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Even though there clearly must be a line on some topics, many people think those lines should be placed to minimize the number of times people are forced to do something (or prevented from doing something) against their will.

It’s not at all obvious that “adults can’t have TikTok” is anywhere near the correct side of that line.


Do what EVs do: make 100% on the display not 100.0% electro-chemically and 0% not be 0.0% chemically.

This is a serious suggestion, as I think it’s actually net beneficial for the consumer.


This is already the case and has been so for a long time. But it's a trade off between longevity and capacity

The problem is that consumers want to buy a phone with 24 hours of runtime and an EV with 200 miles of range, and they want the phone to be thin and light and the car to be fast and light, and manufacturers want to achieve those capacities with as little electrochemistry as possible. The number of charge cycles at full capacity will be a big deal a year or two in, but on the sales floor it's a secondary concern for typical buyers and sellers.

Playing fast and loose with the numbers, I'm sure that if 100% on the display was 80% in the battery and 0% was 20%, you'd have an amazing number of charge cycles. You could program that 40% of unused capacity to be reduced as the battery ages very slowly, and by the time the used capacity is only at 80% of its original revealed capacity you're at many thousands of cycles. But you'd have a phone or car that weighed 40% more and cost 40% more than one that had no buffer and ran at the bleeding edge on day 1.

Absent breakthroughs in battery chemistry, this basically regulates the amount of buffer capacity that manufacturers are required to include in their ~~lies~~ marketing materials.


> But you'd have a phone or car that weighed 40% more and cost 40% more than one that had no buffer and ran at the bleeding edge on day 1.

But it would also behave on day 1000 just as well as when the user agreed to buy it on day 1, meaning they’re likely still ok with it.


There's no coming back from 0% chemically. Running li-ions that low results in physical damage.

What is a “special tool”? A Philips screwdriver is pretty clearly not, but is a T-5 Torx? A security T-5? A Tri-wing? A Pentalobe?

"Special tool" is not used in the actual regulation; the requirement is that replacement must be possible with basic tools, defined:

> (50) 'basic tools' means a screwdriver for slotted heads, a screwdriver for cross recess screws, a screwdriver for hexalobular recess heads [Torx], a hexagon socket key, a combination wrench, combination pliers, combination pliers for wire stripping and terminal crimping, half round nose pliers, diagonal cutters, multigrip pliers, locking pliers, a prying lever, tweezers, magnifying glass, a spudger and a pick;

(Excepted devices can require "commercially available tools" which is defined exactly as you'd expect.)

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1670/oj


> A portable battery should be considered to be removable by the end-user when it can be removed with the use of commercially available tools and without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless they are provided free of charge […] to disassemble it.

> Commercially available tools are considered to be tools available on the market to all end-users without the need for them to provide evidence of any proprietary rights and that can be used with no restriction, except health and safety-related restrictions.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1542/oj


Why does the Pentalobe exist in the first place?

in one product design i did, unironically because the customer thought that six-star screws were antisemitic

Antisemitic geometry. Now I've seen everything

Imagine the lasting havoc the Nazis could have wrought if they adopted a + instead of a swastika


Any tool you can’t get at a random local hardware store.

Except in this case, the company also now owns EBay with a market cap of around $44B before the takeover bid was announced.

I don’t think GP was claiming it was an infinite money hack at all.


The headline seems written to guide the reader towards concluding that this is IP theft.

If ASU holds the rights to the underlying IP (such as if the work is a “work made for hire”), it’s not at all obvious that they need specific additional permission to compile or remix the IP.


The legality of this doesn’t seem like the most important factor here. The larger issue is that somebody thought it was a good idea to sell material “grounded in trusted ASU courses” without involving or even informing the actual professors who teach those courses. And of course this material, which is trading on the professors’ reputation, is low-quality slop: “error-laden, jumbled, lacking context, and confused.”

If I was one of these professors, I would be livid. Legality aside, this was a miserable thing for the ASU president to do, and I hope he learns from his mistakes.


I find things like that hard to perfectly square with observations like the Flynn Effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.

the 'IQ' people conveniently ignore how the IQ test is such a poor measure for intelligence & resourcefulness

I learned a long time ago that people who talk about IQ don't usually have anything intelligent to say.

