I think this type of anthropocentrism extends to chess too actually. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’ve heard that chess AIs are finding success doing unintuitive things like pushing a and h file pawns in openings. If, 10 years ago, some chess grandmaster was doing the same thing and finding success, I imagine they would have been seen as creative, maybe even groundbreaking.

I think the average person under-rates the sophistication of AI. Maybe as a response to the AI hype. Maybe it’s because we’re scared of AI, and it’s comforting to believe that it’s operations are trivial. I see irrationality and anger cropping up in discussions of AI that I think stem from a fundamental fear of its transformative power.

Turns out, extremely yonic

While sensible, I would argue that it is ill-advised (depending on context). One would instead be better suited to protest for this right, or to build grassroots support with the hope of democratically achieving it.

Sure, but it takes energy to protest & there are only so many hours in a day. If you’re fighting for something righteous, alright, maybe it’s worth it. But all that work for something that sits on the shelf at cabelas that anybody can buy? Nah.

the rule of law must be respected unless one is absolutely certain that there is no other choice

I disagree with this. There are laws that are unfair, discriminatory, puritanical, fruits of political gamesmanship, legislative overreach, arbitrary coincidences of time & place, restrictive on activities that harm no one, etc. I don’t think people oppressed by those laws should have to bear the burden of crusading against them. I don’t think disobedience needs to have strings attached.

If the safety we pay for, and the justice we expect isn’t provided sufficiently by the state, I think it’s sensible to ignore prohibitions of this nature. I don’t personally view them as a misfortune - freedom is a practice.

I see your point. On the other hand, chaos is a powerful terror tactic. If you’re a dissident, not knowing what angle you could be engaged from is stifling.

Also, people need to eat and drink daily. Poisoning is a horrible threat with multiple daily reminders.

To all the people in this thread saying this was probably an accident:

Imagine you’re an operator inside a totalitarian regime, and you want someone assassinated. Maybe this person isn’t themself a critical target, your objective is to instill fear in a particular department to increase compliance on a morally abhorrent skunkworks project. You already know everything about this person, of course including details of their personal life and hobbies. Hey they’re a mushroom hunter. Mycotoxins are readily available and can be lethal in small, undetectable doses. Not difficult to figure out what happens from there. Everyone who knows Vitaly knows, hey he wouldn’t pick and eat a poisonous mushroom. The message is sent to the people who you want to hear it.

Thanks for the links, I’ll check them out. Persistence of data seems like an interesting issue.

Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn’t already in place

I don’t know about that. Say you take a few years to write a handful of poems, and it turns out people in your neighborhood really like them. You compile the poems into a book, and sell it for $5, and it sells well. Seeing this, your neighbor buys one, copies it, and starts selling it one neighborhood over for $2, and representing themself as the author. I would think most people in that situation would want to say, ‘hey, that’s not fair’. I don’t think that’s sick or rooted in greed, copyright can be a check on greed.

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

Yep, and add to that, 500 hours of video is uploaded to youtube every minute & they serve over 2.5 billion monthly users. The scale really is unfathomable.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.

Where can I read more about this? It sounds interesting.

Absolutely. There’s nothing special about YouTube’s frontend - it can be replicated by someone with no coding experience, in an afternoon, for free, via a Softaculous module. On the inside, it’s the Library of Alexandria. And unfortunately, it’s owned by a company that understands that reality only as a means to a nefarious end, which is to develop a detailed psychological profile on its users that can be sold to advertisers.

My hope is that the cost of server storage and delivery will become inexpensive enough that YouTube can be forked and maintained by a nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, who sees user generated content as a means to the enrichment of human experience. I’m not optimistic though, the history of the Library of Alexandria is instructive.

“Those people are snowflakes”

• Person that twitter is currently making every effort to court and cater to

Following the theory that the leadership at twitter actually hate the users and are decimating the platform on purpose for the lols, maybe the outcome you suggest is the plan.

Part of me believes this theory, because it’s hard to imagine how someone even with the explicit stated purpose of destroying twitter could have topped the recent developments. It’s almost as if what they’re trying to do is embarrass and degrade the users.

That oft repeated claim of parallelism between the US Democrats and the CPC might have been more true in the past. I think there are significant differences nowadays as Poilievre plays with populist rhetoric and policy ideas. Considering the voting base the CPC is attempting to court, I’m not sure those two political parties are really in the same boat.

I’m not a fan of either of those individuals. I know Stone has claimed to have played a part (he claims a lot of things and frankly I don’t trust a word that comes out of his mouth), but are you saying Trump was tied to the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000? That’s news to me, and I would be interested to read more about that if you could point me in the right direction.

I don’t know anything about anything, but part of me suspects that lots of good funding is still out there, it’s just being used more quietly and more scrupulously, & not being thrown at the first microdosing tech wanker with a great elevator pitch on how they’re going to make “the Tesla of dental floss”.

They exist. Inform yourself on the Internet Research Agency, one of Russia’s state sponsored troll farms. A handful of their activities are well documented in factual records. ‘Dems’ weren’t crying about it, every rational person who doesn’t want foreign interference and disinformation flooding our spaces is concerned about it. This should not be a partisan issue whatsoever.

I think when companies that originally offered something unique and desirable get large enough, they necessarily lose touch with what made them indispensable. Dollar signs lead to a notion of growth that summons a many-tentacled cocaine-caked Moloch of feature creep, tech bandwagon hopping, information siloing, data harvesting, advertiser worshiping, and corporate evil that is, at best, indifferent to user experience, but more typically actively antagonistic to it.

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

True. And unfortunately certain privacy measures can make it easier to digitally fingerprint you as a user. Also my mind is still blown since I learned about canvas fingerprinting. EFF.org describes it as follows:

Canvas fingerprinting is invisible to the user. A tracker can create a “canvas” in your browser, and generate a complicated collage of shapes, colors, and text using JavaScript. Then, with the resulting collage, the tracker extracts data about exactly how each pixel on the canvas is rendered. Many variables will affect the final result. These include your operating system, graphics card, firmware version, graphics driver version, and installed fonts.

These settings are different from one computer to the next. But they tend to be consistent enough on a single machine to clearly identify a user.

Sounds like you’re on the right path, and I know you didn’t ask, but just wanted to chime in. I love cooking, and have both stainless and cast iron skillets. The circlejerk for cast iron is strong, but I have to say, it’s genuinely the best available non-stick pan once it’s seasoned properly. I can make a perfect omelette, sear scallops, steaks, sautee vegetables, & use it as a pan for oven roasting chickens and roasts. I use it for bread baking as well. They’re cheap (compared to clad cookware) and I’m not sure I could damage my pan even if I wanted to. They’re extremely sturdy, and hold heat very well. I clean mine with cold water and a stiff bristle brush, dry, lightly oil (when it looks like it needs it) & it’s ready to go.

Down side to cast iron pans is that they need some care in the initial seasoning stages, and it stinks up the house when you season them (do it outside on the bbq if you have one!). It’s a bit messy to keep them oiled. They’re heavy and not ergonomic. Can’t use them to simmer acidic sauces because that actually will soften and strip the seasoning, so I use my stainless for that. Get one, season it correctly, and you’ll never look back.