Philorandroid

>Stanley Zhong graduated from high school in June 2023

I think it's safe to assume that Mr. Zhong is of an Asian background. My guess is that he is, unfortunately, lacking in "interpersonal skills".

> Hopefully the world can bid goodbye to the last of the sith lords one of these days.

It'd take a lot more than Murdock fading from the scene for that to happen. Don't fool yourself into thinking that all will be right in the world because ${prolific figure} is less involved in it. The Mafia didn't cease to exist after Capone, they just learned from his mistakes and didn't make showmen of themselves.

That's a bit dramatic, isn't it? Compared to Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mengele, et al, the line of succession to history's greatest monster to Rupert Murdoch is pretty long.

Are there any figures suggesting it will actually be "cost effective"? Neither the White House release or the AP article mentioned the budget for the program, or what employing 20,000 activists would cost.

Godot has been remarkably fun to work with, and was way easier getting started in than I'd thought it'd be, coming from some topical UE4 experience. Scriptable with a flavor of Python, programmable in C#, and most recently with native C++ modules that don't require rebuilding the engine.

It's fascinating that the author implies more regulatory power over telecoms would solve this, even though they're plainly buying that same regulatory power when it's advantageous. If "the vast majority of politicians are feckless cardboard cutouts with little real interest in market or consumer health" anyways, it'd seem a superfluous effort to give an agency more power only to sell it out later, right?

0:28 of the promo video, "EVOLUTION OF HULK PREGNANT" is in the Youtube search results...

Just Mandate the Good Ideas™

The comments suggesting people would just decide to have fewer sugary drinks to save money seem to be forgetting how humans act when something they like is made less available. It will be a wake-up call to exactly no one. Cheaper brand-X sodas would fill the void left by more expensive ones, enterprising individuals might even make their own sodas or switch to lemonade, etc. The perceived scarcity might even lead more people who don't normally drink soda to start.

I'd think that incentivizing the proliferation of taste-alike low/no-sugar sodas would have a much better outcome anyways. Tax credits to businesses that adequately serve and promote low-sugar sodas could be a good start.

> Humans aren't perfect automatons that will make perfect choices if given information.

And yet, somehow, they will rationally conclude the best financial course to take is to realign to making healthier choices instead of switching to dollar-store sodas or making their own sugary drinks.

Do you mean to suggest adding another predator would address the first? That somehow, because there's a legal writ behind it, it makes it any more morally right?

Sorry for the late response.

The short answer is because I don't like meddlers, especially not ones with legal authority.

Consider that perhaps I want to build my dream home, but my neighbors use the HOA or town council to try and keep me from doing what I want with my property because they think my preferred home style is ugly. In my mind it's the same principle as me wanting to block dense housing because I think it's ugly.

I'm personally at the interstice between "the government shouldn't have the right to mandate lot sizes, it creates artificial scarcity and puts a soft floor on property prices" and "tiny, congested lot clusters are really ugly, don't offer much more value than apartment living, and make a poor replacement for the woods bulldozed to make room for them, and could stand to be dis-incentivized".

Soon, journalists the world over will be in contest with a purpose-built machine for the fakest and least-grounded (but most-believable-sounding) content.

Give me five good men and fifteen minutes, we'll compose a far more comprehensive list of cuss words. lol

Here are some smaller ones for you then: €1+ billion worth of damage to private property isn't in the norm for France's protest fixation, and regardless of the motivations of the actors, my concern is how many people here are giving it lip service like France deserved it for one officer's bad(?) shoot.

This comment echoes a lot of the sentiments I'm seeing in this thread. I have to wonder if holding the proverbial gun to the head of the world around you, ready to pull the trigger at any well-timed injustice, paying lip service to the destruction of private property in spite of the authoritarian sentiments it fosters, and generally thumbing one's nose at the idea that it's entirely possible that neither the police nor the rioters are in the right, is the intellectually-honest approach?

