This is the racist part. The majority is always worried about how awful everything would be if they were to become the minority. Usually it's because they treat minorities like shit, and they'll worried that they'll suddenly be treated that way too.

Why would that possibly destroy their culture? Are the cultures of all minorities always destroyed? Why would that be? Is it because of racist assholes?

It's an incredibly weak argument when you think about it. The South Korean culture doesn't have to go anywhere: there will be the same number of Korean pop stars and artists and chefs as there was before, it's just that there will also be others coexisting with them in the same country. Somehow this is a huge threat? They're worried about their culture being "watered down" by lesser cultures? These are racism-adjacent fears, similar to their pure blood being mixed with the lesser races. If you're worried that the South Korean youth will get so much exposure to other cultures that they somehow drop or forget the Korean culture, that just feels like weird gatekeeping and more "mixed blood" concerns to me.

Is there a limit on how much culture can exist? If so, it's surely based on population. We're not talking about the South Korean population declining more due to immigration; it's already declining. If their culture is in danger, it's surely due to that, rather than some sneaky danger of all those dirty immigrants. How is it not based in racism? We're just talking about more culture overall.

Not to mention the fact that most culture spreads over communication channels, not physical bodies. Those terrifying 8 billion non-Koreans who are threatening to destroy Korea's culture are already influencing Korea's culture. Would it really make that big of a difference if they were physically within its borders?

Similarly, the ozone layer is not a requirement, the requirement is that we have some protection against harmful radiation. I don't know how many different possible ways there are to produce a world with minimal UV light, but I'm sure it's more than 1. And besides: are you seriously suggesting that Earth is clearly optimally habitable regarding UV light, when a large percentage of all humans have to take active measures to protect their skin from frying every time they go outside for more than 30 minutes? It's actually very easy to imagine worlds where it's much more pleasant to be outside.

Why would you even think humans require tectonics, vulcanism, and erosion? This is the most obvious is-ought fallacy. Humans cannot live on a planet unless it has earthquakes and giant death-gas-spewing lava mountains? What?

Abundant fresh water I'll give you. This is something that all our evidence suggests Earth is definitely S-tier at, and rare in our neighborhood of the universe.

Or write something that actually provides value to your reader, communicate that value effectively, and trust your reader to recognize that value. Which would you rather read: writing that was optimized for psychologically capturing your eyeballs, or writing that was optimized for providing you something of value?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

So if my API happens to return text strings that always happen to have an even number of characters, I better make sure that all future versions of it also always return an even number of characters, just in case some moron decided to bank their application's functionality on that? No. If you decide to write a fragile application tethered to some incidental property of some upstream software, your application deserves to break.

There's something really important to understand when evaluating non-fiction books: nobody reads the later chapters, and the authors generally know this. They can present tremendously one-sided information in the first few chapters, giving the spin that they want, and then in later chapters give a more balanced approach to shield themselves from criticism. Almost everyone who reads the book will read only the spin, but any criticism levied against the author will be met with "but I specifically say, in the later chapters ...". It's a slimy technique that you start to see everywhere once you're aware of it.

Inference costs cannot keep falling forever, but they do still have a long way to go.

> Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.

Why? Why do you need to be intimidated into actually making effective change? Why is everyone walking around with their hands tied, unable or afraid to enact change? Probably because of the terrible leadership at this company.

>> "We missed it because Alice was on holiday and Bob thought the Widgets team owned it".

> Okay. How do we make ownership unambiguous when someone is unavailable?

You cannot take this step without details. That Bob-Alice story is the details. You do actually need to know that story before you can take the step of knowing that "unambiguous ownership" would be a worthwhile change to make. What exactly is this SVP doing again?

This entire post could be summarized as "executives are useless" and "do the 5-whys", both of which everyone already knows.

This is the opposite of really striving to understand what your AI is producing.

Windows users are the ones who don't want to think about the OS at all. They want to get something else done and have the OS get in their way as little as possible. Linux fans want to dig deep into their OS and play with its internals; Mac fans want the OS to be an experience: trendy, sleek, reassuring. The kind of people who like it when the AI tells them "you're absolutely right!". Windows users generally understand that Windows is awful; the worst operating system, in fact, except for all the other ones.

Yes, don't try to actually get any work done, install anything you care about, or use it in a way that improves your life at all. Just reorient your life around learning this clunky system and don't expect to get any actual benefit from it until you've spent years learning it.

This is the standard Linux pitch, followed by "why doesn't anyone use it!?"

Because the gravitational potential between two massive objects is equal to the amount of energy it would take to separate them (from touching) out to their current distances, and equal to the amount of kinetic energy they'd have when they impacted if they started from rest and eventually came together. This is not zero for any two massive objects that are any distance apart.

If you pulled two objects further and further apart in R3, the force required at each point would drop off proportional to 1/r^2, and the total energy would be the integral of that (let's assume total mass == 1). This integral approaches a constant: for a total mass of 1 and a starting (or "touching") distance of 1 (you can't use 0 or you can't pull them apart), this integral is 1. So no matter how far apart you pull them, potential never exceeds 1. But it must be nonzero, because you could extract energy from releasing them and letting them come together.

In R2, the force required to pull them apart at each point drops off as 1/r, so the integral grows as Ln(r), and so has no upper bound.

I recognize we basically agree on all this, I'm just clarifying why I consider the limit of the potential to be nonzero as distance approaches infinity. You could extract energy from the system with a "water wheel" setup, at least at every finite distance. You could argue "but not at an infinite distance, because they'd never come together, their attraction force is 0, and where would you put the water wheel?" but that problem only comes up at infinity. We're talking about the limit as r approaches infinity, so this problem never actually comes up.

The integral of const/r^2 doesn't drop to zero as r gets larger, but approaches some constant. Unlike const/r, which is unbounded as r gets larger. So potential is bounded in R3, but not in R2.