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I don't think I ever ran into that when I was younger. Meeting in houses is the original way Christians met, so I think it would be weird to complain about it. I found it pretty common for people to make fun of the opposite. If you're spending your church money on a big fancy building, does that really show your dedication to church teachings like charity*?

Also, people might accuse a really small church group of being culty, but a small church group with a big fancy building feels much cultier than the same group meeting in a house.

I was only really exposed to Evangelical Christianity so it's possible this is very different among other groups like Catholics.

* Churches typically justify this in terms of practicality (more spaces to work with) and marketing evangelism.

I realized after asking that my default prompt makes ChatGPT really verbose so I changed the prompt to:

Identify types of human cells using the following marker genes. Identify one cell type for each row. Only provide the cell type name and no other commentary.

And it gave me:

  1. Embryonic stem cells
  2. Induced pluripotent stem cells
  3. Endoderm
  4. Granulosa cells
  5. Oocytes
  6. Pituitary gland cells
  7. Germ cells
  8. Leydig cells
  9. Neurons
  10. Meiotic cells
  11. Sertoli cells
  12. Neural progenitor cells

For 9 it's actually interesting that if I let it give commentary it says:

CASC3, PGAP1, SLC6A16, CNTNAP4, NPHP1 - This set of genes does not point to a well-defined cell type but could suggest Neuronal Cells or specific types of Neural Precursors based on the presence of neural development and function genes.

For what it's worth, Comcast is really, really good at providing reliable internet access (providing relatively good managed WiFi routers since WiFi is usually the worst part of the network, proactive detection of downtime and service degredation, improving latency even though it's not a 'headline number', maintaining enough slack that they hit the "up to" advertised speed close to 100% of the time, etc.). The only service issue they have is not caring up upload speeds, but there's a fundamental tradeoff with the legacy cable network and they're probably right that most people would rather have faster downloads than faster uploads (still makes me sad though).

I'm probably biased because I worked for the cable industry (around a decade ago), but purely looking at service quality, Comcast is actually very impressive.

So Comcast is stuck with zero credit for when it provides me with near-instant access to an almost infinite amount of great content (much of it for free[1]), but major blame for the small % of the time when it doesn't.

My disagreement is that I don't think people are generally upset with Comcast about internet service problems, they're upset about completely different parts of the business (billing, customer service).

I think this is fair, since "hating" a company typically has to do with how you feel about your interactions with them (do they treat you fairly, nicely, etc.), not how good they are at their jobs.

Taking this the other direction, some local ISP's provide service that isn't very "good" (using wireless tech, which has fundamental limitations, having fewer people on-call to fix problems, having fewer people to spread up-front costs to), but are very wholesome and nice to work with. Even if I choose not to use their service because of the limitations, I don't hate them because they're doing their best.

I think people hate Comcast because of their customer service and pricing, not the quality of their product. I know plenty of people who used to[1] use Comcast despite hating it because the service was so much better than the competitors.


  1. My hometown has really good sort-of-city-provided fiber now so no one who cares uses Comcast anymore. ↩︎

One issue is figuring out who will watch the supervillain light. If we need someone monitoring everything the AI does, that puts some serious limits on what we can do with it (we can't use the AI for anything that we want to be cheaper than a human, or anything that requires superhuman response speed).

But it also creates an incentive to bring lots of annoying stuff to vote to force your political enemies to vote for it. For example, if you put "Deport all Rationalists" up for vote as often as possible, you can prevent Rationalists from voting for anything else.

If you’ve got 100-300 kilovolts coming out of a utility and it’s got to step down all the way to six volts, that’s a lot of stepping down.

We just need Nvidia to come out with chips that run on 300 kV directly.

Otto Octavius' Experiment - The Fusion Accident Scene - Spider-Man 2 (2004)  Movie CLIP HD - YouTube

There's an idea in security where you should avoid weak security because it lets you trick yourself into thinking you're doing something. For example, if you're not going to protect passwords, in some sense it's better to leave them completely plaintext instead of hashing them with MD5. At least in the plaintext case you know you're not protecting them (and won't accidentally do something unsafe with it on the assumption that it's already protected by being hashed).

I feel like this is a case like that:

  • If you don't care if these become public, consider just making it public.
  • If you don't think they should be public, use something that guarantees that they're not (like the random ID solution)

The solution you proposed is better than nothing and might protect some email addresses in some cases, but it begs the questions: If you need to protect these sometimes, why not all the time; and if not protecting them sometimes is ok, why bother at all?

(I should say though that there are benefits to making data annoying to access, like that your scheme will protect the data from casual snoopers, and prevent it from being crawled by search engines unless someone goes to the trouble of de-anonymizing and reposting it. My point is mostly just that you should ask if you're ok with it becoming entirely public or not)

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