foxglacier

It's worth keeping in mind the purpose of copyright. It's a pragmatic tool to encourage investment in creative work for the benefit of everybody/consumers. We may be entering a time where there's less need to incentivize people to write books. At least not non-fiction books which are simply a collection of existing knowledge presented in an a way that's suitable for human readers. A lot of the value those authors provided can now be done by AI. Yes, the AI trained on their work, but now that it's here, we don't need new non-fiction authors quite as much as we used to.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where technology or general people's wellbeing was held back by obsolete laws that ended up lingering on just to protect undeserving special people at the expense of the rest of society. Remember guilds for tradesmen? They were also a monopoly given by the government to special people. They had their purpose but nowadays we have different ways to keep tradesmen working effectively like license requirements and insurance.

Just to be clear, I think we do still need copyright, but that we might be in a transition period where it has to be redesigned to adapt to AI.

No. Plenty of people are in that boat - look at youth unemployment in many countries - or housewives. And yet somehow workers seem to do the most creative work.

Never heard of hemlock or mushrooms? Crazy people already have! Run for the hills!

I know what it means. "you're not fighting the sun's heat" means "the paint is fighting the sun's heat" but that's no explanation of how it could mean that. I say it's backwards because clearly whatever's doing the fighting is not the paint because it has the opposite effect. It must be the steel, as you say, or the people struggling with the problem.

You're using the dishonest argument technique of strawmanning. The claim you're sarcastically criticizing is not one that he made. It's one you created yourself just so you could ridicule it. You did this before too with your statement about the Lingwood temperature being due to weather stations at runways. I think what's happened is you've sensed a faint ghost of heresy and were so offended that you neglected to think rationally because fighting your perceived enemies is more important to you than knowledge or understanding.

Wouldn't immigration be a real effect too, not just poor measurement? If a person moves from a low emissions per-capita country to a high emissions per-capita country, the emissions attributable to that person would increase because of their lifestyle changes adapting to the new country.

But that's backwards. I took it to mean the rails or the engineers are no longer fighting (coping with) heat input from the sun because the rail never receives that heat when it's reflected away by the paint.

I wonder if this fatalism comes from a feeling that the enormous power of AI must somehow come with some sort of proportional cost. There isn't really any clearly known cost so maybe that's why people talk up the water and global warming and social impact fears and all that.

In comparison, does anybody say they're burning down a bit of rainforest when they go to the toilet (and flush it)? Or when they cook dinner at home with more waste heat than factory cooked food? Or throw away a pen that's run out of ink? The environmental impact of all the mundane things in life is far greater than using AI but the impact of each mundane thing is perhaps also far less impressive.

That sounds noble until it doesn't work in reality and people always find reasons to justify wars. If it was so simple, it would be easy for most people to get on board with and most wars would end.

For example, do you agree that Britain's and France's appeasement of Germany before WWII was the right thing because an attack wouldn't have been self-defense? Or, what about attacking another country to help defend an ally who's being attacked by them? That's not defensive, so I guess it's wrong by your standard for any other country to defend Ukraine. What about defending them by supplying arms and soldiers? The line gets blurry fast.

How about re-taking some recently lost territory? Is that wrong? For example would it be wrong for Ukraine to attack Russia to regain its eastern areas that Russia took at the beginning of the war? Or for Russia to retake any other parts of the soviet union? How about either North or South Korea attacking the other? If everybody opposed such non-defensive wars, they would be severely disadvantaged to a country that incrementally takes pieces of their territory in a ratchet effect.

What about "liberating" the people of another country from a brutal dictator? I'm sure you'll oppose this because it's like Iraq or Syria, but is there really no case where it's justified? Not even Pol Pot's Cambodia where it might have saved a quarter of the population from death it somebody had intervened?

Oh god what's wrong with you people? Can nobody just be direct and say "I don't accept the UDHR and I believe this other thing that's incompatible with it"? Or "I believe the meaning of that article of UDHR is this other thing and here's some reasons or examples".

Are you saying those researchers got their upper bound too low? You should inform them of their mistake.

I'm talking about doublerabbit, not India. Doublerabbit apparently doesn't like human rights, which is his right, but it's possible he actually holds contradictory opinions and doesn't realize it.

What do you think that human rights rule is supposed to mean then? By your definition, the (more older) Chinese way of restricting mobility between provinces according to hukou would be OK because you can just bypass the forbidden provinces.

How do you reconcile you complaint about complaining about the tourist ban with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says people have the right to freedom of movement within the borders of each state?

