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New neuroscience research shows liberals experience more empathy than conservatives when they imagine others suffering
  • Maybe not "need", but yes, a fully peer reviewed study confirming or rejecting seemingly obvious conclusions is an important part of the scientific method. It's how we gain confidence in what we (think we) know.

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    Google lays off contractors who unionized last month | Engadget
  • There have actually been a few cases that have made it through the courts that apply "employee" status based on how the company treats the worker rather than how they're paid.

    Especially in cases where the worker is on long-term assignment somewhere like Google.

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    A year in Mars is longer than the ones on Earth, so ppl living on Mars would celebrate less birthdays and technically die younger.
  • A lot of science fiction writers try to address the problem of time when humanity becomes a space-faring race. Star Trek has the idea of a "Stardate" and instructed the script writers to just fucking make it up,

    For example, 1313.5 is twelve o'clock noon of one day and 1314.5 would be noon of the next day. Each percentage point (sic) is roughly equivalent to one-tenth of one day. The progression of stardates in your script should remain constant but don't worry about whether or not there is a progression from other scripts. Stardates are a mathematical formula which varies depending on location in the galaxy, velocity of travel, and other factors, can vary widely from episode to episode."

    Meanwhile, Asimov in the Robots / Foundation universe, everyone still uses the idea of a 365-day / 24-hour day "year", even if no one remembers Earth (except a R. Daneel Olivaw and a few others).

    And Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars trilogy does what OP notes -- Martian years are longer, and the societies diverge pretty rapidly, within a generation, for a whole host of reasons.

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    U.S. to decide soon on GM's request to deploy cars without steering wheels
  • From the article, this looks like it's for GM's "Cruise" program, which is already out there in limited scope in a couple cities. It's aself-driving car service limited to a small area of San Francisco and.. I want to say Austin?

    They're already operating vehicles that are essentially "self-driving" now. This is about rolling out a new class of vehicle using the same technology, but without the human controls.

    I don't know a lot about the service, or what, exactly it does, but I suspect it works well because the area the vehicles operate in is extremely limited and the vehicles can have an incredibly detailed, and up-to-date map of that area. I'd also wager the area selected is free of most obstacles and has only one type of terrain, i.e., "downtown low-speed streets" or similar.

    That said, I can't imagine the NTSHA will allow a vehicle on the road without any sort of manual emergency control mechanism in place. Though, it may be very rudimentary, like others have suggested, a joystick and a throttle/brake intended to get the vehicle somewhere safe so people can get out.

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    Honking at someone when the light turns green is no longer rude because he is probably on his phone
  • I have a whole protocol for this.

    You got a 5-count once there's no one in front of you to go. Then you get a quick tap.

    Then you get a 2-count to start moving. Then you get a double tap.

    Then you get another 2-count. If you haven't started moving by now, you get 1 tap every second until you fucking move for the love of fuck just fucking GO jesus tap-dancing christ in a Bethlaham drag show GO!!

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    The 11-mile long, 600 lbs IMAX print of ‘OPPENHEIMER’
  • Many years ago, I ended up with a membership to a local museum that had a OMNIMAX theater, which is IMAX, but with a dome and a fisheye lens is used ot shoot the film. The projector is, essentially, in the middle of the room and shoots "up" at the screen / dome at about a 45 degree angle. The net result is the film is pretty much half-a-sphere in front of you. Your entire field of vision is filled by the media.

    They almost always showed educational films or documentaries specifically filmed for the format. I specifically recall some stupid one about snowboarding of all things, which was really just an excuse for the filmmakers to go snowboarding and ride helicopters with an expensive movie camera in the mountains. It's very, very cool.

    Even if there aren't any major studio movies made for these theaters, if you ever get a chance to see something on one of the few left in operation, take it. Totally worth it.

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    Just redacted 13 years of interaction and helping people on Reddit
  • I did a GDPR request for all my data, and then aimed the reddit-user-to-sqlite script at it -- https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite

    The metadata.json & recommendation to use datasette to interact with it makes finding old comments super easy. I've been going through all my comments sorted by date, clicking each permalink manually and editing-and-deleting them while bored during the workday (meetings, etc.). It has the added benefit of being incredibly difficult to figure out of I'm a bot or not.

    I'm thinking of, instead, just pasting the content into chatgpt and editing the responses to leave it in place.

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    Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious
  • Capitalism is great, but it absolutely must be tempered by regulation.

    The problem comes when the capitalist gains influence over the regulator, aka, regulatory capture.

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