Mnemnosyne

The weird thing about this to me is how someone who has watched all this crime stuff, which generally (at least the English ones I've seen) portrays the police as being competent and successful at catching criminals, doesn't come up with a far more detailed plan to not get caught.

The interesting thing is she could genuinely have done a murder to see what it's like, just as she wanted, and probably never gotten caught. If you murder someone with no motive, no connection to you, chosen at random, in a place not close to your home or place of work or any other frequently visited locations....the police have little to go on. As a fan of these shows, she would surely be aware of this. But instead she chose to do things that would basically guarantee she's caught if the police are even minimally competent.

While language does evolve over time, we shouldn't encourage unnecessary and somewhat negative evolutions of it, and especially not encourage it to change over less time.

When two previously distinct words come to have the same meaning, this can be a problem. First, older written things become less comprehensible. Few of us today could read and understand old english because so many words have changed. The evolution of language has taken a long time to get to that point, at least. But if we encourage the acceleration of this change, something which appears to be happening even without encouragement, how long will it be?

Today, we can still pretty clearly understand things written 200 years ago; some bits are confusing but for the most part it is still clear. If language change accelerates enough, in the future, people may struggle to understand something written only a hundred years ago, or even less.

The second problem is that if the word for a thing goes away, it becomes more difficult to express that concept. Consider the word 'literally' whose meaning has become extremely muddled. In order to express the original concept, we now require additional emphasis. There are other, more difficult to think of terms like that - a concept for which a particular word would have been perfect had the word's meaning not significantly changed.

So when a word's usage is corrected, do not be so quick to defend the misuse of the word through 'language evolves!' If people accept that 'oops, I used that word wrong' and then see if there is already a better word for what they were trying to express to correct themselves with, that is probably better - in most cases.

Even more notably, new words should be used when possible, if an older word doesn't quite fit a newly emerging thing, or even a concept that has existed for some time but has not had a word to describe it precisely. One of my favorite examples of this is the word 'cromulent' which expresses a concept that did not have a specific word for it in common use at the time, even though the concept of 'understandable and linguistically correct' certainly already existed. Also consider the now common word 'emoji' which was coined specifically to represent this concept. This is an excellent evolution of language because it took nothing away. It arose in response to something which did not exist, and described that thing with a word created specifically for it.

That said, fighting against the evolution of language that has already happened and is far too entrenched to ever change is nonsensical. My father, for instance, insists 'cool' should be for temperature description only, even though that word possessed its non-temperature meaning before he was even born. Similarly, sometimes the change is resisted for bad reasons; like the word 'gay'. In these cases, it is best not to try to fight the change, but instead embrace and encourage it.

So ultimately, when a word is used wrong, consider whether the word evolving to the way it is being used is a positive change. If it does not make things better, it's probably best not to encourage it.

This shouldn't be a problem based on how they think abortions work...the woman didn't go out FOR an abortion, she was out shopping and decided to get one, like picking up a snack on your way out of the market!

Seriously it's deranged. If they behaved generally like they care about the 'children' and the women, I could accept they're at least acting in good faith according to their dumbass beliefs, but they don't seem to care except for outlawing and restricting women's activities, so it's clear that those who say the point is just to subjugate women are right.

Yeah, if I remember correctly. He sold the rights straight up to the developers of the game, no royalties or percentage or anything because of his anti-game bias, then when the game was successful and that decision bit him in the ass, he tried to change the deal and get more money out of them. As I understand it he lost and still receives no revenue from the games.

Even then they're still benefitting him tremendously because while he was popular in Poland, it's the games that have really made his work popular overall, and people are buying his books and all because of it.

Some of them, sure, but there are a lot of stories of how many lies recruiters will tell you to get you to sign on, so a pretty significant number are genuinely bad people.

So one thing I don't fully understand is this: the secret service is required by law to protect the former president, but...is there anything that actually requires the state of New York to accommodate the secret service in doing so?

In theory, couldn't the state of New York just actually throw Trump in prison, no special privileges, and also no special accommodations for the secret service?

Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?

By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.

The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren't pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.

The big question is how many times to press it. Once at least is a given. It does specify the death as gruesome, so I don't really want the death, but I'd also like enough money to not have to worry again until a non gruesome death.

Like, if it was painless death, I'd probably say something like 20 or 30 times, but with a gruesome one...maybe 5 max, or perhaps even less. Still, one or two pushes is a given.

Only reason he's leaving is he's not going to get reelected. He did shit that pissed off the trumpies and there's too many of them in his state for him to win the primary; he's probably already got a really credible (for certain definitions of credible) primary opponent who he knows he can't beat.

Also he might have something resembling principles, but those principles are themselves still monstrous and harmful.

This is absolutely untrue. Trump doesn't deserve his trial delayed, but it is absolutely the case that sometimes people who are actually innocent need more time for their defense to be prepared, and this idea shouldn't be perpetuated in general as it can bias potential jurors.

If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That's it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it's just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.

I love a quote I read once in a thing about alignment. "If you fix twenty neighbor's roofs, you're Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat the neighbor's daughter, you're Jimmy the Cannibal, and no amount of additional carpentry assistance will change that."

I've actually tried to do that with pictures/art, but none of the tools I have to do so make it easy. The Windows photo viewer from Windows XP, which I can't seem to get anymore, was actually pretty okay at it.

But the truth is that even then it required more effort than I was willing to put in, and I was never able to anticipate every tag I would eventually want. If I didn't feel like tagging something the moment I saved it, it generally never got tagged.

At this point an AI to do it would be amazing. I have thousands and thousands of pieces of potential character art, but when I want something with specific features it's not easy to find.

The app she used to find the victim likely had enough of a digital trail to link back to her, so body disposal or no, she would likely have been investigated and caught sooner or later.

Contingency plans. Yeah. Sure. I don't think there are any that most of us can make. There aren't any countries I could move to that would be any better I don't think. I'm too old, I don't have degrees, my only job qualifications aren't particularly in demand because the training for them is fast, and the only family connection to citizenship elsewhere I had is insufficient because it's too many generations removed from me.

I suspect the cast majority of people who would be even worse off than me under another Trump/Republican administration are in just as bad if not worse a position.

The "pedophile" thing has always been a front for conservatives to wedge in, from what I've seen. They saw a real problem and then, as they always do, fearmongered and inflated it way out of proportion to reality, then started to expand the definition.

I'm old enough to remember when pedophile actually meant people trying to engage in sex with children. As in, actual children. The definition began expanding to older and older people, and expanding into fiction, fictional characters, and more.

They also started getting weird about any men being near children. I am also old enough to remember when fathers, uncles, and generally men, could be in public with kids without a woman around and without being looked at with suspicion. These days we hear countless stories of men stalked, harassed, and threatened when they're out with kids they have every right to be with.

And that's just the stuff that affects everyone, not just minorities and marginalized people. How the left ever got on board with this pedophile panic I don't understand, considering conservatives have been equating LGBT with molestation and pedophilia as long as I can recall. Anyone who didn't see this coming from the beginning is a blind fool.

I think it was the Catholic Church thing. A real case of pedophilia committed by figures generally considered conservative and right wing, which the left rightfully jumped on attacking...but then kept going when conservatives egged them on further instead of stopping. People got tricked into going nuts on it cause the right was all 'well if that's bad then you must condemn this...and this...and this...and this...' with each step being something less and less real, less egregious, less of a true problem. But they're good at stoking hate, and once the hate was kindled in people it took less and less to spread it just slightly further each time, until now we have people ostensibly on the left calling for censorship of completely fictional works and punishment of people who produce or consume them, despite no actual harm to any actual people being involved.

And that's exactly the level of unthinking hate they want, for people to not stop and consider whether any actual harm is being caused, just condemn and punish and don't argue or dispute the severity of what you're calling for. Just hate, just view them as monsters, deserving of death. Even as the definition keeps expanding.

After all, what group is othered and made the enemy doesn't matter that much to them, only that some group is hated to the point of an unexamined desire for violence and death. They can work with that, after all.

