Re: Ban cars?
Oh no, please don't make their problems into ours any more than they already are :/
692 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2020
Depressingly, I get the impression that people who carry a gun for self-defense in the US might legitimately need them to not die. Gun crime in the US is at epidemic proportions, I somehow doubt that instantly disarming the non-criminals will curb that. Turning firearms from a "need" to a "privilege" is going to be a long and complex process, because you do need to do something to actually bring gun crime down first.
I am very happy to be in Canada where we do not need carry rights (but I'd like to keep my range guns please -_-).
Exactly. When a lazy sci-fi writer produces a "conversation with a sentient AI", it always reads like this. The fact that it behaves PRECISELY like a stereotypical sentient AI to me is excellent evidence that it is not one. More likely, the training set included lots of existential philosophy (both the real kind, and the sorts of things that emo kids write).
It would be like meeting aliens who had never visited earth before, and they just happen to be little green men with big heads and black eyes, flying around in garbage can lids. If/when we meet real alien life, the odds of it looking like our conceptions of it are vanishingly small.
All this said, I do find it amusing to ask for "evidence of sentience". I can't even provide that evidence for myself.
This really highlights the incredible tensions we see in this space.
On the one hand, most people will agree that the powers that be (including both the government and large corporations) should not be able to interfere with people's right to express ideas in the commons.
On the other hand, most people will also agree any part of the internet which attracts large numbers of people will eventually become unusable without moderation, beyond the "common sense" removal of extreme violence and pornography.
"The commons" has become both extremely large and extremely easy to add ideas to...when our modern conception of free speech came into being, expressing an idea to a large group of people had a high barrier to entry so there was a natural filtering process for ideas to propagate. Now that is not true, so the potential damage of saying something that is incorrect has gone up significantly. And yet, I know that I for one am still loathe to infringe on free speech rights.
I am not convinced that there even is a way to reconcile these two problems, and I do not envy those whose job it is to do so.
See my comment above on your first point.
Of course destruction of media is not an issue that can be solved in the database itself (well ok, there is stuff like ECC, but that's not a cure-all). I see it more as, lets separate the concerns of database interaction fuckups and hardware fuckups. Defense in-depth and all that.
I think there is an issue with having the removal in the transaciton log, since either the data still exists in the transaction log (in which case it has not truly been deleted) or the data is truly destroyed, in which case we are right back where we started with a mutable history.
There will always be friction between the goal of "make it impossible to accidentally permanently delete things" and the legal requirement of "permanently delete certain things".
As I see it, if this technology matures it will be used to build an even more centralized internet than the one we already have. If I understand correctly, this is all physical layer stuff and not inherently secure. Maybe I have not followed the idea.
I make no bones about the fact that Chornobyl was very very bad. It is a fascinating and terrible event. But even the most aggressive casualty numbers you can possibly come up with pale in comparison to even China's own numbers related to Banqiao.
I agree that this is not as important as looking at the actual technology and why a Chornobyl-like event is virtually impossible with the types of reactors we actually use. However, if people are going to make the faulty argument that Chornobyl proves the danger of nuclear power, then I think it is valid to counter that the the worst engineering failure of all time is actually related to an alternative form of power. I don't think it proves anything beyond that, and I certainly don't think we should stop building dams.
I just don't think we should build dams like the Chinese did in the 50s, just as I don't think we should build nuclear reactors like the USSR did in the 70s. If we can agree on that, then there is very little reason to discuss either event in the context of actually coming up with a plan for building new power infrastructure.
Right, which is why we don't generally let people into Chornobyl. Russia was stupid and caused the mess in the first place, Russia was stupid and didn't properly prepare their soldiers. Note that the common factor there is Russia.
I think the 100k - 250k thousand people estimated to have died in the dam failure would have much preferred to have taken their chances in Pripyat.
That's totally missing the point. In an unclear situation, the reactor SCRAMmed. That's what it should do, that's how people stay safe. The only "disaster" is economic, just like Three-Mile-Island.
This kind of thing increases my confidence in Nuclear Power. The system saw something that made no sense, and instead of throwing its hands in the air and yelling "undefined behavior", it erred on the side of safety.
The reason they tell you not to use the same password in multiple places is that awesome website A might have great security, but crappy website B might store your password in plaintext. So if crappy website B leaks your password, all the effort on securing awesome website A has been a waste.
