>>> To establish this, let’s write a simple simulation. We’ll flip a coin a million times, ask our friends what they saw, and observe the results.

Either they agree, or they disagree.

If they agree, they're either both telling the truth or both lying. All you can do is go with what they agreed on. In this case, picking what they agreed on is the same as picking what one of them said (say, Alice).

If they disagree, then one is telling the truth and one is lying and you have no way to tell which. So just pick one, and it makes no difference if you pick the same one every time (say, Alice).

So you end up just listening to Alice all the time anyway.

>>> Manifesting things into reality through writing them often enough is FAR from a normal belief.

Hey, propaganda is a thing and it works. That's totally and example of manifesting things into reality through writing them often enough.

>>> For much of history, laws in many countries were designed to uphold systems of privilege for white men. Segregation, discrimination, and unequal treatment were institutionalized, limiting legal protections for non-white individuals and women.

For much of history, most countries did not have an upper class made up of white men.

And for those that did, the absolute majority of white men in these countries were not that far away from slaves.

I intend to do this very bad thing. How much karma do I need to accrue in advance, so that I don't go into the red from doing it?

I guess my point is you will always be bad as a result of doing this very bad thing, no amount of karma can counter it.

You can't just "do good" like it's a spreadsheet, managing your karmic balance as the parent comment joked. You're only worrying about your personal consequences in that model, not the harm to others.

But I think it should be possible for a human to reflect on their actions, find remorse, and strive to do better in the future. They will always have done a bad thing, but they might not always be a bad person.

Meanwhile $employer is continuing to migrate individual tasks to in-house AI tooling, and has licensed an off-the-shelf coding agent for all of us developers to put in our IDEs.

>>> How should we think about cloud seeding?

It's a way to take someone else's rain.

Under international law, countries have complete and exclusive sovereignty over this airspace, just as they do over their land. They aren’t “taking someone else’s rain” because the clouds they’re seeding are effectively theirs anyway

> Under international law, countries have complete and exclusive sovereignty over this airspace

Iran isn’t operating under the protections nor restrictions of international law. Neither is its relevant neighbor. (Practically.)

What they choose to do and how the other chooses to interpret it is very much…up in the air.

who owns the rain? what if it was just going to fall in the oceans?

Less rain than you'd imagine falls on the oceans, due to the land having varying elevation and temperature, whilst the oceans have far more constant elevation and temperature so the conditions needed for rain happen less.

That's just...wrong.

"78% of global precipitation occurs over the ocean" [1]

[1] https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/articles/nasa-earth-science-w...

We’ll find out soon. Whoever is “taking” the rain is the one that owns it is my guess.

My understanding is that cloud seeding has been going on for quite a while over Texas and the rest of the southern Plains.

It's hidden in plain sight, and the only people who ever seem to talk about it are total wingnuts who also believe things like climate change is real but manufactured by the US and other world power militaries (using secret technology) for geopolitical purposes, often conflating real cloud seeding with variations on the classic chemtrails conspiracy theory.

It's a largely unregulated continent scale weather and climate modification experiment. I haven't booked too deep into the research on it, but because powerful agricultural interests are involved, I'm sure nobody is looking too closely at externalities and would prefer to keep it that way.

Who cares about local storage? You could have just made up whatever you're claiming to have saved.

Archival sites could let you download cryptographically signed copies of the archived pages. If they get removed from the archival site, the authenticity of your local copies can still be attested.

Storage media and authenticity have zero overlap in the venn diagram. Authenticity is a cryptological feature of the internet, not a topological one.

The reason you believe that you're reading something on news.ycombinator.com right now is not the path by which the bytes were copied from one interface to the next before getting to you, but the certificate and signature that confirms you have a valid HTTPS connection.

True, it's next to useless as a proof of anything for wide audience...

But what does care about local storage in this brave new gaslit world is my own sanity, for one.

Ask a parent what they hear when they hear “irreversible” in conjunction with their child. I promise nobody mistook that for “until the heat death of the universe,” but I can add a note if you really think it’s warranted.

You definitely make a good point.

But even reversible changes aren’t always “reversed”. They aren’t necessarily minor.

Sure, breaking an arm or skipping high school can be a “reversible” change. But not often not fully “reversed” and/or not done so in a negligible time frame. There are costs. Seems like biological development could be similar.

Even if this was going to hold up, it wouldn't make the policies that Lamarck's ideas were designed to promote work. We already empirically know they don't work.

It’s also a good argument for not allowing children to be victims of their parents’ circumstances. Which is the heart of compulsory schooling and school lunch and a whole host of other things.