see that it seems to have shut down. So - I tried to recreate the basic idea as I remember it. Click a...

    Recently I tried searching for the old StumbleUpon. I was surprised and disappointed to see that it seems to have shut down. So - I tried to recreate the basic idea as I remember it. Click a button, get a random site.

    If you're interested, please check it out. Stumble a few times. Let me know if there's any problems with it or things that would make it better.

    16 votes
  12. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~movies

    lmn
    Link
    Personally, I'm torn between really looking forward to this movie, and trying not to hype myself up too much. I like what I've seen in the previews and have heard good things from early reviews...

    Personally, I'm torn between really looking forward to this movie, and trying not to hype myself up too much. I like what I've seen in the previews and have heard good things from early reviews such as this - but I also don't want to get my hopes too high and spoil a good film by expecting it to be great.

    2 votes
  13. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~creative

    lmn
    Link
    I'm currently learning a bit about web development. I created a website for ranked choice voting, like strawpoll, but instead of voters picking one or multiple options they order them by...

    I'm currently learning a bit about web development. I created a website for ranked choice voting, like strawpoll, but instead of voters picking one or multiple options they order them by preference. It looks pretty amateur, but is functional at this point.

    I'm currently working on redoing it using react to learn a bit more.

    http://rankem123.com

    8 votes
  14. Comment on If you found the secret to immortality would you tell anyone? in ~talk

    lmn
    Link Parent
    I don't know. I'm not a food scientist, economist, planner etc. Centralized planning, I think, has been conclusively shown not to work for distributing resources. Instead, we figure out solutions...

    I don't know. I'm not a food scientist, economist, planner etc. Centralized planning, I think, has been conclusively shown not to work for distributing resources. Instead, we figure out solutions to problems as they arise at the level as close to the ground as possible.

    1 vote
  15. Comment on If you found the secret to immortality would you tell anyone? in ~talk

    lmn
    Link
    I'd share it immediately. Why not? I want to be immortal and assume others do also. I don't want people to die waiting for me to share the treatment. The other answers in this thread aren't...

    I'd share it immediately. Why not? I want to be immortal and assume others do also. I don't want people to die waiting for me to share the treatment.

    The other answers in this thread aren't convincing. There would be social problems from immortality. That's for society to struggle with and solve - not for me to figure out with an elite cabal while I withhold the treatment and let others die.

    3 votes
  16. Comment on Facebook investors call on Mark Zuckerberg to resign as chairman following damaging report in ~tech

    lmn
    Link
    I heard that the people who want Zuckerberg to step down are actually paid by George Soros.

    I heard that the people who want Zuckerberg to step down are actually paid by George Soros.

  17. Comment on On YouTube and EU Article 13 in ~tech

    lmn
    Link
    The part of me that wants to watch people learn a lesson wants the EU to pass Article 13 and YouTube to ban EU creators and viewers, and then the next step will be someone uses IPFS and creates a...

    The part of me that wants to watch people learn a lesson wants the EU to pass Article 13 and YouTube to ban EU creators and viewers, and then the next step will be someone uses IPFS and creates a YouTube clone with no copyright protections that can't be shut down and doesn't pay rights holders at all.

  18. Comment on CNN sues President Trump and top White House aides for barring Jim Acosta in ~tv

    lmn
    Link Parent
    They revoked Acosta's access to the White House. The other commenter is pointing out that citizens don't have a right to go to White House press briefings, so Acosta and CNN must be arguing for...

    They revoked Acosta's access to the White
    House. The other commenter is pointing out that citizens don't have a right to go to White House press briefings, so Acosta and CNN must be arguing for additional privileges that aren't granted to ordinary citizens or even smaller news organizations.

    3 votes
  19. Comment on It’s time to make video games safe for children in ~games

    lmn
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    The author is asking video games and video game culture to change so that he doesn't have to do the task of moderating the content his daughter consumes? This reminds me of a Mark Twain quote....

    My family moved to the United States two years ago from South Korea. My 3-year-old daughter loves learning English through YouTube videos and by playing puzzle video games. I fear that she’ll be exposed to this toxicity soon, unless we eliminate trolls, put a new ratings system into place and demand better of the video-gaming industry.

    The author is asking video games and video game culture to change so that he doesn't have to do the task of moderating the content his daughter consumes? This reminds me of a Mark Twain quote.

    'Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.'

    Surely nobody likes trolling. Except trolls. That's the whole point of trolling, to make people dislike you. That said, I'd prefer some trolls to the heavy handed and intrusive moderation that would be required to eliminate trolls altogether.

    If most people don't share my opinion, that seems like something the market can satisfy. Create a MOBA with lots of moderation and banning. Perhaps you'll attract an audience.

    7 votes