int is_even(int n)
{
    int result = -1;
    char number[8]; //should be enough
    sprintf(number, "%d", n);

    // check the number
    // TODO: handle negative numbers
    for (char *p=number; *p; p++)
    {
        if (*p=='0' || *p=='2' || *p=='4' || *p=='6' || *p=='8')
            result = 1;
        else if (*p=='1' || *p=='3' || *p=='5' || *p=='7' || *p=='9')
            result = 0;
        else {
           fprintf(stderr, "Your number is wrong!\n");
           exit(1); 
        }
    }
    return result;
}

It is often heard from non-native speakers and will probably be understood, but in the absence of other context it will be perceived as slightly odd. Perhaps it’s on the way to being widely recognized as fully “correct” but I don’t think it’s there yet.

She would have expected people to name figures such as Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who became governor of Roman Britain

Look, I know everyone in Britain is required to know the names and dates of all the monarchs going back to the 9th century, but expecting everyone to be able to come up with that name when put on the spot is going a little too far.

I thought the plan was immediate violent revenge? Gaza has been under siege since 2007 and if it ever seemed likely that it was all part of a grand strategy that could some day end in peace, that time is long past.

Indeed, I am convinced of it. Thanks to everyone who took the trouble to help fill in my ignorance there. It was a pleasure being your crazy person on the internet for the day.

I dunno, maybe they changed the terminology since I took it. Seems to me “free market” was not previously imbued with all that meaning you guys are reading into it. I’m not convinced it isn’t just an Americanism. To me a “free market” is simply one that’s substantially free of distortion, resembling to a notable extent a perfect market. But I’ll certainly avoid the phrase in future.

If it involves “an oligopoly, a cartel, or a monopoly” then it is not a “free market” according to what they taught me in econ 101, everything convincing that I’ve heard since, and what Adam Smith explicitly wrote down when he first described the idea. Wikipedia cites Karl Popper in saying that in classical economics a free market is one that’s “free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities,” and that it’s a market in which economic rents are minimised. A monopoly is by definition antithetical to a free market. Any neoliberal suggestions that attacking the whole concept of public regulation of markets will always make them more free are simply lies, and should not be accepted.

That there is at present little or nothing preventing any imperfectly but approximately free markets that might otherwise exist devolving into less free ones dominated by monopolies, cartels, corrupt and captured regulators, out-of-control rent seeking, frauds that rely on information asymmetry, and other such perversions is (obviously, I thought) the reason why I’ve been consistently saying that “free” markets are not something we see much of in reality. Perhaps that’s not exactly congruent with Marxism, but I don’t think it’s inconsistent with it either.

The free market is an abstract concept, one which rarely exists in anything like its ideal form due to its instability under current conditions of capitalist development. The original definition given by classical economics is still the prevalent one. Despite what slogans from some proponents of capitalism would have you believe, not only are free markets not identical with it, but capitalism tends to take markets further and further from anything resembling their theoretically ideal state of freedom.

A “free market” as the term is usually understood is a well-defined thing, which of course has many problems and failure modes, but is not well-represented by a market dominated by a large cartel routinely controlling prices. It is also not the same thing as capitalism.

Really? I thought the most infamous example of triangular trade was more of a mercantilism thing.

Actual free markets are almost as rare as actually existing socialism.

That classic free market system where a cartel has regular meetings to set production levels to maximise their profits.

That there’s a difference between transistor density and total compute capacity does seem crucial. We can and often do have more microprocessors in the world, and more automobiles, more coal mines, more injection-molded plastic, more batteries, more bombs, more of everything without any improvement in technology whatsoever. Just more of the same, mass-produced by the ever-expanding machine. If there does exist some curve that measures overall tech progress in a useful way, the curve which measures its applications and their effects is necessarily offset from it in time and need not follow its shape. It seems natural to expect our thrust into ecological overshoot to continue for some time after the big impulse that pushed us into it has begun to fade. Much like the “macabre whale analogy” from Scott Alexander there, in which we’re enjoying the results of a whalefall.

As long as resources aren’t scarce enough to lock us in a war of all against all, we can do silly non-optimal things – like art and music and philosophy and love – and not be outcompeted by merciless killing machines most of the time.

