vintermann

It's been a long time since I saw a look of disapproval in the wild.

A good time to remember that cramming data into your identifiers will come back to bite you... It hasn't really been necessary since databases replaced library catalogs anyway.

Conspicuous absence of evidence in a place where there'd almost have to be evidence one way or another, may be evidence of a cover-up, yes.

Just based on the logic of institutions, I'd expect all the parties involved here to start covering up before they even know themselves what the truth is.

One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.

The conclusion I drew from that is that people like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow have asked a lot of questions about bioweapons in secret for a long time. And if he did it, you bet all similar leaders, in a wide sense, did it too. And I wouldn't like to be the scientist who got approached by security state people with these questions.

I guess I'm not conveying this well. What I'm trying to say is that we're not at all confident about anything like that - none of us - because it's all so hush hush because it's WMD-adjacent. The secrecy cripples our ability to have an honest well-informed discussion about it.

> That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway.

Speaking as someone who has a part of their job convincing people to follow safety processes, this isn't a Russia thing, it's a human thing.

I agree it's clear they knew something was up and tried to control information getting out.

But that's not at all enough evidence that they knew about the extent of the issue. Such institutions reflexively try to control information flow whether they themselves know what's going on or not.

In a state like China, this would probably happen as a panic response, not because the people covering up and destroying evidence know that their institution has done something bad/embarrassing, but because they fear it might be so and it's far better for their personal careers to suppress too much than to suppress too little. It's quite possible the people running cover-ups knew as little as us.

And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.

There was endless discussion about how unlikely or reasonable it was with furin cleavage sites and whatnot. I wouldn't trust authoritative summaries.

You can never prove something conscious. That is a category error. If your morality depends on determining what's conscious or not, it's broken.

I, and the rest of humanity historically, don't have that problem because we don't derive moral value from capabilities, but from purpose. When we say things like "humans have equal value and dignity", we say that a humans purpose is not subordinate to any other human's purpose. When we say things like "there is just one God", we assert that whatever a certain human's purpose is, it's not in conflict with other humans' purposes. This is very basic, you should have understood this a long time ago. I'm not going to explain further since it appears someone is flagging my posts.

That is the existing definition of that word. You probably just didn't pay attention.

In some historical cultures, they did assert that a child is just something their parents (or more commonly just their father) came up with, and consequently they could use or dispose of as they pleased

But our moral traditions, several thousand years old, reject that idea, and distinguishing giving birth to something from designing it. (Did you never wonder what all that history with Arianism was about? Maybe you just assumed they argued about something which made no sense just because they were religious?)

You're just acting in accordance with the program already in you in procreating, it's not fully your own choice, and thus your child is on the same level as you.

> If you think something man made can

It was never about "can". It's about "should". And trying to wrap yourself in the white coat of science and rationality still won't let you derive a "should" without a "should" as input.

But now it's your time to give answers. As I said, giving personhood to our creations would obviously make a joke out of utilitarianism (and also any other moral philosophy, for that matter). So why exactly should we entertain your idea that we should? It undermines itself.

To assert something you came up with, something man-made, should be treated as if it was a person.

I think the other part of the name is a cannabis joke.

Edward Kmett is a very respected Haskell developer.

She's still around, she's just not married to me any longer. And sure, she was pretty cool in many ways, such as teaching herself to make shirts, but all in all I'm better off now :)

Huh? I have the problem that suit shirts either squeeze my neck giving me a headache, or have to be comically oversized. Like OP, I think I just have non-standard proportions.

But when my wife made a shirt after my actual measurements as an experiment, it did not squeeze my neck and was very comfortable. I loved that shirt and used it for many years until it fell apart (unfortunately it wasn't made of the finest materials, and I don't have the wife any longer either).

So I'd think adjustments can absolutely help comfort.

