Dracophoenix

He means Woodrow Wilson.

How are you defining "empathy"?

“Politically neutral" is a phrase used to distance oneself from the largely American habit of slotting one's values into the red vs. blue dichotomy. One can't be truly politically neutral, as you say, given that politics is a system of dealing with others and not an electric charge. However, it's a phrase that is easier to invoke just as it’s easier to describe oneself as an atheist rather than an agnostic when explaining why one would not believe in God.

Or conversely, individuals should possess the right to form a militia or employ a private force to defend oneself and one's property from the encroachment of the state and other trespassers. They should be able to exercise this right for so long as each nation retains its respective armed forces.

What you call "the endowment " doesn't exist in any monolithic sense. "The endowment" is a disparate collection of donations from alumni such as scholarships, artwork, buildings, etc., governed by their respective, specifically-worded contracts. Many of these gifts aren't easily convertible to cash. In fact, a large cash gift is rarely offered at all and rarer still would any such gift come unconditionally.

> Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?

The government's justification has historically been that the research value gained by putting the brightest minds to work at the frontier of academic science is worth the allocation of necessary monies. Whether that is (or has been) true is obviously debatable.

An endowment isn't free money and launching a telescope into space remains a costlier venture than plopping a few arrays on mountains like Mauna Kea or atop the Chilean Andes. Contrary to your imagination, radio telescopes aren't that cheap either. The Smithsonian and NASA fund most of the construction, operation, and maintenance of Harvard's telescopes rather than the university. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely an academic institution will find an economically viable route to launching space telescopes any earlier than twenty years from now.

I linked to this same article a few years ago, although the original URL is now broken.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616289

A jury is relevant to the legal adjudication of harm, not the institutionalization of a certain ideas, activity, etc. as harmful. There are many so-called harms that are arbitrarily declared by agencies as such long before a lawsuit is conceived. Just the same, there are many legitimate harms that states and societies enact as their "right" at the expense of a person's liberty (i.e. conscription, expropriation of property, etc.).

> My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it.

In the absence of a clear referent or definition, who gets to decide what constitutes a "harm"? What substance do their claims have beyond conveniently spun moral arguments? Why does betting on an event as common and unalterable as the weather require adoption by an incumbent entity and/or regulation by the state to achieve legitimacy?

What model number? How color accurate is your printer for photos?

> I also did and still suffer from massive pain caused from most in ear headphones, even the recent AirPods with adjustable silicone tips I use sparingly and never more than a hour or so.

Have you tried replacing them with foam tips?

Visa and (to an extent) Mastercard have been known to block transactions from their foreign-issued credit cards to digital Suica and PASMO cards. US issued Amex and Discover cards (at least prior to the latter's acquisition by Capital One) use JCB's merchant network in Japan, and thus receive the same treatment as any other JCB-branded card.

G&L is no more as of last year. Fender acquired the Leo Fender name and potentially a whole host of other IP from the now defunct company, which may or may not include guitar designs like the ASAT (itself based on the Telecaster) among others.

Which ones? Who were you working with? How did you get published? Did you do any Toonami games?

Yes. Amsterdam has one of the largest IXPs (AMS-IX) in Europe and is also one of the largest European markets for Internet Infrastructure services (i.e. hosting, DNS provision, domain name registration, etc.)

This isn't good reasoning. According to your analysis, any website, ISP, or hosting provider that uses a firewall or Cloudflare is by definition a publisher, since they algorithmically shape traffic to prohibit suspicious IP addresses from accessing content.

Since you're now focusing on the AT protocol, will E2EE/OTR become a priority?

That's the issue with most RSS client I've used. The feeds are portable but the data and metadata aren't. I wish there was a permanent solution to this problem.

Jstor is an information database provider that that specializes in the republication of academic journal articles. The web is the company's delivery mechanism, not the defining trait of the its existence. A public-facing website doesn't make it anymore of a tech company as such than it would the New York Times.

Jstor is a tech company?

> Despite its history, it’s still a valid example of an exception to the First Amendment under current law.

It's not. The current standard, set by Brandenburg v. Ohio, forbids speech which advocates imminent lawless action. It is a standard much broader than the Schenk case's threshold of clear and present danger.

> The problem is that most people who cite it are using it as an analogy for something else that isn’t.

