If your choices are vote for A and democracy ends or vote for B, it isn't really a choice. If it isn't a choice, it's not a democracy. It's political theater. Not unlike mock elections in dictatorships.
You're fucked either way, both choices are pathways to the same destination. Just at different speeds/ different routes.
The age thing was already a concern. Now it's a panic. Even top Dems are avoiding question of whether to remove Biden.
The debate was a catastrophe. It really couldn't have gone much worse.
Well yeah it's a catastrophe. You can't avoid it. Realistically, Trump was already edging out Biden in the polls, including the 6 swing states.
They need a new candidate immediately.. but nobody else who has the party blessing (newman, kamala, Michelle, etc) polls as good against Trump as Biden.
So what do they do? Damned if you do, damned if you dont. They are probably goinf to lose the election.
The Pentagon was actively spreading anti-vaxx misinformation in Asia. Claiming that the Chinese vaccine had pork (so Muslims wouldn't use it), that vaccines weren't effective, etc.
It was an attempt to destabilize Asia. There's a Reuters article released a couple weeks ago on it. Happened summer 2020 -> summer 2021. So roughly half under Trump, half under Biden.
Although it wasn't exactly a "Trump policy" or a "Biden policy"
Obviously they ultimately hold responsibility for what the Pentagon does because they are commander in chief, but the military did act very sketchy in this case. They essentially used loopholes by considering the "Asian cyperspace" an "active warzone" which allowed them to do certain things without authorization from the state department.
10% of people who voted for Biden last time are switching to Trump according to a survey from a few months ago.
Well let's say there's an algorithm to find length of longest palindrome with a set of letters. I look at 20 different implementations. Some people use hashmaps, some don't. Some do it recursively, some don't. Etc
I consider all of them and create my own. I decide to implement myself both recursive and hash map but also add certain novel elements.
Am I copying code? Am I breaking copyright? Can I claim I wrote it? Or do I have to give credit to all 20 people?
As for forbidding patents on software, I agree entirely. Would be a net positive for the world. You should be able to inspect all software that runs on your computer. Of course that's a bit idealistic and pipe-dreamy.
I have no problem copying code either. The question is at what point does it go from
To
How abstracted does it have to be before it's OK? If you write a merge sort, it might be similar to the one you learned when you were studying data structures.
Should you make sure you attribute your data structure textbook every time you write a merge sort?
Are you understanding the point I'm trying to get at?
First, this conversation has little to do with fair use. Fair use is when there is an acceptable reason to break copyright. For example when you are making a parody or critique or for education purposes.
What we are talking about is the act of reading and/or learning and then using that information in order to synthesize new material. This is essentially the entire point of education. When someone goes to art school, they study many different artists and their techniques. They learn from these techniques as they merge them together in different ways to create novel art.
Everybody recognizes this is perfectly OK and to assume otherwise is absurd. So what we are talking about is not fair use, but extracting data from copyrighted material and using it to create novel material.
The distinction here is you claim when this process is automated, it should become illegal. Why?
My opinion is if it's legal for a human to do, it should be legal for a human to automate.
What's the limit? This needs to be absolutely explicit and easy to understand because this is what LLMs are doing. They take hundreds of thousands of similar algorithms and they create an amalgamation of it.
When is it copying and when it is "inspiration"? What's the line between learning and copying?
You know how China has a strong centralized government and cooperates with their big companies? Government says jump, Huawei says how high?
We have a similar system. A strong centralized government that cooperates with the big companies. The primarily difference is that on the spectrum of
Government power <-----------> corporate power
The US leans more to the right.
Really what's interesting is both the US and China are slowly converging onto a point in the middle. Zizek said something like this some years back.. authoritarian capitalism is unfortunately the most effective form of capitalism.
It depends how you define effective. Of course the consumer would prefer a free market with competition and low barriers to entry. This is the most egalitarian system, where money (and therefore power) gets distributed almost democratically.