No. They're not. If they were, they'd be stopping this themselves. This guy shot her. What about the other officers that were there? At least one other is mentioned in the article. Why didn't they immediately draw on him and stop him from attacking this woman?

Every time we hear about one of these bad cops, there's other cops just standing around doing nothing at best, and helping at worst.

No 'good people' are cops. If they were good people when they went in, they either get fired, get mysteriously dead on the job, or stop being good. There are no other options.

Because so-called second amendment advocates are really just gun nuts, and so over the years they have worked hard to maintain the right to keep and bear guns, rather than arms.

Thus knives, swords, halberds, maces, and all other 'arms' have had restrictions go unchallenged, or at least, not challenged by an extensive and well funded network of advocacy.

Prosecutorial discretion is a big problem really. It's what allows laws to be applied unequally, why black people are prosecuted way more than white people, and, as you mention, provides justification to jail anyone at any time because you ARE violating some law every day, almost certainly.

If prosecutorial discretion did not exist, if agents of the law were required to prosecute all crimes to the fullest extent of the law, it would require the entire legal system to be restructured in a more precise way, and would have far less room for racial, sexual, and class discrimination as well as far less capacity to be weaponized against enemies of those in power.

The administration will not endorse the widespread use of march-in rights, and is not expected to take action against any individual medicines, said the people familiar with the matter, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal decision making.

Important bit from that, lest anyone think they're actually going to do something.

I would be delighted if they did, but I would also be very surprised if they actually assert these rights on medicines developed with public funds, which is what they should do - just all of the medicines developed with public funds, patents seized, end of story.

It's worse in that there is now no common way to say what it used to mean, without adding several more words, where previously one would have communicated the meaning clearly.

Anytime a language change increases the likelihood of misunderstanding it definitely has negative effects. It may also have positive effects, but it shouldn't be simply accepted without regard to that.

Now, disagreement on whether a particular change's negative outweighs its positive is going to happen, obviously, but it's important to acknowledge the bad parts exist.

It's also important not to accept a mistake and insist that it's fine because language changes, out of pride and desire to not be mistaken - a trend I definitely see a lot. It's often not 'I am using this word in a different way and have considered it's implications', it's 'I don't want to be wrong so I will insist that I didn't make a mistake, language changes!'

Despite Musk, Teslas did have some positive effect as they helped push electric car adoption. The big automakers were not interested in taking risks, and nobody was eager to build out large charger networks.

I certainly don't credit Musk himself for it, but no one should feel ashamed of having bought one of those cars back then. Today there are other good options for electric vehicles from companies run by slightly less bad people, but let's not kid ourselves. Everything we buy comes from some company that is enriching monsters...it's just that some of them are more monstrous than others.

You know, eventually, after we've seen enough of this shit, I feel like there's a point we have to ask...will no one rid us of these turbulent justices?

If you are not going to read something, perhaps you should avoid making ignorant comments, considering that for the most part, those topics are already addressed in my posts.

Get every flagship CPU and GPU from 2000 to today that I can get my hands on. Also as much open source code as I can get hold of. And especially AI stuff - there's several fully open source models, so bring those, and as much technical writings on them as possible.

Speaking of which, download every science paper published since 2000 that I can get hold of, in every possible field.

Get as much info on the 2000 election as possible, to hand to Al Gore, see if he can win that election with a solid unassailable margin.

Research stocks, lottery, and everything else I can to get fast money within the shortest possible period of time after I get there, so I can get super rich before the butterfly effect makes predictions impossible, I need billions in seed money and I need it fast.

Then use that money to start a private research group, and hand them all the scientific papers I brought. Get those experts to work studying all this knowledge and figure out what can be turned into practical technology. Turn some of this into profit-making devices to fund continued development, but release as much as possible for free.

Essentially, deluge the world in as much new technology as possible, mostly free and open source, holding back only as much as necessary in order to fund continued research.

And oh jeez the pharmaceutical industry. Release for free every drug made since 2000, so the pharmaceutical industry can't get their patents in them.

