Please tell me you are younger than the TSA

Back when this kicked off, Putin even cited a bunch of laws the UN drafted to justify the Iraq invasion.

And every single liberal should be protesting this in all the ways they’ve been saying Russian civilians ought to.

Can’t train one though. That’s what the datacenters are for. That infrastructure could put to more useful research, and the current owners are digging themselves a pretty deep hole…

Maybe after the bubble pops, we can have the public ownership all them datacenters. Let grad students run… I don’t know, statistical analysis of particle physics? Folding proteins?

That’s a joke, of course. We’ll foot the bill to fill the hole, but all the infrastructure will stay private.

Problems AI companies would like you to imagine (what if their product is too good?!) VS problems AI companies would very much prefer you not think about (their product isn’t actually AI)

Nah, science has always worked like that. This is what peer review is for.

What’s better than finding evidence that proves your own preconceived notions? Finding evidence that contradicts someone else’s. Schadenfreude is the great engine of scientific progress.

is this the biologist’s equivalent of “assume a flat, frictionless plane”

Assume A Perfectly Homogeneous Liquid Mouse

Except everyone hates on the politician instead.

Sorry, do you think a business failing is only possible with government coercion?

And what government coercion gave Google near monopolies on web search and video? Microsoft Windows accounts for 70% of desktop computers, did a government give them that? Whom did the government coerce for Amazon to have such domination of server hosting and online retail?

I don’t think you’ve been paying close attention to whats been happening in your lifetime.

Ok, but R&D on a given product eventually stops. Over the lifetime of a good, it becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of overall cost.

So, for the first unit you ship, the cost is materials + logistics + labor + R&D.

But for the 1,000 unit you ship, the cost is materials + logistics + labor + (R&D/1,000)

In a free market, competition has end results. Buisnes don’t just keep competing with one another ad infinitum. One of them eventually cant keep up and closes shop. It’s competitors expand into the space it previously filled. This process repeats until you have fewer and fewer firms that account for more and more of their sector of the economy. New business do not have resources to eke out space in an already filled niche.

Under a long enough time frame, a free market creates less competition.

Valve is notably better (not good, but better) than the other companies you’ve listed.

That is, of course, an anomaly. A good monarchy lasts only as long as the monarch. A good company that exists for longer than the average human lifespan will quickly become no different from its peers.

it’s a poignant quote

but

a moment like this will never happen. There will be severe consequence from climate change within our lifetimes, certainly. And there – may – be a point where all the technology and comforts of the present no longer exist. But there will be many generations between us and that point. The CEO and shareholders of BP will not be around to see the world they set in motion, nor speak to its people.

Apocalypse is fiction. The trajectory of history can be read from present day conditions, and from how we chose to act. But that wheel turns slowly.

Unless I misunderstand, in China it’s illegal to distribute VPNs, but simply using one and accessing the wider net is fine. That implementation isn’t great, but it could also be a lot worse. Effectively it means anyone who’s tech savvy enough can leave the walled garden whenever they like with practically no consequence. Though, it still requires some group of people assume the legal risk of setting up and hosting the VPN infrastructure.

I feel like there must be some means of achieving the same effect without criminalizing people just for providing a service. Like, defaulting to a garden of public and private webpages that meat the standard, but still with some means of leaving that garden provided you pass a minor techincal barrier to entry.

Also forcing every social media site and glorified-website-app to default to chronological sort every time you close the browser tab or leave the app. It’s a simple change, but it would do a lot.

I heard somewhere that the adult starfish is just the head. Imagine being a face and only a face, scrunching along the seafloor.

everything else is just sitting there waiting to be obsolete in a couple years

a bit out from the cutting edge, sure, but obsolete? This aint the 90s or the Aughts any more.

A machine put together 10 years ago will still run most things fine. Not at the fanciest settings, but fine. This is essentially the same criticism PC gaming has been lobbing at consoles for years, and now we have essentially a PC masquerading it’s way into the console wing of the market – of course the same criticism still apply! It’s not incredibly beefy because it doesn’t need to be. Different audience, different requirements.

Clergy is the one I would say most breaks the dichotomy.

All the others listed still lack the title and privileges that come with nobility. There is some nuance I skipped over: different laws for urban citizens vs rural peasants. But a peasant could become an urban citizen by fleeing their land and living in a city for a year and a day, after which their former lord could no longer claim them.

If we’re going by the historical use of the term, yes.

At the beginning of the early modern period, you had two classes: peasants and aristocrats. You were born into your class and that was that. But early industrialization lead to a funny thing; people who were born peasants, yet through owning things like mines or factories, had amassed enough wealth to rival (and sometimes surpass) the aristocracy. Aristocrats derisively refereed to these wealthy peasants as “The Middle Class”.

If you were to show an aristocrat our present world, they’d tell you we’re ruled by their middle class.

go buy bread and sanitizing wipes with satisfaction