It's a liberal democratic version of capitalism. It's the version of capitalism that works. Not perfectly, but it rises people out of poverty and is more or less egalitarian, relative to the alternatives.
Authoritarian capitalism is where you still have the large private sector except you don't have the political freedoms. Think China post 1970s, modern Russia, Singapore.
The government essentially rewards companies that support the power structure. They get privileges and a say at the table. It creates a sort of incestuous relationship between the government and large corporate entities.
The US is moving towards this system as wealth inequality and corporate influence rises (more strongly under Biden than Trump, might I add. Probably to do with pandemic). More $$$ = more power. More power, more influence within the government. Creates a cycle where it's a "buy your policy" type of democracy.
Slowly our political freedoms are being eroded. Mass surveillance, the CIA and Pentagon are now allowed to spread propaganda on US soil (they were not allowed to before early 2000s), erosion of democratic institutions through populism. For example "fake elections" and events like Jan 6th. We are starting to censor and ban outside views ("misinformation" bans from Covid, the banning of TikTok, Google & Facebook & reddit & Twitter regularly manipulate the information people receive and cooperate with the government)
Only some crazy number like 20% of people approve of Congress in this country. The democracy is falling apart and some new system is forming.
As China is opening up their private market to become more like us in terms of finance, big capital, corporate rights, etc. We are closing down our political system to become more like them in terms of the loss of political freedoms, censorship, etc.
America is a country with over 300 million people and it's bigger than Western Europe. There's going to be a lot of variance. Someone growing up wealthy in San Fransisco is going to live in a different America than someone growing up with a single waitress mother in Louisiana.
The average homicide rate in the US is 5 per 100,000. The town of Boca Raton, FL has a homicide rate of 1 (less than half of the European average of 2.5) and Baltimore / St Louis / New Orleans can sometimes reach 30+ on bad years (worse than some Brazilian and Mexican cities).
When you ask about the shitty laws, we have to remember that the US is almost like 50 different countries in one. Every single state you will have a different experience as well. In Illinois school districts kids in elementary school may take home school laptops free of charge. In Panhandle Florida the kids aren't getting that.
In Florida you can go to a one of the many kava bars or smoke shops and purchase a kilogram of kratom. If you drive through Louisiana with that kratom you can get charged with a felony comparable to being caught with heroin.
Do you get what I'm saying? There are many different Americas - even in the same geographical area. In SE Florida there are a wild mix of different ethnicities and cultures. There are Haitians, Jews, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, Vietnamese, Jamaicans..
You can live in the same city but have a totally different experience. The Brazilians may hang out with mainly other Brazilians and go to the Brazilian restaraunts / clubs / grocery stores and not ever go to the Jewish deli that all the Jews love as a staple of the town. It's like you walk around the same area and depending on the cultural lens you put on, you experience a different reality.
HAVING SAID ALL THAT
I think America is a good country to live in. Why? Because it's better than the vast majority of the world. You earn more money. You are safer. You have more opportunities and there's better infrastructure, healthcare, etc than in vast majority of the world.
Yes, there are serious problems. Wealth inequality is splitting the country in two. Healthcare is expensive. There's an opioid epidemic. We have high rates of gun violence. Etc etc
But having come from a relatively well-off third world country, I've seen the difference in QOL first hand and it's massive. America is a good place to live.
It's sort of like how YouTube ran at a loss for a long time. The idea is to get ingrained in the market and make up the money later.
Right now Meta has the best VR / AR that is easily accessible. If some new idea or technology catapults VR into a more popular position, then Meta is in a prime position to take advantage.
Will that happen? I don't know, but Meta seems to think so.
I think it's a short-sighted move by Universal. Granted, maybe they know something we don't (Tiktok getting banned soon), but the benefit in TikTok for artists isn't necessarily the revenue but the promotion of their songs. They are short clips, usually no more than 15~20 seconds long. Lots of people use the songs in their videos, lots more people listen to a clip and want to listen to the full thing -> they go to youtube or apple music or whatever where Universal presumably would make a much larger share of the revenue.