Big list of stuff there, but if I pulled off even half of it, the world would probably be a much better place in 25 years than in my original timeline.

Some of these actually do have an effect, but it's difficult to impossible for a person to know whether this particular one is a placebo button or not.

This is especially the case with elevator close door buttons. Those buttons are always hooked up, because they are needed during emergency operation with the fireman's key. They are sometimes programmed to cycle the doors marginally faster under normal circumstances, but more often aren't.

Also, some of the traffic crossing buttons don't make the walk cycle come sooner, but they occasionally are needed to insert a walk cycle at all, because some intersections don't trigger a walk cycle unless the button has been pressed.

Basically, every promotion of every officer in the military apparently needs to be confirmed by the Senate.

Normally these are confirmed via unanimous consent - the entire Senate agrees and they're confirmed with no further procedure.

But any senator can insist that the full normal procedure be followed, which means committee hearings, discussion time, and an actual vote at the end of it. He would not be able to stop them from being confirmed on those votes. But the normal procedure requires a lot of time during which the Senate would be able to do nothing else because the procedural rules require all this discussion and voting time.

Really, the problem isn't that he had a lot of power; it's the absurd situation where every single officer in the military needs to be confirmed by the Senate. I'm not sure that made sense in George Washington's day, much less today with the size of the military.

This long explanation supporting capitalism and 'the market' fails to take something crucial into account that all these market promoters forget:

Labor cannot have an undistorted market so long as the option to not sell your labor isn't a valid one.

For any market to be relatively undistorted, a seller must be free to choose not to sell at all if none of the offers are equal or greater than her assessment of the value of her product.

However, as long as labor is needed in order to procure food, shelter, and adequate living conditions, this cannot be the case - people are coerced into selling their labor at values lower than their assessment of its value because to not do so means being denied adequate living conditions.

If people were free to choose not to sell their labor without this coercion, then those seeking to purchase people's labor would find they likely cannot find anywhere near as many people willing to sell at the price they are offering.

Basically, you are making excuses for the fact that due to this market distortion coercing people to sell their labor, the divide between productivity and wages has grown. It is not necessary to lock wages to productivity - if people have the option, and they see massive profits being pocketed off their work with increasingly minimal compensation, they would choose not to sell...except there comes the coercion to ensure they don't do that.

I wonder if the same excuses would be made if we turned it around and told companies they must sell their products, no matter how little the customers are offering....

The way I see it, if training on copyrighted content is forbidden, then that should apply universally.

Since all people mix together ideas they've learned from their own input to create new things, just like AI does, then all people-produced content should also be inherently uncopyrightable, unless produced by a person who has never been exposed to copyrighted content.

Oh, also all copyrighted content should lose its copyright. The only copyrighted content should be the original cave paintings by the first cavemen to develop art, since all art since then uses its influence.

And if this sounds ridiculous, then it's no less so than arguments that AI shouldn't be allowed to learn.

I do not believe in 'undecided' voters. I don't think they exist.

So this is not going to be decided by then. This is going to be decided very simply: will enough people in the right states bother to vote?

Blizzard, back in the day, was willing to simply can games, even highly anticipated ones, when they didn't meet their standards, even after a couple years of work. StarCraft: Nova, Lord of the Clans...

And Square-Enix managed to take an MMORPG that was already released, tear it down to bare bones and completely rebuild it to make it good, with FFXIV: A Realm Reborn.

So it is possible to completely redo something if it doesn't work out...

This is actually what I look forward to most in gaming in the next decade or two. The implementation of AI that can be assigned goals and motivations instead of scripted to every detail. Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn't have to think of beforehand. If they can integrate LLM type AI into games successfully, it'll be a total game changer in terms of being able to accommodate player choice and freedom.

Denuvo isn't easily bypassed, unfortunately. I think there's still only like two people cracking Denuvo and one of them is batshit insane.

Yep, good explanation; but to add to this...