On a more optimistic note I think history demonstrates that art, music, and love are not so easily done away with although I’m not so sure about philosophy. Scarcity is going to make a comeback, and the results will be as unpredictable as anything people imagine AGI might do if it does actually arrive some day. I suspect we should ideally aim to make some changes to what is normally thought of as “human nature” in order to avoid the worst outcomes, but that they need not be larger ones than those that have happened in the past. But who the hell knows really.

Yeah it’s the “tech curve” being exponential that I don’t see happening. The Haber-Bosch process (after the end of the 19th century, but only by a few years) was revolutionary, and a fine example of the kind of rapid increase in our ability to exploit the hell out of everything that hasn’t been happening so much lately. The increase in technologically-enabled power may have started looking exponential at a certain point, but I don’t believe it has continued like that all the way to the present. The gains today are more incremental, less momentous. The rise and fall of Moore’s law shows a similar pattern in microcosm: Great new invention, rapid improvement, exponential growth that people assume will last forever, then its limits are approached and further progress in that direction is slow and complicated. When I try to imagine how the total curve of technological power has gone I can’t avoid the impression that its rate of growth topped out somewhere mid 20th century at the latest.

Sure it’d be disastrous if we somehow kept up for any great length of time the exponential growth in energy use, production, and population even without fossil fuels, but the idea that this might actually happen starting from this level seems more like a techno-optimist fantasy than any kind of realistic scenario worth considering. Like some other ideas of the Consilience Project it seems to me as if it might be more relevant to some future post-collapse civilisation that needs to avoid making the same mistakes that will bring down ours.

I just don’t think that the “exponential tech curve” is all that exponential or all that relevant a factor compared to for example the pretty low-tech way in which we’re burning ungodly quantities of fossil fuels and using the energy thus produced to eat the whole planet. It’s not only AI that I think is over-hyped, it’s many of the things I saw when scanning through the video transcript. Finely-tuned supply chains, genetically modified crops, ridiculous financial system fuckery, and other such things are increasingly required to keep it all barely chugging along, but it seems to me that they and “Tech” in general are not the cause of or the solution to our problems unless you go back to technology and modes of social organization invented in the 19th century and before. Crooked Timber: “As Cosma said, the true Singularity began two centuries ago at the commencement of the Long Industrial Revolution.”

But then again a substantial part of my reaction was prompted by things I read on searxing the word “metacrisis”, so perhaps not entirely fair to this video.

I think this speaker and the people pushing the term “metacrisis” in general misunderstand humanity’s predicament in a way that leads them to rate too highly the potential of those AI systems that have been made so far (that we know of.) It’s interesting technology, but its potential threats are even more over-hyped lately than its potential benefits. We have better things to do than worry too much about either.

“Metacrisis” huh. As a name for the thing I like “the Long Emergency” better. AI in its currently-existing forms is important only in that it’s yet another refinement that can have some use in enhancing the efficiency of the systems we’ve been building up for the past few hundreds of years, but we are at the point where the diminishing returns from such novelties will no longer be effective in staving off disaster for any appreciable length of time. Large language models are already passé.

Do you know how much good it does for climate change to build a lot of solar power and electric vehicles “while greenhouse gas emissions keep rising”? None. It does not help. The amount of climate change it prevents is zero. The atmosphere does not care that you’ve built a record amount of renewable energy capacity.

I mean obviously everyone here does know that, but it’s amazing how many journalists and politicians seem completely and stubbornly unaware of it.

What Zelenskyy didn’t know is that “would you like to buy some wheat” is a dire insult in Polish.

About 3,000 adolescents in Texas, ages 13 to 17, were questioned between 2015 and 2019. The researchers compared the results with responses from more than 32,000 teens in the broader United States.

To me this appears garbled in the usual science journalism way, although it doesn’t change the overall gist of it which seems legit. They analyzed each population separately and found significant results in both populations. Reported vaping was associated with an additional chance of asthma of something approximately like 0.1% to 3% at the 95% confidence interval among US adolescents, the exact range depending on numbers not included in the excerpt provided on Science Direct.

Edit: I initially thought the 15-19 age range, being the only one I saw mentioned in the excerpt, was the one studied. That does not appear to be the case. That complicates things in a way that makes it unclear precisely where the bounds of that confidence interval are when described in a way that quantifies the overall public health risk. Read the full study if you need more precise information.