And who doesn't do it?
OSS operating systems. The more proprietary software you run, the less and less you actually own your computer and the more it becomes a tool to advance the interests of megacorps.
Americans love dogs. Even the brainwashed MAGA loonies. I can't believe she is a successful politician and thought this would be an OK thing to include in a book.
Usually psychos who make it into power understand the public sentiment enough to hide certain things like this.
Maybe it was a calculated risk- an attempt at courting controversy like Trump does and just dramatically backfired.
This is why I don't trust any government trying to justify any warlike behavior. It's all a scam. There is no justification good enough for civilians and young men to suffer and die.
The politicians play chess and we die
I cut off a close friend of mine when I decided to get clean from heroin. I used to use drugs with him and he was my weed dealer. He never sold me heroin, but his friends did.
I feel bad because he messaged me 5 or 6 years later saying he got clean too and said he was sorry for anything he did. He honestly didn't do anything wrong, I just felt like I had to prioritize my sobriety.
I still haven't contacted him. He was my closest friend for years. I wonder how he's doing.
Sort of hard to say. I grew up an illegal immigrant in a big city. When I was 6 or so my parents would bring me with them when they went out to clean offices at night.
I pulled a fire alarm at like 1am without knowing what it was and my parents hid me in the trunk of the car. Told me to be quiet. They didn't speak English and were afraid the cops could take me away.
I got hit with the belt a few times. When I was around 12 I tried to fight my dad during a belting and got my ass beat.
Also when I was around 12 I was in a car accident on the highway in an SUV that flipped 4 times. Everyone went to the hospital except for me, I was perfectly fine.
I was in Vegas with my brother for his 21st once and he had spent all his money. We were in the airport on the way back and there are slot machines there. He asked me to borrow some money to play some slots- he said if he'd win he would share with me.
On the last $2 bet he hit a jackpot and we each got $600
One time I was playing pool at the bar in my early 20s and hopped a ball to make the game winning shot on the 8 ball - won $50. It was beautiful. I rode that high for a week.
Speaking of high, I also overdosed on heroin (fentanyl, really) and was revived with Narcan in an ambulance once. That was a very confusing experience. Coming to slowly with many lights and people in uniforms around you.
I've been robbed before, with 2 guys grabbing me by each arm while a 3rd goes through my pockets. While they talked shit I just stayed quiet.
I've gotten in bar fights and have been kicked out of bars. I stood up for a friend at a house party at around 18 and got my ass beat because of it. He was too scared to do anything. Around that same time period I had a short couple months long fling with a woman in her 40s. I felt like a badass at 18 but nowadays I look back and it was weird.
I've done intramuscular ketamine injections with exactly the right dosage to be under anesthetic - aka khole. I've done a lot of drugs - nothing in my life has ever come close. I've also done two cycles of steroids. I've never had so much sex as during those cycles. During this time period I caught chlamydia & gono.
Also I made like $5,000 on Dogecoin and like $3,000 on Bepro. (Easily lost more than that overall with coins)
Those are some arguably crazy things that have happened to me. I'm not sure if my life is tame compared to the average. I guess it all depends on perspective. I know people who have seen much more craziness out of life.
The higher up you go the less work you do and the more stress you take on. You're essentially trading your peace of mind for more money.
When you work a simple manual labor job you clock in and clock out and then go home and live your life. Work stays at the office.
When you're an executive or a business owner you're working 100% of the time. Something happens, you need to respond. Sometimes you need to make hard decisions where you're fucked either way but you need to minimize damage.
You need to find solutions to problems and that keeps you up at night. Don't have enough money for payroll next week? How you gonna do it? Not pay vendors this week? Take out another line of credit at ridiculous rates? Skip a payment on your rent? Equipment financing?