I also tend to find people who score well on those tests don't put much stock into them.

And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence.

If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, nobody’s IQ changes.


For any given IQ test, the norming sample is taken once. So if everyone gets twice as smart as before, everyone's IQ, as measured by any existing IQ test, would go up.

This is wrong and confused in every possible way.

Look up the Flynn effect ... it refers to an actual change in performance.

That the scores on a given IQ test are occasionally renormalized so that the mean is 100 has no bearing on whether "IQ is a statistical distribution", whether intelligence or whatever the heck IQ measures can be measured absolutely, or on the validity and meaning of the previous statements by Epa095, sokoloff, and irdc and why they are or are not true.

If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, all of their IQs will shoot up until the scoring of every IQ test is renormalized to a mean of 100.


I find it interesting that you are basically saying the same thing, even if the reply you are confused by simply made some assumptions you were not able to make and was a bit less precise.

It’s interesting how people will say things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way” even though it’s not, making it and them in turn the ones “wrong and confused in every possible way”.

Maybe if we are a bit more generous with others we won’t be compelled to be so pretentious and denigrating by saying things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way”, about something someone said and believes.


Does the original reply actually make sense in context? I can't see how.

It's a response to someone saying "you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950", and it says "And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence."

This seems like a non sequitur to me. Am I missing something? (Bear in mind that the 'line' under discussion is an increase in unstandardised scores.)


On a given set of 1000 questions, over time the trend has been to answer slightly more of them correct every year, progressively raising unstandardized scores, over the set of all IQ testees, since IQ testing was formalized in the 1950s.

Extrapolation is the most questionable statistical tool, and while extrapolation ad absurdum is a way to show a formal predicate logic argument to be incorrect or underspecified, it is an almost fully general attack against real datasets, which basically always have some trend line that ultimately passes sensible thresholds like zero bounds. Showing this, however you form the trend line, is not saying a whole lot.

Extrapolation prior to 1950 is not a very useful tool to evaluate intelligence trends, and this is entirely separate from the periodic recalibration of IQ tests to keep the average at 100 (however many correct answers out of 1000 this corresponds to).


This is another non sequitur ... it doesn't address retsibsi's point or their question. It has nothing to do with cluckindan's comment, which is what this subthread was about.

It's because there are multiple levels of misconceptions as well as "violent agreements".

retsibsi is correct. You can't draw (meaningful) conclusions about IQ before 1950, because extrapolating from the data after 1950 is dumber the farther back you reach, just for reasons related to the concept of extrapolation.

This has nothing to do with the fact that IQ is a statistical distribution that we keep re-norming, which "should always average 100"; The Flynn Effect is not in serious dispute, it's just an effect that pertains to nonstandardized results.


Nothing you wrote here is remotely correct, it contributes nothing on the topic, and it commits the exact sins it accuses me of.

True, but irrelevant.

Or, false and irrelevant.

People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.


I wouldn't give the Flynn effect a lot of weight. The numbers are from IQ tests. No one knows what they measure, they are tuned for a population, for the most of time the Flynn effect had place IQ test scores were used for hiring, school placement, and policy decisions (so Goodheart's Law was at play, how'd you think?).

It is a curious effect, I agree, I'd like to know why it was so, but probably I will not know for sure (I'm a big fan of a scientific method, but I don't believe it is up to a task), and so I personally prefer just ignore it.


Firstly, this is completely orthogonal. But it's also improper reasoning.

If Neanderthal had bigger brains (they did) or had different cognitive abilities, there's a chance they were baseline smarter than homo sapiens at the time.

Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.


Hmm, more smarter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Cranial_capacity

Not the lady Neanderthals:

> average Neanderthal cranial capacity for females was 1300 cm3 and 1600 cm3 for males. [Modern humans, 1473 cm3.]

Nor the dude Neanderthals, since they were using the swollen brainparts for vision and coordination:

> Neanderthals had larger eyes and bodies relative to their height [...] when these areas were adjusted to match anatomically modern human proportions it was found Neanderthals had brains 15-22% smaller than in anatomically-modern humans.

