AnimalMuppet

No, it's not the most important thing (far from it, as you say). But it's a thing most people have, and a thing that most people are willing to talk about, and a thing that is socially acceptable to ask about, so it's a decent first question. It also has the virtue of not being too intense or intrusive.

Other first questions could be "What is the core of your identity?" (though that might be too intense/intrusive) or "Of all the things we could talk about, what would you be most interested in?"

Wikipedia says that in a police state, the government exerts an extreme amount of control over society and individuals. That leaves "extreme" undefined, though, so it's subjective. (Also, you know, Wikipedia.)

I'm not the one you asked, but: Me, personally, I'd draw the line at the independence of the courts. If the courts are independent, if they can rule against the police for failure to prove their case or for procedural violations or whatever, then it's not a police state. If the police win the borderline cases (or worse, the clearly bogus cases) just because they're the police, then it's a police state.

Yeah, but not for 2030. IIRC, Xi has demanded that China's military be ready to take Taiwan in 2027.

"Almost certainly no longer work"? I'd be interested in seeing your basis for your "almost certainly".

In the office? Only if their office has a separate air supply.

They should be able to do what they want. They should not be able to affect me by what they want. Selfish people need to step aside.

Do you mind having the discussion we're having?

But for me to be able to make decision after decision, I need to know what the over-riding guidelines are. I need to know what we're trying to build, and know it well enough that I know how my part fits.

And then I need to be able to tell when I can make a decision, and when I don't have enough information to make that decision and therefore need to ask questions of someone who has a better handle on the overall picture.

Non-deterministic, sure. But also they are powerful, at least powerful enough to launch a cyberattack. Until this morning, that was not a power that I thought they had outside of fiction.

And, the thing is, I don't want non-deterministic things to have that kind of power. We don't want that. We want that kind of power to not be triggered by a random number generator.

There's two ways to look at this: morally, and practically.

Morally, attacking civilians is wrong. It's wrong when Russia does it, and it's wrong when Ukraine does it.

Practically, when one side attacks civilians enough times, flagrantly enough, deliberately enough, the other side gets really tempted to respond in kind. It's basic human nature. They'd have to be saints not to, and you don't find many saints in wartime.

This is probably across the line for being a "personal attack". Those are against site rules. Please don't do this here.

If it's not written down in a place where other people can find it, it does not exist. So the place has to be either standardized or searchable, or preferably both.

That depends on the answer to a question that hasn't been answered yet.

Is what an AI does similar to a human reading a book, and adding it to their knowledge? Or is it similar to a human plagiarizing a book? If it's the second, for at least some books, no, the damages are not reasonable. They are far too small.

Freedom is the only missing piece holding them back from pursuing what they think will make them happy. That freedom makes them happy today, happy with the hope of tomorrow's happiness. But a number of people find that pursuing that thing (whatever it is for them) doesn't actually make them happy. Now they're less happy, because not only are they not happy, but their dream of future happiness has also died.

I call baloney. What percentage of the US Congress and governors, say, are people whose parents were in Congress and/or governors? I have no hard data, but my gut feel is less than 25%. That's basically not hereditary.

Anyone with hard data, step right up...

I can see complaining that people can pay to find out truth earlier. That's a real advantage. But paying to find out lies earlier? That seems to me to be of questionable usefulness.

I suppose that you can expect the market to react (at least to some degree) on the lies, and you might be able to trade on that...

Pruning. When I feel that I have too many, I go through them (or maybe just a subgroup of them) and close the ones that no longer are relevant or interesting.

This requires a threshold of feeling that they're "too many" while they're still a manageable number...

An apprentice with a grinder and a file. Producing shells that contain high explosives. That might not be the wisest production plan...

Why would you be very careful with a one-off script? The only point is the output.

On the other hand, if you actually care about the output, how do you know it's right, unless you review the script? I mean, if all you care about is plausible-looking output, you could have the LLM produce that, and skip the Python script entirely...

I am not an economist, but I think that the theory is that prices do go to MC in a competitive market. Coase's theorem was for an uncompetitive market. (In fact, a monopoly - the most uncompetitive market possible.)

When a bubble pops, there's always a cause. But it's a messy, chaotic world out there. If it wasn't that cause, then it would be a different one.

No, if traffic were billed rather than free, we would only get traffic that was deemed to be worth the bill. Most spam, for example, has a very low rate of return. If it cost to send - even a little bit - much of it would become unprofitable.

So in that world, we would have fiber, but not (much) international spam.

Not being worth something (money). Being worth something to someone (relationships).

You can kind of get the "being worth something to someone" by achievements, but they have to be achievements that other people care about - that move them, or matter to them in some way.

This looks like a fund-raising scam. "Let's cause as much outrage as possible to get people to donate to our campaign!"

Don't forget the pickups "rolling coal".

My expectation is that Germany has higher taxes than the US. What happens if you look at median net salary rather than gross?

Perhaps so. In what direction do you expect "the current economic climate" to be moving the charts?

Uh huh. And Europe is carbon neutral, and has been for the last couple of decades?

The head killing Europeans right now is caused by everyone pumping CO2, including Europeans.

Maybe. Depends on how solid the code is in the directions that matter for that code. Does security matter? Real-time performance? Never losing a transaction? Never leaking memory? What matters for the code you're trying to write? Future maintainability? How good is AI at producing code that does not fail in the directions that matter?

People who master the fundamentals but review all the code will move much slower. But they'll be more successful in the medium to long run if they're catching things that matter. (If they aren't, of course, they're just wasting time.)

No... but paper spam actually pays less than a regular letter. Make it pay more, and the amount will go down. Not to zero, but down significantly.

First: That was six paragraphs, not five.

Second: There was some substance. Maybe not six paragraphs worth, but there was some. Here it is: You, when you said "zero-knowledge proofs", did not give much substance. How, specifically, is that going to work?

It's a bit rich for you to be complaining that knorker didn't have any substance, when the problem is that you didn't give any.