Because it's a negative unhappy view. It's not enjoyable to hear people complaining about problems or imaginary problems everywhere - and it really is everywhere. It's hard to find news about exciting new technology without rampant negativity from the commenters. I suppose HN is particularly negative about technology but so is mainstream culture. It's also irrational - the world keeps getting better in leaps and bound but we hardly celebrate that. High speed low latency affordable internet in any remote place in the world is amazing!

Perhaps another offputting aspect of this is Musk-hate. People were excited about SpaceX and Tesla a decade ago. It was a rare burst of popular techno-optimism, but now they aren't able to appreciate anything Musk does because their minds are clouded with hate.

It's not reductionist - planes and their vapor trails are a constant presence in the sky there and in many places. Far more obvious than even these 5-10x as many satellites will be. I'm sure there are cloud photographers who are bothered by plane but, as with Starlink, there are people getting good value from them. There are even photographers embracing them. I think you see the world how you're familiar with as good or at least acceptable but anything different as bad.

Yes, but real writing is also unbounded in complexity. Unicode can't do everything or it would just be a general purpose vector graphics language. Traditionally, writing systems had to adapt to the limitations of the technology (eg. runes with only straight lines for carving) or not using cursive for printing, but now computers can do so much, we just let everything go and try to recapture every arbitrary detail of the past we can squeeze in and people pay for that with human labor maintaining such a mountain of low-value capabilities.

10x worse than the best time in all of history to be a human doesn't sound so bad. Even just 200 years ago, a gigantic chain of internal wars killed 25% of the entire population of my country.

Has seeing the horrors of the Ukraine war made you want the west to stop it and force a surrender? More horrors don't make people want less war. If anything, it may be the opposite. People pretend to be anti-war right up until there's a war and then suddenly it turns out they're actually anti-losing-the-war.

There are side effects and you may have to try different drugs to minimize them and maximize the effect. Medicine makes sense when the side effects are less bad than the problem that the main effect is solving, not only when there are no side effects.

Some people choose what, if any pill to take each day according to what they intend to do that day.

According to cygv... the more intensely you use the battery, the more miles you get out of it, so kind of yea, the faster you use it, the "longer" it lasts in miles. And this example supports that idea because it was used more intensely than usual and lasted more miles than usual.

Do you mean 11 years is a "long" time? I'd say it doesn't matter how long it was - it ended up better the expected based on the miles, and since it was a high-mileage-per-year car, that supports the claim that degradation is determined (at least more than expected) by calendar years, as cgyv.. claimed. I don't see how it doesn't support his claim.

That's 25000 miles per year, which is high. So the opposite of false.

If the author was honestly trying to communicate, he would believe that the reader is already expecting it to be X, but it tends to get used for things where you didn't even consider it to be X in the first place. So it's not clarifying a potential misunderstanding, just making it sound surprising even if it isn't. You're left with the feeling that something's importantly different from expectations even when it's not.

In this case, I think it's fine. It points out that the victim only has to trust YouTube itself, not a stranger posting on it (eg, if it was listed as an example of a user comment). But I'm desensitized to everybody else abusing that construct so it didn't communicate that to me.

Have you considered it might be something medically treatable? There are drugs for that sort of thing. I've tried some and wouldn't have believed it was possible before - aren't I anxious because I haven't done things I'm supposed to do and the consequences are nebulous and growing? Isn't anxiety a real signal telling me to get them finished? If you lose that feeling, you'll be even more screwed! But it turns out neurotypical people can be productive without being driven by stress.

What's the population of the suburb you live in? About that?

This comment shows you're being disingenuous. If a war killed 4 people, you'd be asking how big my family was. You can obviously understand the significance of that figure and it's nothing to do with suburbs.

Of course not. Education is free on the internet. University provides motivation and credentials. The motivation part is important because most people can't stick to such rigorous education for so long without some external force. Universities need to enforce rules against cheating as part of the motivation service they're providing.

It depends how you define philanthropy - obviously corporations don't just donate such valuable products to the world to make it a better place, but in effect that's what they end up doing in their effort to gain market share or brand recognition. Actual human philanthropists are sometimes doing it for the similar reasons of self-promotion.

Racial identity is a good proxy for ethnicity which studies do show affects IQ.

conclude that to be a bloody stupid idea.

You say that as if all the other presidents' wars in the middle east were shown to be good ideas and they were smart to follow that advice and kill all those people their generals wanted to kill. Iran seems to have not been nearly as terrible as Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, or Syria. The death toll is only around 10000. What's the problem? Don't say oil prices increased because that's a good thing.