Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • But now they want a court to treat that click as though an 8-year-old knowingly negotiated away her right to have these issues heard. It’s insulting.

    In the court of public opinion, sharpen your pitchforks, light your torches, and move on Roblox HQ. This is objectively a silly argument.

    Made in a court of law. Where lawyers play by different established rules. Where they are often compelled by those rules to pursue every possible avenue to get the best result for their client. Where they may be held accountable when mishandling their case. Where company execs push their own moral compass out of the way not because they believe this argument but out of a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. It’s a clusterfuck of obligations.

    My gut feeling is they probably know this argument won’t hold up in court. But it may just knock whatever punishment awaits them down a peg or two.


  • The researchers cautioned, however, that, because they did not have a control group of people given counterarguments by humans, they could not definitively say the 30% reversal rate reflected an effect unique to AI.

    This study may be considered one data point and if others add to it, okay. But until then, this is not worth getting outraged over.

    Also, if you are in a position to change this dramatic outcome by altering a train’s course or pushing a person off a bridge, you probably won’t have the time to ask an LLM to enter into a philosophical debate with you. So this measured a highly theoretical change of mind about a virtually never to be encountered philosophical dilemma. The remote likelihood of such situations landing in their lap must have been very present in the participants’ minds while answering. It’s like playing with monopoly money or shooting a bunch of NPCs. A study about a more life-like scenario (political beliefs, cultural norms, work practices, etc.) which ticks all requirements of a well peer-reviewed study would probably be more insightful.

    We are also retreading all the debates about misinformation from when the web came about and then again with the advent of social media. Which had previously been held when movable type came about in Europe. Or the advent of radio and TV. The long arm of history shows we’re getting better at dealing with these changes.











  • The problem with the question is us, the consumers. When is the last time you sat down to read the instructions in great detail? A cursory look at the recommended temperature maybe and off we go. Meanwhile a labcoat has produced the greatest formula to clean everything at room temperature. If only we used this much water and these many spin cycles. But no one read the back of the container.

    Where I am at, people tend to not do a hot cycle or if they need it they go to a launderette. The liquid works okay on clothes in a cold cycle. But bed sheets and towels start smelling if they don’t get at least a 40C/100F cycle every once in a while. And I do that one on powder because it was the only one that wasn’t designed to be for cold wash only. So to summarize this extremely boring anecdote: it depends where you are, what your machine is like, and probably on local water quality as well. Or: we’ll never find a good answer here that satisfies the demands of the scientific method.



  • There are laws and case law that make criticism of Israel harder than in other places. Post WW2 pro-Nazi and antisemetic speech was basically declared hate speech. Courts have taken a narrow view of what counts as antisemetic. There are in excess of six million reasons for that hard swing in the other direction.

    So I would say the long version is this: you can criticize Israel but you need to pay close attention to how you say it. Criticizing the existence of the Jewish state is possible as well but you need to weigh your words even more carefully.

    Moderators on an internet forum may take an even narrower approach to avoid any sort of legal trouble. And thus continues a chilling effect.

    Freedom of speech is a tricky subject. Post WW2 the US had the influence to export their constitutional values, such as a first amendment, to Japan and West Germany. In both cases they punted. It’s not without some irony when I say opinions on how to establish freedom of speech in a democratic constitution vary.


  • On the one hand, any negative Melon Usk headline fills me with joy just like all the shit flung at Meta. On the other hand, my empathy for people living on yachts who get effed by this change particularly knows bounds.

    Poland - if they didn’t just forget it - may be excluded because it borders Ukraine where they use Starlink for military reasons. Maybe they preserve bandwidth or try to deter roaming tourism of rich people thrill seekers or something like that. Monaco is missing because that’s basically France. It’s about 4 klicks across, the satellites fly at about 500 km overhead - that’s probably a rounding error. Cyprus may either be too small as well or it’s excluded because it is a divided island.


  • Technically, “the Holy Spirit” isn’t a proper noun. That’s because it contains an adjective also. Personally, I wouldn’t capitalize any of those terms. The head of the Catholic church only really when talking about it as a title in front of the assumed name, Pope Leo. Somebody’s style guide may have them capitalize all nouns with religious notoriety. That’s a style choice then rather than grammatical necessity.

    Also, grammar is the attempt at formulating rules about how people talk. Meaning the talking came first and then somebody tried to codify it. That means there is virtually no grammar rule that doesn’t come with at least one exception. Learning when to use an article or not, when it should be the indefinite or the definite one, is killing students who come from languages that don’t use articles at all. And in some cases also those who speak other article-infested languages. That’s because it doesn’t make any sense and you had to grow up being corrected by other speakers to get this mostly right. It is convention more than clean cut rules.