My data plan on my phone expired rather suddenly (my phone was too old), and I just didn’t get a new phone number/data plan (wifi + wifi calling still worked).

It was nice having unplugged transit time.

Just noting that image gen is done by s different architecture than an LLM, and the environmental impacts are not the same (in particular, much much less energy use than having a human make one image, and substantially less water use than going to the toilet).

I do those too! That’s where the ideas for new architectures, datasets, and training tweaks come from! Math is fun, and it’s fascinating that math can talk sometimes.

Edit: And I see now that we’re editing messages after people reply? Rude, no? Designing a hallucinating machine certainly doesn’t rot your brain.

I think in a non market economy I would still work on language models. It’s cool that a machine can hold a conversation.

Yeah … Not quite. The negative aspects of coordination problems are more general than just capitalism. Every system has a problem of getting stuff from the place it is to the people that need it, because convincing people to care is hard and verifying that someone needs it is harder.

If we could solve the coordination problem even approximately, we could run profitable businesses in capitalism that addressed many of the ills. The trouble is that we usually can’t (and sometimes the states will shoot people that try).

This is from 2020; It seems like we might have more recent data and there’s been some shifts?

This is the 2025 report from the same group: https://www.nationalsurveyreligiousleaders.org/s/NSRL-report-2025-clergy-in-america.pdf

They say (page 28):

Evangelical clergy, by contrast, stand out as especially conversionist, with 82% agreeing that it is important to try to persuade people to join them. Only 35% of mainline clergy agreed that such conversion attempts are important, compared to 41% of Black ministers and 52% of Catholic priests saying that. Consistent with their more ecumenical views, mainline clergy are less likely than clergy in any other group to agree that it is important for them to try to persuade people in other religions to accept their religion instead of the person’s current one, though the differences between the mainline percentage and the Catholic and Black Protestant percentages are not statistically significant at the conventional level.

Same question in the new report is here; seems like it’s from the same data round though? So that’s a bit confusing:

There is an additional question, on how this varies for ‘primary’ ministers vs others on page 77; feels like it should be broken down by religion first, but I haven’t looked closely.

Brainstorming things you can do about it:

(US) tell congress you want NSF funding to grow, not cut in half.

(US) tell your state gov to start (resume, really) funding state colleges and growing their research offices.

(World) tell your government to increase research funding and support recruiting efforts. Help people get out and continue to do good work.

(All) consider donations and support for professional societies around academics. (Not just in the US; I suspect strengthening these institutions world wide will help.)

(All) let folks know that the US government is gutting weather reporting, basic research (in basically every field), training for future researchers, and ending experiments that have been running for decades. If there is a cool thing you’d like to see in the future, chances are a republican just broke it.

(Folks with far too much money; kinda shocked you’re on here) donate to colleges to create grad student/postdoc/faculty positions. Earmark it carefully so that additional positions are created instead of administrators relabeling previous positions to move money around.

How did you get started as a stone mason?

Bonus: what made you first consider it seriously as a profession?

As I watched the pepfar drama, I’ve become more sympathetic to the overhead fees of a good charity. How the charity works internally isn’t that relevant, compared to how much good gets done per dollar donated (eg, if $1 feeds 10 people in an area and no other charity can do better, I’m not all that sad if the ceo got 90 cents; they did good work even if they aren’t very charitable as a person).

But yes, there are probably grifts.

Housing and food for your communities.

I’m going to make a mildly stronger claim. I think this game really is quite moddable by a non-coder. What you need is to implement a different ruleset with new win conditions; everything else can be done with copying existing files into the correct file structure. New win conditions are specified by a pretty boring JSON file, docs here:

https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv/blob/master/docs/Modders/Mod-file-structure/5-Miscellaneous-JSON-files.md#victorytypesjson

See here for an MVP for a mod of this type (probably replaces/strips away too much, but you should be able to find the vanilla files in the github linked in the OP):

https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv-minimal-base-ruleset/tree/master

Which is all to say, this is much easier than doing address lookup imo.

By testing it out in the app?

I’ve also tried getting AI to program really simple things, like using js to find particular elements in a webpage (which I don’t control and involves far too many lines). It did fine.

It’s not ready for commercial use, but it makes hacking around unfamiliar code more accessible.

An endorsement for group housing!

While it’s got downsides, I’d say the rpg life happens a bit more of you’ve got 6-8 people living under one roof (or across 6 tents, three neighboring houses, etc)

Kozy asked for a different rule set; essentially changing a few numbers related to non-combat victory (shorter research times, lower policy points required, etc). Identifying these numbers in a complicated code base, especially for a non-programmer, could be very difficult. For the non-programmer, understanding how the code works isn’t very important. You just need to know what to change, and perhaps make sure you don’t change more.

I think this is exactly a case where getting a novice programming friend to make a mod would make sense. Equivalently, to vibe code.

This is making a classic media literacy mistake.

The argument being made is that we can disregard the source if the thing that the headline is about is a real phenomena, regardless of if the actual anecdote is true. I don’t think you can ever disregard the source; we should always ask who told this story and why.

Also, OP definitely made a choice providing this url instead of another. Sensationalist headline? Mistake on their part? Lack of English language alternative?

That sounds like something easily modded; like a couple of integers somewhere. It would be cool to do (and seems vibe-code accessible if a model can hold the full script in context?)

You can be selective with this power; works well for a lot of folks. Have a smallish in group where you’re always upstanding, enjoy all the benefits that our tribal brain craves, and also enjoy the material benefits.

I hear this, and also some flavor of people gaming the system.

I don’t like that I hear these things. But something definitely weaseled its way in.

Some folks would have easier access to their drugs though. Pre war on drugs might have some benefits

Needing to go through and disable all the stuff sounds like managing bloat to me, no?

I’m personally angry that we have ads on the default minesweeper and solitaire. Gross