The premise of these centralized logins is to reduce the attack service by JUST having awesome website A manage security, so crappy website B never knows anything about credentials and therefore cannot leak them.
I'm not saying that I agree with this system, but the reasoning is more sophisticated than you are giving it credit for.
What's wrong with that?
The following will return true.
bool CheckDisney'sClaim()
{
bool Result = true;
for (auto Thing : AllFilmsAndPromotions)
{
if( ! Thing.MayNotBeAvailableInAllTerritories)
{Result = false; break;}
}
return Result;
}
EDIT: Sorry, the comments section ate my whitespace.
Would my country be better if the government could easily create and enforce such a law? It certainly wouldn't be a country I would want to live in.
There are lots of things that I would prefer that people not do, but when I put on my J.S. Mill hat I come down on not wanting laws for most of them. One person's personal freedom is another person's unacceptable behavior. Personally, I want to live in a country that errs on the side of allowing people to do things. The alternative very easily turns into tyranny.
I am opposed to tyranny, even in cases where I agree with the tyrant.
Yeah, I have more or less the same setup. The one big drawback with the mini-PCs is when new video codecs come along. I've had to swap such machines a few times for this reason, and I found an RPi4 to be really problematic (doesn't do VC-1 in hardware and software playback is not smooth, which made some of my blu-ray rips unwatchable).
But when that sort of situation arises, you can just replace the computer instead of the whole TV (which is particular important if you spent too much on a very nice TV >_>)
Here is a tremendous irony. Let's say that "useful life" means "can watch Youtube/Netflix/iPlayer/Kodi at the best possible quality".
If you plug a PC into a TV, the useful life of the TV will be longer than that of the PC.
If you have a TV in one part of a room, and a PC connected to a monitor in another part of the room, the useful life of the PC will be longer than that of the TV.
What a curious state of affairs.
Surely if we completely stopped using general purpose programming languages, there would be significantly more languages floating around...and you would have to learn a new one every time you wanted to jump domains...
And I still don't believe that this says much about the growth of C++, as I hardly consider std::filesystem to be the kitchen cabinet.
It's not like we are talking about turning it into a scripting language or something. Many of the best new features in recent C++ revisions have revolved around making templates more powerful, and I think it would be absurd to claim that C++ is not the right language for writing high-performance templated code.
Unless you are denying the very concept of a general purpose programming language.
The thing is, most of the new stuff was added because real people were using crazy workarounds to achieve what the new features add (if it could be done at all).
C++ long ago gave up the philosophical purity of being small and clean; instead it takes the pragmatic approach of identifying what users are trying to do, and providing features to enable it. No doubt it would be an easier language to use if it could be started again from scratch, but that comes with its own costs (and those are recurring costs, because I'd bet that the new language would wind up in exactly the same situation in 20 years).
Ah, but "slow and reliable" isn't sexy. Everything has to be an AI-generated 5G disruptive blockchain microservice written in Angular.
I'm sure that the truth is somewhere in the middle, but the way forward for the US DoD is probably not "move fast and break things" (unless the things they break are *insert joke that conforms to your political beliefs here*). I really do not want to trust most commercial software with my life.
I bought a hamburger so I could eat it.
I bought a car so I could go places.
I bought a stereo so I could listen to music.
I bought a print so I could look at it.
I bought a power drill so I could make things.
I bought a camera so I could take photographs.
I bought a couch so I could sit on it.
I bought a lamp so I could see things.
I bought a graphics card so I could play video games.
I bought an NFT so I could say I owned it.
Are you seriously suggesting that the last item on that list is not significantly stupider than the others?
They run some of the most widely used websites on the internet, and a lot of other stuff besides. Consider what their income would be if they were a for-profit organization. $162 million seems completely reasonable, and is easily worth it for the services they provide.
Yeah, that part of the article made me cringe. I am very happy for industrial applications to look and feel industrial, because more than anything else I want them to work. If adding a fade-in could make something break (which it can, because all features can make something break), don't put it in the thing I use to do my job please.
When you go to a store employee and ask them "do you have X" and they punch some information you completely do not understand in a green terminal from 1983, you know you are talking to the right person. Less so when they just open the store's website and search.