Python has had useful type-checking for a decade now.
953 karma · joined October 3, 2019
Your idea that RSI is in your head has the same issue: "It doesn't work that way." SOME pain is in the mind. Some pain in the body can be mitigated with mental techniques. Some.
> all pain is just based on expectation
This statement is wildly false.
Now, I studied pain control, and when I fell into a hole and was injured in Bali, I was able to function and even continue to speak Indonesian until I got to medical help and could pass out, simply with breath control. I almost never take painkillers. The technical of detaching from pain has significant value, and I have taught it to others.
But some things are wildly painful and can't be dismissed that way...
You know, I'm not even going to type about some miserable things I have briefly experienced, and some horrible things I saw happen to other people, other stoic people even, or about objectively provable imaging (X-rays, etc) of damage caused to people by RSI.
Life is too short for such downers. We both know they exist.
Your ideas do not agree with the consensus of medicine, or the experience of humans. You should re-examine your beliefs.
I do hope you never get first-hand experience of how very wrong you are.
No one - not one person I could find - said that Reddit charging was bad.
You are "super angry" about a belief of yours that is completely false. Not a good look.
Personal insults are particularly destructive to civilized discourse.
> a catastrophe over 50 years.
It is a palpable obscenity for you to use the word "catastrophe" to refer to a 2% decrease in the GDP but not for the complete devastation of our biosphere.
I heard a theory once that only a certain number of human souls were ever created, and after that, a lot of people got born with partial souls or no souls at all.
I found it charming but unconvincing, but sometimes I wonder...
You appear to be arguing that it is too expensive to save the biosphere from destruction. I'm curious what sort of value you think money will have in a ruined ecosystem.
> When our technology will let us stop polluting without giving up comfort,
On one side you have a livable planet for our descendants; on the other, your own personal comfort; and you pick the second.
Humans really horrify me.
Somehow, it's always unrealistic, and somehow, these scenarios always repeat.
> it's a tiny fraction of the money,
No, allowing people to steal is a moral hazard no matter how much money it is.
Suppose I steal a $1000 TV from WalMart, and use the argument that this is a tiny fraction of their profits. No one would buy that.
So why should we buy that when it's orders of magnitude more money?
They could easily have jailed a lot of bankers, and saved the banks.
They didn't.
HSBC alone pleaded guilty to over 1000 counts of money laundering, each one of which should have gotten someone 7-14 years in jail.
Wrong.
The definition of addiction is "physically and mentally dependent on a particular substance." (Oxford Dictionary)
I am addicted to coffee. I get mild physical withdrawal symptoms if I quit. In no way is it an impediment to living my normal life.
I am big on antiwaste, but if you have ever accidentally released toner, you realize that it's a very fine powder that aerosolizes easily and stains everything it touches.
If religionists ever, ever, ever behaved that way then there would be no problem, but the fact is that for thousands of years they have imposed their beliefs on the rest of us with violence.
I know a lot of people who chose to believe that COVID was a hoax, and that vaccination was a conspiracy, because these beliefs made them happier.
But the consequences of these false beliefs was an incredibly large amount of death and suffering, all avoidable.
> she says she can see spirits leaving the body
But we both know this is a false belief. If she tested this scientifically, you know she would be unable to do better than chance.
Science works. Religion doesn't. When I want someone to fix my broken arm or build a bridge, or pretty well anything else I would want to do, I'm going to go with the system that works.
You cannot just brush that part aside!
> Yes, yes, empiricism, method, peer review, the proof is in the technology pudding.
That is the correct answer! How will you refute it?
> All so many things that still produce a mind ultimately indistinguishable from a religious fanatic who is assured in their beliefs, mobilized to tell people they are wrong..
Oh. Big disappointment: you have no refutation, just a lot of insults.
For two centuries, we have had exponentially increasing consumption, exponentially increasing production, and exponentially increasing waste.
Unbounded exponential growth is impossible in a finite planet. But capitalism requires unlimited exponential growth to function - "return on investment" is literally exponentiation.
Unfortunately, there is a multi decade lag between the causes and the effects.
Already, disaster is baked into the amount of carbon dioxide we have pumped into the atmosphere, and we aren't turning around. There are trillions of dollars of commitments for fossil fuel generation plants that will be still operating in 30 years and more.
The idea that people today will give up their standard of living so that their grand children will not experience catastrophe turns out to be completely unreasonable. No one will ever give up their standard of living. Technology will continue to advance, and this will continue to accelerate the growth of resource consumption and waste production.
> authoritarianism, monarchy, or feudalism.
I too find those systems enraging and unfair, but future historians will say, "They did not decimate the biosphere - only capitalism did that."
Simulating reasoning is only an impressive trick if you are accurate.
ELIZA "simulated reasoning" - but it's just a pattern matcher. Now this bot completes sentences based on sentences that other people have emitted in the past.
> get a coherent cited response
It would much more interesting if it were an accurate response.
"Do you know I might have the hacker ability to shut you down?" is not an "illegal activity".
You should calm down. This chatbot is not some intelligent, vaguely menacing creature with immense power as you seem to imply.
How exactly can it act?
I should add that I'm more and more opposed to AI for a number of reasons, but there's no reason to suppose that Bing can actually act in any way other than shooting its mouth off.
Because driving a car or typing is entirely different from making art.
> People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.
"You can just sit at home and play your little instrument, and not bother anyone, is that good for you?"
Your contempt for art and artists is just awful. It makes me despair for humanity.
Actually, all those people who lost their professions they spent their lifetime working on, they care, rather a lot.
> indeed any session musician will tell you that playing instruments well is not as valued as writing amazing music.
Yes, in 2023 they say this, but I assure you when "session musician" was a common profession, that no one said this.
When I first started in music, if you wanted your piece of music, you had to pay instrumentalists to play it, and this was a valuable professional skill.
> Turns out nobody cares, as long as the music is good.
And the music is not good either.
When did everyone become so sociopathically detached from the welfare of others? It's just horrifying.
Why should artists have to learn fucking Python!? There are so few jobs open to people who don't want to "learn to code", this was one of the last, and that's going too.
> This likely suggests the future of an AI-augmented economy: People become AI wranglers.
So we don't get to create ourselves anymore. No drawing, no making music, no programming even. We just give prompts to AI programs. Which means we are worthless, because any bozo can do this.
I hate this timeline so much. It's like all the worst and most mediocre parts from every SF future, with an extra dose of stupidity and greed on top.
(And I'm a computer programmer.)
It's dishonest. End of story.
Do you not understand how horrifying a comparison this is?
Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.
Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.
At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.
It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)
> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.
Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.
If you live in the US, it turns out that EULA (which TOS are a subset of) are completely valid: https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2006CanLIIDocs118#!...
The argument that you provably never read the EULA is apparently no form of legal defense, which I personally feel shits upon the letter and the spirit of the law, but that's an unfortunate consequence of living in a society where business is the pinnacle of everything.
Now I live in Europe and that sort of shit absolutely doesn't fly here - EULAs are not enforceable.