The important factor here as far as what an individual uses is the tracked metrics. When a browser looks at a website, it identifies itself and its engine. Therefore actually using an engine other than Chromium is important because it goes into use stats across all websites the individual visits.

And like with all collective endeavors, while an individual contribution is insignificant, the whole is made up of those individual contributions. It also only takes a few percentage points of users for a business to in theory want to avoid excluding those users and thus keep them developing for multiple browsers.

I've put in 2000+ hours on Civilization IV, Stellaris, and Skyrim, and 1000+ on several other titles. So, since I could quite happily never purchase another game again, and simply play those games until I die, let's use them as our baseline for what the cost should be, shall we? Assuming they cost $120 each (maybe a little low on Stellaris when you count all the DLC, and definitely high on Civ IV) I've played each of them for about 2,000 hours...that means I should expect to pay $0.06 per hour. Heck, let's be generous! Let's count Stellaris, with ALL of its DLC, at the price it currently is, without being on sale (except for one that's at 10% off. I've bought most of the DLC on various sales of at least 30% off, but let's try pricing all games as though they cost this much. That's about $335. Which still comes out to $0.16 an hour. Not bad, I'll take it!

Granted, since most games don't hold me for 2,000 hours, most games aren't going to get that much out of me. I sometimes buy new games at a $60 to $70 price point. So, the average game would have to hold me for 375 hours in order to make the same amount I pay for it now. Which means in my entire Steam library, there are a mere 12 games that would reach that threshold of getting equal or greater than the $60 I'm willing to occasionally pay these days.

I'm all for it! Most of my games would drop considerably in price, even at $0.16 an hour!

Ah, I recalled he didn't win, I suppose I should've assumed it was settled, that's usually how that goes down.

Personally I think he should've lost and had to pay CDPR's legal costs, the whole thing was absurd. He admits he made a stupid mistake but wants money out of them anyways despite having been an arrogant shithead to start with.

Most likely, in my opinion:

Hold you for 24 hours to see if anyone reports a crime and describes you as the perpetrator.

When no one does, find a crime which seems plausible for you, and where they've gotten a description that could possibly fit you.

Interrogate you about it, giving you your lawyer of course. Assuming you do not have a solid alibi for that particular crime, there's a real chance you'll be charged and eventually convicted.

If you do have a solid alibi, they might keep looking for other crimes to charge you with, or they might give up.

If they give up, they're likely to charge you with something related to wasting their time, for which you will at minimum have to pay a fine.

Many criticize the frequent content updates, often cosmetic, as overwhelming. However, it’s optional, and no other industry receives flak for releasing more. I’ve never seen anyone complain about too many Lays or coke flavors.

Lots of people complain when some product they like is no longer available in favor of a 'new and improved' product. Remember 'New Coke'? Patches and updates to games are the same thing, especially ones that significantly change the gameplay.

I, for example, liked Overwatch during certain time periods. That game is no longer available. There's certainly people who play League of Legends or DOTA that feel the same way, though I wouldn't know - the game they liked was at a certain point in its development, and since then changes have made it no longer the game they like. Same applies to a lot of MMOs - I liked Ultima Online, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and others, but the games I like no longer exist even though the games technically exist.

The problem isn't easily solved either - no updates may make some people happy but others will not be happy. The resources probably don't exist to continue splitting the game and maintaining a stable version of an online game at each iteration, and even if they did, the player base would become too diffuse to be able to actually keep the game enjoyable with sufficient players. But it might be a fair criticism to say that updates come too fast for some of these games, and we need more time between them, or various other things. And there's nothing wrong with people just griping, even if it's something that can't reasonably be stopped.

The lead writer for Mass Effect 3... I suppose it's possible he learned from it, but I question whether the person who wrote (or at least had to sign off on and approve) the ending of ME3, which killed the franchise and disappointed most players should be allowed to ever do anything related to writing again...

If a game today came with a nice solid box, a cloth map, a 250 page manual that actually explains almost everything about the mechanics of the game, and WAS FUCKING FINISHED WHEN I BUY IT, getting maybe one patch and otherwise never changing, then I might be willing to pay more.