You have to do something- you stop paying your employees and the company falls apart very quickly. Could start a chain reaction of good people leaving, making the situation worse. The buck pretty much stops with you, you can't pass off the problem to someone else.
It's not easy to be in charge. Lot of blame rests on your shoulders if things go wrong.
Of course that doesn't mean they deserve 10,000x the salary of a regular job. I think CEO pay should be capped to some multiple of regular employee pay. Whatever that scalar value should be 2, 5, or 10 I think is debatable. But it should be capped.
There are lots of ways to hide money and protect your assets, and many of them perfectly legal.
Lot of it stems from laws made to protect regular people in debt (bankruptcy laws, getting rid of debtors prison, etc) but people with money use them too
Imo it's a worthwhile price. Otherwise credit cards would just take money straight from your wages if they could.
It's not incel language. It's just language.
There are females. There are males. It's only the chronically online who don't have regular conversations with normal people that somehow find this offensive.
I have quite a few. I don't believe in copyright laws or IP in general. I think it holds back innovation and exists solely to benefit megacorps like Disney or pharmaceutical companies.
For example - you develop a new drug that really helps some people. You charge $50 a pill even though it costs you $5 to produce. Without the government protecting IP, another company will come around and produce it and sell it for $6 a pill, providing cheaper access to healthcare.
People will say "what would give someone the incentive to make new things?" Without actually thinking it through. For a great example of how lack of IP is a good thing, look at how Shenzhen went from a fishing village to a Chinese San Francisco in a few short decades.. one company will take the product of another and iterate on top of it.
Another unpopular opinion is I'm pretty absolutist with free speech. I think certain things like calls to violence or intentional defamation of character should be restricted. But pretty much everything else should be fair game.
I believe in open borders and think the US should return to the late 1800s style of immigration. We're gonna need the population to compete with China in the coming century.
I also think that the primary investment into climate change at this point should be preparing for the inevitable changes instead of trying to prevent the inevitable.
This is strictly a civil lawsuit against Pornhub (Aylo) AFAIK
I guess stuff could turn up in this trial that leads to criminal charges, but from what I understand nobody at Aylo was involved with the GDP activities. They were simply a popular channel on the site.
The people behind GDP did get charged and convicted with a long list of criminal charges including rape, sexual assault, fraud, sex trafficking, etc. Some got charged with like 20 years. Pratt, one of the founders went on the run and was on the FBI wanted fugitive list. He was arrested by Interpol in Madrid eventually.
Pornhub was/is a video hosting platform and the lawsuit is because they didn't react quickly enough to remove the videos. Legally speaking, they aren't responsible for the content assuming they make a good faith effort to remove it should it be found out it was illegal.
The law exists in this manner because otherwise social media sites wouldn't exist. At any point any user can post something illegal and then the website would be liable for criminal charges.
They had 1 moderator responsible for checking 700,000 videos. The plaintiffs are claiming that this means they weren't making a good faith effort to remove these videos.
IANAL but I think they have a legal argument although we'll have to see what happens. It'll be interesting to see how the ruling goes. Other social media websites are definitely watching with interest.
There are right wing populists in virtually every democracy these days. It's not an issue unique to the US. I think it's a byproduct of our times. Economic uncertainty + geopolitical tensions and war = hard shift to the right.
It really depends how you say it. You can say things in such a way where you're covered under free speech. For example
Telling a mob to "go over there and attack all the dirty [racial group] to cleanse our city" is 100% incitement and you will go to jail, regardless of who you are
But going onto your podcast and saying "man, I really think the best thing for our society would be to get rid of all the dirty [racial group] so we can be cleansed" is protected under free speech
It really depends on what the man who's the topic of the OP said, to determine whether he said something illegal or not.
Keep in mind they tried to fight fascism in Germany too. They sent Hitler to jail. Eventually he got broken out and he became dictator shortly after. I think ultimately speech and hatred is not the problem - it's the symptom. As long as we have people suffering under an economic system that doesn't provide for all their basic needs, we leave the door open for people like Trump or Prager to sneak in and offer a solution.
