SetTheorist

https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/average-least-16-child...

https://zmina.info/en/news-en/russia-has-killed-661-ukrainia...

That seems to be true only in British English. In other dialects (USA, Canada, Australia), corn refers only to maize. (I'd never heard corn used as a general term, though Miriam-Webster does affirm this British usage.)

Background discussion: https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies...

Stating objective facts is not "copium".

It is simply false that "half the country [voted] for Trump".

That's absolutely what it stands for. To see this you need only listen to what they say and observe what they do.

On what basis do you make the claim that "It is vanishingly rare for users to scroll up when reading content unless they want to reach the top"?

If I were to judge from the comments here (and my own behaviours) it is quite common for users to scroll up when reading content for other reasons that wanting to "reach the top".

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35863186

12,500 years ago seems to be a more sensible and evidence-based estimate.

I'm not sure someone who writes things like "Text generated by LLMs also remind me of autistic people. Like, actually autistic people. [...] How annoying." is the best judge of culture and humanity.

I agree with the basic premise but this posting is a poor bit of writing.

Concentrating people in one spot with minimal hygiene available so that infectious diseases spread as much as possible does not seem to me to be ICE "doing their job".

One of the meanings of the word "democratization" is "the action of making something accessible to everyone", which is clearly the sense meant here.

77,302,580 people voted for Trump in 2024. That is not "half the country".

Nor does he or ever did have the support of "(over) half the country". His maximum approval level in 2025 was at the beginning of his term at 47% "approve" and is currently around 36%, according to the Gallup poll.

"It's that the people running them are committing ethical crimes that have not been formally illegalized."

I think it's even worse than that - they are committing actual crimes that many people were punished severely for in the previous decades, (for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...)

They've kind of patched this for direct questions, but distractions can still confuse it into nonsense. ("drive it over when it's ready to be picked up"??!)

e.g.

Welcome to Opus 4.6

Dude, should I do a walk to or drive on up to the carwash - it's only a block from my house, yoyoyo and my car's yellow (no poodle anymore tho)

● If it's only a block away, walk. You're going there to get the car washed, so drive it over when it's ready to be picked up, or just drive it one block -- either way works. But driving one block to wait around seems unnecessary when you could walk over, get things set up, and then go grab the car.

  That said, the practical answer: drive it. The car needs to be there to get washed. Just drive the one block.

There is no general rule that something created by an X is therefore an X. (I have difficulty in even understanding the state of mind that would assert such a claim.)

My printer prints out documents. Those documents are not printers.

My cat produces hair-balls on the carpet. Those hairballs are not cats.

A human creating an artifact does not make that artifact a human.

I think it's unfortunate that this anonymous and careless person refuses to acknowledge the harm done, their culpability in this, or real lesson.

For example, "Sure, many will argue I was irresponsible; to be honest I don’t really know myself. Should be criticized for what I unleashed on parts of the open source community? Again maybe but not sure. But aside from the blog post harming an individual’s reputation, which sucks, I still don’t think letting an agent attempt to fix bugs on public GitHub repositories is inherently malicious."

No. That is not the case. The majority of deportations are of non-criminals.

It is absolutely not the case that 60% of the population wants all non-citizens deported. On what do you base your claim?

You are explicitly saying that you feel more in common with Taliban or Tren De Aragua than with someone who wishes to exercise their Constitutionally protected right to peacefully protest against unlawful actions by agents of the government?

Also, I am confused why you think that allegedly spitting and/or kicking out lights is a justification for execution.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...

The data does not support the claim that the US has "better quality of care"

As recently as 15 years ago, Google _explicitly_ stated in their employee handbook that they would NOT, as a matter of principle, include ads in the search results. (Source: worked there at that time.)

Now, they do their best to deprioritize and hide non-ad results...

"There are at least as many problems with trying to use statistics as evidence as there are with using anecdotes and fictional references."

This is a dubious claim.

"Damit wird insbesondere zu der interessanten Aufgabe, eine quadratische Gleichung beliebig vieler Variabeln mit algebraischen Zahlencoeffizienten in solchen ganzen oder gebrochenen Zahlen zu lösen, die in dem durch die Coefficienten bestimmten algebraischen Rationalitätsbereiche gelegen sind." - Hilbert, 1900

The use of "variable" to denote an "unknown" is a very old practice that predates computers and programming languages.

I will definitely trust a random, prima facie absurd, claim from an anonymous someone on the internet (with bad grammar, misspellings, and lack of capitalization) over peer-reviewed scientific studies. Yep.

There is an inherent complexity in a lot of mathematics. The compact notation makes it much easier (or even possible) to understand what is going on.

Compare something like

equals(integral(divide(exponentiate(negate(divide(square(var),2))),sqrt(multiply(2,constant_pi))),var,negate(infinity),infinity),1)

vs

$$\int_{-\infty}^{\infty}\frac{e^{-x^2/2}}{\sqrt{2\pi}}dx = 1$$

(imagine the actual generated mathematical formula here :-/ )

it is infinitely easier to grok what is going on using symbolic notation after a minimal amount of learning.

Experimenting with LLMs, I've had examples like it providing the Cantor Set (a totally disconnected topological space) as an example of a Continuum immediately after it provides the (correct) definition as a non-empty compact, connected (Hausdorff) topological space. This is immediately obvious as nonsense if you understand the topic, but if one was attempting to learn from this, it could be very confusing and misleading. No human teacher would do this.

Bad. Education and growth of children belongs to the entire country. Full stop.

Have you tried diving deeper into languages like Prolog, Haskell, Lisp/Scheme, APL, Forth? These are likely to provide some food for thought different from typical languages used in numerical analysis...

Have you tried diving deeper into languages like Prolog, Haskell, Lisp/Scheme, APL, Forth? These are likely to provide some food for thought different from typical languages used in numerical analysis...

From "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" by Umberto Eco. via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

I think it is quite evident that the modern far-right movement in the US (including those in power today) can be characterized as fascist.

"The cult of tradition," characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

"The rejection of modernism," which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

"The cult of action for action's sake," which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

"Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

"Fear of difference," which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

"Appeal to a frustrated middle class," fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups. "Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession. Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

"Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

"Contempt for the weak," which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

"Everybody is educated to become a hero," which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."

"Machismo," which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."

"Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".

"Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

Amusingly, even the numbers in the first example are counter-examples to the author's false claim: neither 0.1 nor 0.2 can be represented thusly.