Fascinating. Can you cite a link from the Conservative Council of Evil Affairs website? I'm sure they've got "we're evil and hate you" in the mission statement somewhere.

Could you post some citations? ADT's crime statistics seem pretty damning with 10x the national crime rate in some areas of downtown San Francisco. Even if the statistics indicate a decreasing crime rate, they would seem defiant of the most common kind of testimonials of the quarter-million-plus people who have left the area.

My sentence structure is fine, as is my word choice.

The parent to my original comment talked about how evil it was to question the integrity of an election, and I snidely brought up how it wasn't considered a problem until Trump did it. mrguyorama's response was to suggest that Trump sympathizers filing legal cases on questionable or nonexistence evidence justified the decidedly anti-democratic response to his election. So, I facetiously asked how they think democratic measures justify the anti-democratic action they claim to abhor.

Kindly explain how, misguided as they might have been, proceeding through the legal system is somehow more pernicious to democracy than paying lip service to riots and participating in a campaign where the outcome of an election is flat-out denied and retroactively justified by "foreign interference"?

It might be "centrally planned" in the most technical sense, but it's a bit of a stretch to compare a government's leverage over a market by threat of force to a private entity planning what to do with the property it owns. How is it meaningfully distinct from an individual (or a family) doing financial planning around their assets?

> They are the primary destructive force in society

What a deranged belief to hold. Rationalizing that cars of all things are the root cause of all of society's ills is reductionist and lazy, equally so as to believe that simply removing them would cure those ills.

Conversely, cars made it possible to:

- Live outside of dense urban environments while still working in one

- Travel to visit friends and family not living down the street

- Not be dependent on shaky public transport infrastructure (US)

- Travel where public transport isn't available

Everyone owning a car might not be the most efficient or pleasant solution, but certainly there are more productive attitudes to have than "cars are bad and I hate cars because they're bad".

Sure, technology evolves, and the solution to Current Problem Is Only One Paper Away, but it's extrapolating to the problems arising from the next paper that matter more. ChatGPT citing fictitious articles as backup for fictitious conclusions as responses to prompts about real people wasn't a pervasive problem until recently, if memory serves.

Novel problems arise from novel solutions to yesterday's novel problems, and the cascade shall continue.

>Additionally chatGPT is in fact already superior to people in many instances of writing. For example, composing a rhyming poem about some obscure topic; chatgpt likely will blow most of us out of the water in terms of quality.

Sure, it can eventually settle on some nice output, but knowing it was created by a statistical model makes it about as impressive as a hyper-realistic painting of a human face displayed on a webpage.

For a while, sure, but complacency tends to set in with automated procedures that usually work. It's the one-in-ten-thousand errors that'll sneak under the nose of the tired prompt engineer who believes his model is accurate enough for that sort of thing to not happen.

It's occurred to me lately that, even though they rarely produce anything better than "adequate", LLMs being leveraged as a cheaper alternative to human output means we'll be settling for more, worse-quality content. Economics aside, I loathe to think of the day that ChatGPT is used to describe food allergens, hazard warnings, voltage ratings, or any other quantitative analysis with potentially lethal implications for being wrongly-conveyed that are eventually overlooked because an LLM gets it right most of the time.

Not on a meaningful timeline, no.

That would require an incredible slant towards exclusively 18-year-olds being killed in school shootings, and an exceptional overestimation of just how many school shooting deaths there are per capita for it to make that kind of difference.

You know, I could've sworn the post I was responding to said "of ammo", hence why I spoke about building ammo and not guns.

But the conclusion remains the same in that making a working firearm at home isn't difficult, and there exist a plethora of designs like the FGC-9 family that can be assembled from easy-to-acquire parts, no manufacturer needed.

It got a cocked eyebrow from me when I saw the range too, "children and adolescents" makes me think "up to 15-16". I wonder if there's a breakdown by age range?