Can censor, arrest, and deplatform all you want, won't make a difference.
You're looking for blogs. Get an RSS reader and subscribe to blogs. Also, of course like others are saying, books.
I recommend buying the $100 Kindle with e-ink (or any other e-ink reader) and downloading all your books off of libgen.rs
It's a one time investment of $100 but you get free books forever.
"o que é um peido pra quem já está cagado?"
What's a fart to someone who already shit himself?
If you're already 30 minutes late, don't speed recklessly to save 3 minutes.
It depends how you use it, I think, like any tool. I might ask ChatGPT to help me write an algorithm to do a certain thing in pseudocode so I can understand it. Ask it a few questions about optimization just so I have a sense for how it works then I implement it myself.
It can also help you think about ideas. I will copy paste a function or file and then ask questions like "what are some considerations do you think I should have?" "is there anything I could be missing?" "what could make this code better?" "how would you optimize this?" "how would you make it simpler?"
let me find some simple example
function findAbsoluteMax(arr) {
return arr.reduce((val, next) => {
if (Math.abs(next) > Math.abs(val)) {
return next;
} else {
return val;
}
});
}
Let's ask GPT4 "how could we make this code better?"
It offers two suggestions
there should be some simple error handling. for example if the arr is length 0 then it should throw an error or return a null. this makes sense and is a good thing to add - perhaps this would have saved me a lot of headache in some scenario where I'm getting a weird bug
add a ternary operator to make the arr.reduce call shorter
return arr.reduce((val, next) => Math.abs(next) > Math.abs(val) ? next : val );
I think this does actually make it more readable and condenses it - a pretty good thing
Now, this is a simple function but you can actually copy in a whole file and ask it to analyze things you might be missing or considerations you could make. It's like talking to the yellow duck except the yellow duck talks back
There's a lot of power in this technology and it doesn't simply revolve around copy pasting code. Perhaps my example wasn't the greatest but someone else can share how they use it
Brave is just a reskinned Chrome anyway. Even Chromium has built in telemetry.
Firefox is the only independent browser. Even Edge is Chrome these days.
We need to support Firefox. Unfortunately it's dying more and more every year
$10k is not very much money to live on where rent alone is $2000~2500. I think if I had $100k I would be very picky. Or better yet, I would try to start my own business.
Same reason people don't like Florida. Lots of targeted negative media coverage. Conservatives think California is a shithole where homeless people are everywhere and people don't get arrested for robbing a store at gunpoint. Non-conservatives think Florida is full of hard-core Trumpers who want to ban all gay people from existing and is like a redneck 1984.
Reality is more nuanced. Both states are very large populations with a diverse makeup. But nuance is hard to convey in headlines. I personally live in Florida and love it, even though I hate DeSantis with a passion. The people here make up for the shitty politics. And the pendulum will inevitably swing back to the other side.
something that is objectively unnecessary but gives comfort or at least the illusion of comfort
i think of it like the laws of diminishing returns
think of a shitbox $3,000 used car. assuming the engine is more or less running, you get like 80% of the benefits of a car
it gets you from point A -> B - the primary purpose of a car
then you spend another $10,000 for a $13,000 5~6 year old Toyota or something. now you have A/C, that gives you an extra few % benefits. You get a carplay so you have a nice little screen for a GPS, another few %. you get a key that unlocks your car, etc.
so you went from 80% to lets say 90%. but that base 80%, getting you from point A -> B hasn't changed.
that extra $10,000 bought you 10% extra
then let's say you spend another $100,000 for a $113,000 car
you get all the benefits of the previous cars, but you maybe can speed up a little faster. you have heated seats. you have a sport mode or something.
that extra $100,000 bought you another like 7% so now you're at 97%
Luxury is that last 20%. The closer you wanna get to 100%, the more expensive each % costs. This is a status symbol
The move effectively reinstates a net neutrality order the commission first issued in 2015 during the Obama administration. In 2017, under then-President Donald Trump, the FCC repealed those rules.