Even the man who composed the the phrase did this. Schenk's "fire in a theater" aphorism was Oliver Wendell Holmes's attempt to persuasively discredit a group of Yiddish speaking anti-war pamphleteers in his non-binding legal commentary. The comparison is not a legal analysis nor is it itself a ruling on the merits of the case.

If you don't mind answering, what exactly was this particular passion of yours?

> There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.

Where does one draw the line and under what conditions? Reasonable minds can differ on the definition of foreseeable.

After all, Some of the most beneficial inventions to mankind have also aided its worst tendencies. For instance, the 20th and 21st centuries as we know them wouldn't exist without the combustion engine. Simultaneously, it's this same device that has significantly contributed to the pollution of the air.

Secondly, how does one mean to stop society or any individual from learning and building on new ideas in the Information age? Is such a thing even possible?

> Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition.

If the conclusion of a meme is ridiculous, it stands to reason that the claim it makes is similarly so. Memes are not substantial enough to be considered as evidence or proof of moral pronouncements any more than other popularly-invoked and contextless aphorisms are.

> I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.

The character attack comes from the implied framing of the invention of the so-called "torment nexus" as the direct product of a person or people exhibiting moral failure through action or inaction. What that particular moral failure is or whether it is a moral failure one at all isn't even given a cursory examination by those crying torment nexus.

Morality requires agency and conscious agreement. A machine/device doesn't choose to be made or operated nor can it act against its maker/operator any more than rocks can act against the Earth. Regardless of motive, a moral conclusion can't be reached about the object.

The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one consistently follows the argument raised in the meme to its ultimate conclusion, then nothing should ever be invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm at some undefined point in the future.

What gave you the idea to write a graphic novel in the first place? What's your workflow?

Define "drive". Correlation is not causation. It's difficult to anticipate the trigger for a particular action or choice when other circumstances or stressors may have more significant factors that contributed to the decision. After all, many have lost jobs without ending their own lives and many have killed themselves despite high-profile, gainful employment. Instead, holding MongoDB responsible risks incentivizing this company and others to turn away and preemptively furlough anyone remotely approaching the statistical profile of a suicide risk.

> When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”.

What's the solution? The alternative, where we can't criticize our governments on account of their hypocrisies and imperfections, robs citizens of their check against an institution with a monopoly on violence.

> Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever.

There's certainly a difference between holding countries responsible for events that have long since ceased and holding a government responsible for double standards practiced presently. The UK lacks credibility on Hong Kong when its own citizens are being jailed on the basis of overbroad hate speech regulations and when its government agencies attempt to claim extraterritorial jurisdiction over the operation of foreign social media companies. Westminister can't be so empty-headed as to believe that its actions will go unnoticed by other governments.

> I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.

What changed your outlook? Did you get burned by Microsoft?

> This is the exact kind of thinking that leads to this in the first place. The idea that a human relationship is, in the end, just about what YOU can get from it. That it's just simply a black box with an input and output, and if it can provide the right outputs for your needs, then it's sufficient. This materialistic thinking of other people is a fundamentally catastrophic worldview.

> A meaningful relationship necessarily requires some element of giving, not just getting. The meaning comes from the exchange between two people, the feedback loop of give and take that leads to trust.

This part seems all over the place. Firstly, why would an individual do something he/she has no expectation to benefit from or control in any way? Why would he/she cast away his/her agency for unpredictable outcomes and exposure to unnecessary and unconstrained risk?

Secondly, for exchange to occur there must a measure of inputs, outputs, and the assessment of their relative values. Any less effort or thought amounts to an unnecessary gamble. Both the giver and the intended beneficiary can only speak for their respective interests. They have no immediate knowledge of the other person's desires and few individuals ever make their expectations clear and simple to account for.

> Not everyone needs a romantic relationship, but to think a chatbot could ever fulfill even 1% of the very fundamental human need of close relationships is dangerous thinking. At best, a chatbot can be a therapist or a sex toy. A one-way provider of some service, but never a relationship. If that's what is needed, then fine, but anything else is a slippery slope to self destruction.

A relationship is an expectation. And like all expectations, it is a conception of the mind. People can be in a relationship with anything, even figments of their imaginations, so long as they believe it and no contrary evidence arises to disprove it.