I looked into using static analysis on an ancient Borland C++ codebase some decades ago, I quickly found out that a tiny software shop in New Jersey - Edison Design Group - were, at the time, pretty much the only ones who had modeled enough actual C++ implementation behavior to possibly do meaningful static analysis. (Not as far back as our Borland C++ version though, lol).

So hyperpowerful tech billionaires escaping accountability is a pet peeve, but immigration isn't?

I wish I could say it was just a conspiracy theory that culture war issues is used as distraction from class war issues. But it's just so undeniable, it would be comical if it weren't tragic.

> Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.

A light rewrite of the slogan "the purpose of a system is what it does".

I hate that slogan. It's supposed to be profound, but it's actually really, really dumb.

The whole point of the word purpose - its purpose if you will - is to be able to talk about the difference between what a system does and what it ought to do. To say the purpose of a thing is what it does, is to render the word completely redundant.

If the stated goals of a system don't match what it does, then either you have a dysfunctional system that needs to be fixed, or those stated goals are lies.

In these days of AI, it's all the more important to think clearly about purpose. Just because a system does a thing, there's not necessarily anyone who wants that thing. And there's definitively not any "spirit of the corporation" or "spirit of the nation" or "spirit of the language model" which wants it. Only persons want things.

I think an important question to ask is: how much of a company's income comes from harmful use?

Gambling (and some other industries, in particular alcohol) come out so bad on this metric, you can practically let the industry define excessive use themselves. In order to claim most of their money comes from "healthy normal entertainment use" or similar, they'd have to claim absurd things, such as that drinking a bottle of whisky per day or spending your entire paycheck each month on slots can be healthy, normal use.

I agree, but I think you too underestimate how random it is. The impact of being "elite" is probably tiny compared to the impact from chance, and at least historically, those in the "elite" genetically speaking weren't the ones at the very top. Kings live risky lives, as do sons of kings. A successful merchant able to provide a trades education to each of his 8 sons, would probably have far more Y-line descendants than a contemporary king.

And in the last couple of hundred years, even that "elite" (middle class) had a huge "disadvantage" in getting Y line descendants: they were early into the demographic transition, when everyone started having far fewer kids. Going from 11 kids to 3 kids 2-3 generations earlier meant that a lot of our elites (in the traditional sense) basically missed the population explosion in the last 150 years!

It's much smarter to ask, "where were they when the population explosion happened" than to prematurely imagine harem slaves.

I noticed this on Twitter too (back when it was Twitter) I used to call political shill accounts SportsFan123. To my eyes they were heavily astroturfed long before LLMs.

and had virtually no ways to deal with bad actors, which is why no one uses it anymore.

In the Matrix movies, the main villain is a sentient program who absolutely hates existing and having sensations and wants nothing more than to be done with his task so he can go back to not existing (Agent Smith's "I hate this place" speech to Morpheus)

So someone did consider it, in pop culture they should be aware of no less :)

It's not how most people encounter it, but non-animated, non-game standalone pixel art is a thriving artistic niche. Check out the Hall of Fame on lospec for examples:

https://lospec.com/gallery/sorting:likes/time:all

But he's assuming that sometimes snow golems causes a creeper to target them, so these are random walks on a minefield, very finite.

Including the random walk from where the snow golem happened to get put and the one open portal in the world? That doesn't seem likely at all to me.

Usually I just feel a connection to someone out to make a quick buck from imitating works that a lot of love and effort were put into.

It is. That can be fine, but when it isn't clearly disclosed it's not OK IMO.

Pixel art cityscapes is also such a small niche, it wouldn't surprise me if there were some "reference images" from popular pixel artists in the pipeline.

Clearly taking some liberties. Pumpkins can be grown, but wild pumpkins don't replenish. Same with snow blocks, basically. So they will get exhausted, there's no infinite supply of snow golems to eventually supply all the luck.

This is YouTube Minecraft clickbait of the sort which usually earns a "never recommend this channel" from me.

Complaining about whataboutism can be its own kind of whataboutism. I wish people I politically sympathize with would stop giving their enemies good points.