Edit since I don't even agree with the concept: even if the extra capacity was differently distributed such that they had more ... powerful? ... executive functions, what's smartness? More imagination, OK, more self-restraint, more planning. More navel-gazing, more doubt, more ennui.

Or it could be more communication, often proposed as what gave sapiens the edge. Chattering bipeds. It's an association between the brain doing something and the species proliferating, that's what we're calling smart, but doing what? It could just mean our ancestors were compulsively busy. Same thing as smart, perhaps.


We will never get that the cranial volume is not the same as inteligence/brain function, or whatever you might call it. Reminder that Einstein brain was smaller than average, and female brain are smaller than male. Phrenology will haunt us forever, in one form or another.

Most likely, some Neanderthals were asimilated into modern humans, most were exterminated in tribal clashes. Reminder also that our almighty specie was almost wiped out from history around 800,000 years ago (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487), being the most intelligent organism ever existed.


I don't think that matches archeological findings. From what I understand the reason neanderthals are understood to have been less intelligent than sapiens is because neanderthal tools found are cruder than sapien tools from around the same periods and areas.

> Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.

Considering most human groups have a % of Neanderthal DNA, they didn't exactly lose... Based on the % of Neanderthal vs. Sapien DNA, it seems Neanderthals were simply outnumbered.


What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?

Are numbers everything? Are sardines more evolved than whales?

Anyhow, the traditional view is that Neanderthals were brutes who were actually out-competed and killed off by Sapiens. The more realistic view considering the evidence is that Neanderthals were much closer to Sapiens, equally or even more sophisticated, but less numerous, and thus their contribution to our DNA is smaller than Sapiens.

But do keep in mind the Neanderthals live on because Europeans and Asians are all part Neanderthal.


I think especially given TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators who occasionally raped human women.

I don’t much believe the friendly smiling museum depictions that have lately become fashionable. Their eyes alone would have made them something you didn’t want to run into at night.


Are there any good illustrations showing how much bigger their eyes were compared to modern humans? Is it really significant? I'm having trouble finding anything that makes it clear.

I kind of agree. Though the old, brutish yet stupid was also likely wrong and more for self-comfort as a species.

Tangent and thought experiment: If we could re-engineer a viable population of neanderthals, should we?

If we further gave them the full gamut of modern knowledge and tools, and even a nation-state suitable for them what would be the outcome?


> TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators

All humans are. Neanderthals, Sapiens, modern humans, we are all apex predators.

> occasionally raped human women

The article doesn't suggest that. While it's plausible, there's also evidence of Sapien/Neanderthal cooperation and mingling: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260412071005.h...

And lets not forget that all hominins fight amongst themselves, rape each other, etc... The assumption that Neanderthals were particularly brutish is just that, an assumption.


There is however a suggestion here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Interbreeding

> According to Svante Pääbo, it is not clear that modern humans were socially dominant over Neanderthals, which may explain why the interbreeding occurred primarily between Neanderthal males and modern human females.

Unless read as suggesting "Neanderthal males were hugely charismatic"?


In current-day interracial dating dynamics there are preferred race and gender combos and this is shown through lots of statistics.

The answer isn't necessarily rape...


...or "Neanderthal males were huge, thus charismatic" :)

Ants won over humans? Worms?

When you are in direct competition? I should have said outcompeted, which in this case I think outnumbered is a fair proxy.

But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.

The minuscule sample of tools we have are more primitive, but we don't have any examples of their wooden tools, nor any trace of most of their activities, languages, rites, etc. They could have invented animal husbandry and wool spinning and build awesome wooden cities and we have no way to know because everything would have disappeared without a trace, crushed by glaciers of later ages. We know almost nothing of them.

The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it.

Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?

Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important.

Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their genocidal policy recommendations seem less scientifically sound, so they put a lot of effort into denying that IQ scores can be improved by interventions. Even though they have been, for decades.


It seems obvious that IQ test scores can be improved with interventions and further that actual [as opposed to measured] general intelligence can be affected by environmental factors that shape whether the brain develops under good, neutral, or damaging conditions (nutrition, sleep, language usage, stress, etc.).

With all the energy that's been spent on the topic, I'm slightly surprised that this isn't entirely settled by now and any opposing view being relegated to fringe/flat-earth territory.