Ajit Pai, the head chair of the FCC that railroaded the repeal of Net Neutrality in 2017 was originally appointed to the board by Obama and then promoted to head chair by Trump.
He used to be a lawyer for AT&T.
I'm happy it was repealed. Ironically the head chair right now is a woman who was also originally appointed by Obama. Goes to show how long President appointments can influence our country.
To be fair to reddit, it really depends on the sub. If you go on /r/fightporn or /r/crazyfuckingvideos you're going to get a certain demographic that tends to be reactionary.
Then if you go on /r/politics or /r/socialism or /r/conservative you're gonna get clickbaity echo chambers
But there are subs with great discussion on niche topics. /r/zizek or /r/credibledefense or /r/askhistorians all have very little outrage and instead good discussions and analysis.
The problem is not unique to reddit. It's a side effect of a large enough community. The focus gets broad and the issue is that posts like Twitter screenshots or memes are easier to digest. Because they are easier to digest, more people click on them and upvote. Therefore these posts will almost always reach the top before articles or other long for articles.
This over time gives incentive for posts that can a) draw the most attention with a headline and b) is fast and easy to digest
Outrage porn is exactly that. You see an image "DeSantis passed a bill to out toxic chemicals in roads!"
People don't bother to do research on what the law says m and they immediately go to the comments and make jokes or berate the GOP/DeSantis
Nuanced discussion gets pushed to the bottom and once again people will downvote whatever they feel is against the narrative constructed by the OP.
Tldr: no reddit isn't getting worse in this regard. It's a function of large online communities. This website will likely see the same effect should certain communities get large enough.
From what I understand he didn't deactivate it.. it was already deactivated and he refused to turn it on.
He had disabled starlink systems over Russian territories - in order to help Ukraine. This included Crimea. Ukraine last year wanted to do a drone-strike on Crimea, so they asked Musk to turn them on. He refused, claiming he was scared of war escalation and that he didn't want to be involved in offensive war operations.
Of course variance in terms of culture, demographics, and industry in even small countries can be massive. My home city in Southern Brazil of almost 1 milliom population has less than 1% black population. Last time I visited for 2 weeks I didn't see a single black person. This surprises some people because of the perception of Brazil and the fact they imported more slaves than any other country in the America's.
So yes, I'm not claiming US is uniquely diverse. It's just unusually large so it has large amounts of diversity due to geographic distance and total population + historic & current immigration.
However what I was trying to say by 50 different countries is that the laws can vary wildly from state to state. It is something that isn't common in other countries. Of course there are other counties with strong federated systems where the provincial-level governments have strong autonomy (Germany and Switzerland come to mind) I think these types of countries are uncommon.
For example in Brazil no state regulates specific substances. That's a power for the federal government. So if you buy a substance that's legal in one state, you can safely bring it anywhere in Brazil. However in US this is not the case. I have the example of kratom, but Marijuana is another one.
This is what I was trying to say by 50 different countries. They aren't actually countries but in some ways they have just as much if not more autonomy than countries, besides of course foreign policy decisions. But look at California for example. It's economy is bigger than most countries in the world.
I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments
after the whole scandal in the summer, i deleted all my comments on my 15 year old account. i realized that i was creating content (aka providing free work to reddit) and they couldn't care less about the older users. from now on all my comments get overwritten after a few weeks
I would get accused on being a bot when talking about specific topics. For example Ukraine war or some Chinese topic. I wonder if it's bots calling other people bots. Muddy the waters.
Astroturfing is rampant and is only going to get worse from here on out. Don't trust anything you read
He spent an entire week focusing on just this debate at Camp David.
Why would he be tired? What other engagements did he have?