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This has already been a movie called Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah Connor is out to kill Dyson to stop Skynet from becoming a thing and the audience watched it thinking she was probably justified but was uncomfortable anyway. Spoiler alert: she ended up shooting but not killing him.

My point is, we've seen this movie and killing Sam Altman is uncomfortable but justified.


It's like a baby on board bumper sticker. But for your house.

*gate. Sounds like it was thrown at his gate not his house.

That his security is inadequate.

Is the underground bunker in New Zealand ready yet? Better check on it.

Who would build a bunker on a fault line?

It's a decent trade-off. It's not like an earthquake destroys all of the entire country at once if one happens, only a localized portion is affected. It's super far from everywhere, and very beautiful. Plus, it's left off a bunch of maps, so some people don't even know it exists.

It's not a good argument. Sale of ivory creates demand because it's a sale.

We could make it illegal to view images of ivory (with the logic that this might lead to a sale), but most people would consider that a step too far.


Viewing images of ivory is not harming an elephant, though. With CSAM, the image is the abuse – you'd be viewing the actual harm event. So consuming CSAM is more like purchasing the ivory yourself.

What percentage of pornhub visitors click on the "barely legal" category? I'm pretty sure that data is available.

That suitcase of rice story though, I'm finding it problematic lol.

- First of all a 95% increase in the price of rice means it less than doubled which is no big deal.

- I think maybe you meant it 20x'ed ? If so I will just eat corn until it comes down (my house eats 100kg of rice in a month)

- Can a suitcase of rice even get through customs?


Indeed it's a roughly 2x increase (5kg supermarket bag from 2000 jpy to 4000).

Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.


> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.

There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat.

Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.


I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.

> I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China

I can't personally attest to that, but it certainly makes sense. Rice meals vs noodle meals are a fairly fundamental split in Chinese cuisine.

(It doesn't make rice any less of a staple food.)


Corn is still cheaper. If you're really poor in Asia you're eating corn (and complaining about it).

If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil.

I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil, and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil must be the price.

But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil available in the US seem to be soybean oil?


China has a minimum purchase price of corn that's set by the government in order to maintain food stocks. It's also part of a larger jobs program (that I don't know much about).

China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.

In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed to livestock and also used in biodiesel production. There's enormous soybean "crush" infrastructure in the US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to everything else.


OK... but I have followup questions.

Why does the minimum purchase price of corn in China not make corn oil, a derivative product, more expensive?

Why does the low price of soybean oil in the United States not make soybean oil cheaper in China?

If the reason corn oil is cheap in China is that it's imported separately from the grain and therefore immune to the price floor... wouldn't that imply that corn oil is also cheaper outside China?


Corn??? I don't think corn in bulk is cheaply available in Japan at all. There's a mention in Wikipedia of a Chinese-Mongolian corn meal porridge thing but it looks pretty local.

It's available but it's culturally considered a grain that you feed to livestock rather than humans. I mostly feel the same way about it TBH.

Wait. Dod I read this right? Are you saying rice isn't real food but meat is?

I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.


Why? Rice is what you eat if you can't afford anything better. This parallels every other culture - the staple food will keep you alive, but if you have any money, you'll eat something better than that.

You know how "bread and water" is considered a terrible diet that only prisoners eat, and then only because they're not given a choice?

(And how modern prisoners get a much better diet?)


It's much more nuanced than that.

Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare. Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.

Rice and tea (ochazuke) is historically the "bread and water" equivalent in Japan, but people of every socioeconomic class still eat rice and miso soup for breakfast, eat rice balls (onigiri) regularly, and generally eat a diet with a lot of rice.

Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.

I wouldn't be surprised if the middle class and lower class eat more-or-less identical quantities of rice.


> It's much more nuanced than that.

> Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare.

That's not an example of nuance. An expensive fruit and a heavily-processed cheese are much higher-grade food than bread is.

> Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.

Same thing; cheese is a high-grade food, and even pesto is chock full of fat.

> Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.

And this is a statement that even the poorest people in Japan aren't so poor that they have to subsist on rice. There's no question about which of instant ramen or ochazuke is a better meal. Instant ramen comes with tons of spices, fats, salt, some vegetables, and even a little meat.


>rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food

Um, rice is real food too, right?


> my house eats 100kg of rice in a month

What’s the maths on that? A cup of rice would seem a fair bit for a person for a meal. A cup is about 200g.

That’s 500 portions a month. 5.5 people for 3 meals a day?


A lot of Asian households are multi-generational, so the maths definitely checks out there.

I'm putting my money on more people (8-10) but eating less than 200g per meal (1/2 cup uncooked, ~100g for most people)

EDIT, just saw sibling, that's impressive for 5 people, unless the dogs eat a lot of rice too.


It's actually traditionally 1 cup exactly here (scoop a measuring cup out of the rice cooker per plate). Most people in my house are 2-3x daily, I'm 1-2x daily because I didn't grow up eating rice (I prefer bread). We have 2 rice cookers going at dinner because 1 one is for the dogs exclusively.

It fluctuates but on average maybe 5 humans and 10 dogs.

You give rice to the dogs, too?

Yup - family dogs eat what we do. Funny story - my mom's dog will not eat rice unless there's also fish (leftover bones will do). Rice+fish - bowl is cleaned up. Rice+meat - only the meat is picked and eaten.

Read the ingredients on a can of dog food, there's either rice or corn in it. They prefer rice.

That’s an amazing volume.

> Goal: 200mb RAM usage

This is why Zed is great but I just can't get used to the debugger experience so I end up back in VSCode.


Yes, but the idea is to have all of VS Code Extensions working as well, which is what Zed doesn’t have. There are just too many Extensions that people would like to use but on a less usage.

vscode debugger has always felt lacking to me; I still find myself firing up jetbrains* just for that

The funny thing is that dishes and laundry are already automated and people are still complaining about them.

Do we need a humaniform robot to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer? Maybe we just need smarter appliances.


> laundry [is] already automated

Partially. Ironing/steaming is only partially automated. Folding/hanging is not.


Not for that task, you don't. Just get a washer/dryer. They're very common where I live: the machine both washes and dries your clothes, and uses a heat pump system on the dryer side for high efficiency.

What's missing is a robot that will take the clothes out of your washer/dryer, fold them up, and put them away for you.


Yeah, that's Rosie from the Jetsons. Still a few years away unfortunately.

my dishwasher in my apartment simply doesn't work. i've tried everything, cleaning the filter, using special cleaning chemicals, vinegar, whatever. maybe if you can afford a nicer machine but if you're in an apartment and especially in one where they choose what dishwasher to use, then dish washing is not really automated at all. i rarely use mine because of how ineffective it is.

I agree with the teachers one. Having one lady in charge of educational instruction for that many kids will be looked back upon as barbarism.

The solution is more teachers, smaller class sizes and not underpaying and abusing teachers to function as nanny’s also charged with raising your children.

This isn’t exactly a mystery problem, we’ve understood clearly how to educate humans well for quite a while. It’s just that doing it properly is “eXpEnSiVe” as if the alternative, isn’t quietly orders of magnitude worse, and more costly.


Even if you doubled the number of teachers (which you won't), we're still not getting to anything that resembles individual instruction.

We're still basically warehousing those kids, and we can do better.


class sizes of 15 is better than 30 and 7 is better than 15.

So the solution is to have less ladies in charge? Who's going to wipe snot off the kids' noses, pull legos out of their mouths, and tell them not to hit each other?

> Who's going to wipe snot off the kids' noses, pull legos out of their mouths, and tell them not to hit each other?

The robots? That's what we're discussing in this thread.


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