Re: And how long before
BMXers will make a very functional half-pipe out of some of the smaller craters one day. And so much more time in the air before you land, too
794 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2022
You can't even talk to the Rottweilers without listening to the voice on hold telling you, "If this is an emergency, dial 000 and ask for an ambulance, or proceed to your nearest emergency department."
So then you have the paradox of the underinformed and sometimes misinformed, seeking information, being told to use their own judgement about whether or not what is happening to them is an emergency.
Speaking as one who runs an ED and fields the phone calls to hospitals, I get very used to saying "I can't tell how serious things are over the phone, so if you're worried come in and we'll check it out."
If they're worried enough to call, it deserves at least that much careful consideration. It can take some time and effort to work out if it is an emergency or not, even once you get to see a doctor. Trying to explain the 4-hour waiting times is a whole other story.
The full expansion of this story is:
Observation has failed to refute the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation. If this hypothesis is true, however, the design of the simulation has thus far failed to give the game away by demonstrating a repeatable programming error that manifests as a hard contradiction, rather than a weird quirk of existence. No one has yet worked out how one might tell these two apart.
What you say is literally correct, as crime is, by definition, a breach of law.
However, if you define or suppose law as not existing, what you are left with is injustice, which can and will exist in a society however it is structured and on whatever philosophical basis it founds its law. Not everyone has the same idea of what justice is.
So we compromise, and bring into existence laws, and thus bring into existence crimes, torts, breaches of contract, all the other ideas that lawyers love. Yes, it is a compromise of universal freedom. The benefit we gain is that injustice is addressed by talking and a person in a wig and not by someone being hit over the head with a club.
As others have pointed out here, a lawless society is, literally and by definition, anarchy. Just as an observation, anarchists seem to be solitary creatures who either live sullen angry lives in the midst of people they can at best tolerate, or go off into the scrub and sometimes turn into the Unabomber.
Which raises the question: what was Replika trained to do? Because at least ChatGPT has accuracy as its goal. I suspect Replika exists to make users feel listened-to and validated in their emotions - so if their emotions are criminally homicidal, this is the sort of result we see.
Such an exercise in the distortion of meaning has become normal in anything crypto-prefixed.
For example, translate crypto to English:
while the NFT space has introduced a revolutionary new model for ownership and the monetization of digital assets, it remains a highly speculative and volatile market.
Translates to
NFTs were a pump-and-dump confidence scam from the outset.
Paved roads might be cheaper to maintain, but only if you keep doing maintenance.
A large network of country roads engineered to statewide 100km/h limits had its maintenance funding cut drastically about 25y ago. Now the potholes are so bad entire roads need to be rebuilt from scratch. The approved solution is not to rebuild the roads, but downgrade the speed limits.
Welcome to Australia, home of Highway 1, the longest road in the world.
Well he said it himself: "The single most important reason that we're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it's the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots."
Someone with his level of genius is clearly clever enough to think of firing most of the people who might have been clever and creative enough to think up a way to combat bots without setting the subscription mosquitoes on to his customers to drain them a nanolitre at a time. I mean, combatting bots and hate speech was only their job description, but $44b or however much of debt will do that to you. Well, that and a healthy sense of free speech absolutism.
Not only has it gone international, it has become standard business practice. There's probably a course unit about it in MBA curricula.
I could only cancel my subscription TV service (whose CEO just retired) by phone, and in the end only succeeded by escalating to a manager, immediately asking the manager to record the call, and saying something like "any and all authority I may have given for you or your affiliates to charge my accounts for any service is hereby revoked and any further such charges will referred to the police as fraudulent. Such authority will not be renewed without my explicit written consent." Asked if they understood then hung up, probably saving a further half hour of being questioned, begged and threatened.
I took up a 2 month broadband internet connection with a small independent ISP while working away from home on contract. Great service but needed 28 days' advance notice to disconnect. Fair enough. 28 days before moving out, go to cancel the service - nothing on the user admin page at all: no FAQ, no phone number, certainly no link. Google "how do I cancel my (ISP) subscription?": Specific instructions come up as first link showing a link from the user admin page which has been obliterated - wouldn't have been surprised to find an empty space where the link used to be. Fixed that one by calling their sign-up hotline, pretended to be interested in taking up a new subscription, then told them why I'd really called. But there was literally no part of their user interface, web or phone, that comprehended the idea that someone might want to cancel.
Reminds me of how Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe met in North Africa.
After an artillery piece which Milligan's gun crew was fired, it went rolling off down the sand dune for want of being properly emplaced.
Followed by Milligan, who, running down the hill after it, asked the first potential witnesses in Eccles voice, "Anybody seen a gun?"
Faecebook tried to make an example of Australia when it introduced laws making them pay news sites to link to content. That attempt lasted about a day and a half, because it didn't make the laws unpopular, it made Faecebook unpopular.
The likes of Zuckerberg have influence, but legislatures have power. Courage to use power in the face of influence, though...