I don't see why it's surprising: IQ is one of the few tools that modern scientific racists have in their toolbox. One wouldn't expect them to let such trifling concerns as "evidence" and "testable models with successful predictions" take that away from them.

There is such a thing as general intelligence which differs between different people. Arguing that IQ isn't real because IQ tests are imperfect, is like arguing in the year 1500 that temperature isn't real because all thermometers are imperfect.

Our lack of ability to precisely measure something does not mean the underlying thing is not real. There is such a thing as general intelligence which correlates strongly with almost every type of performance and life outcomes.


IQ tests are useful for measuring features of populations, but they're a very noisy measure of an individual's "general intelligence" (if such a thing even exists), with several confounders: whether you've trained to pass IQ tests, TDTPSATDIBCA [1], how well-rested you are, how stressed you are, how hungry you are, whether environmental conditions are distracting you… Many of these are also a factor in group averages, although in the context of measuring children's educational attainment, this is a feature rather than a bug: in that setting, IQ tests are a good measure (to the extent that educational attainment is something we want to be optimising for, which is another question entirely).

However, in this thread, we were discussing "the typical racist's use of IQs". Nobody was "arguing that IQ isn't real": you brought that up, unprompted. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

[1]: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stan...


> Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?

The ban on leaded petrol probably also helped.


The timeline doesn't match.

The Flynn Effect covers from around 1930s to 1980s and the phase out of leaded gasoline happened during the very end of that timeline, meaning adolescent IQ measurements during the time the Flynn Effect covers would have all been raised in an environment where leaded fuel was either dominant or at least common.


Are you suggesting our brains are getting better? I find it far more likely that our improved education techniques and our skyrocketing access to information as being the cause.

Better food.

I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.

As King Thamus said to Theuth.

This was Socrates' own warning about writing over 2000 years ago

Socrates was partly right. I am deeply indebted to written notes on just about everything. Pre-literate societies often had excellent memories, and have to rely on them for survival not just culture bearing. The Polynesians had excellent navigation skills without writing. Desert societies can remember oases and routes etc sometimes relying on song to memorise them.

Precisely why is this hard to square away?

If the measured cognitive abilities of a typical 2000-era Homo sapiens are statistically significantly different from 1900-era Homo sapiens, to me that casts some doubt as to how likely similar a 125K years ago and since out-competed species was.

Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?

(This is obviously an unpopular line of inquiry/source of confusion based on the voting.)


> Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?

It kind of was, and one of the people you can thank for that is Norman Borlaug.


For one literacy right now is ~100% and has never been anywhere close to that until 50-60 years ago.

Literacy.

Percentage of children to survive to adulthood.

Global food surplus.

The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...


>Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?

I mean if you look at the rate of technology change and population growth, ya probably.

What we cannot compare is if the older species could assimilate all the information that we had to in that period. The vast wealth of knowledge of the human super-species wasn't avaliable then.



There’s a large risk and hugely adversarial nature/motivation for predators to bypass whatever proactive filtering is put in place.

The real predators are Roblox for getting kids addicted to gambling and the lawmakers who refuse to protect them.

Not that they haven't also abdicated responsibility for keeping sexual predators off the platform. But the societal-level harm is going to be these kids growing up, hardwired to these dopamine-addled gambling pathways. Every single one of those kids has been twisted by Robux.

We need regulations to stop targeting kids with this shit. Companies will stop building it when they get regulated.


Thermodynamically, the heat lost to the outside is roughly linear with the temperature delta between inside and outside.

All else equal, setbacks do reduce energy lost to the outside; whether that saves money depends somewhat on the recovery strategy of your equipment; whether it’s desirable depends on your individual preferences.


But you still need to move air for cooling (as opposed to using water for heating), because you can’t cause condensation during cooling without creating damage and health risks.

Hydronic (water transport) heat is great: extremely comfortable and quiet compared to forced hot air.


When does an existing mortgage lender get involved in a house remodel? (assuming you’re not trying to borrow more money for it)

I’ve owned houses for 30 years and no bank has gotten review of contemplated projects or anything other than appraisals during origination of a mortgage or refinance (which are entirely optional for me, of course).


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