whatgoodisaroad

I recommend John Berger's Ways of Seeing for a much more elaborate (and accessible) way to think about art

the Comstock act was unconstitutional at the time that it was actually enforced. i don't want to get into politics but there are many dynamic factors at work here

the US federal government historically banned books under the Comstock Act of 1873 which is still on the books and is still active federal law. it only currently isn't being enforced following some cultural changes in the 1960s. another change in the cultural winds could bring it back unfortunately

are you contending that every battle where someone is killed by an army counts as genocide?

the linked article describes military campaigns between state armies, not genocide

once we've refactored humans out of driving, the speed limits can go way up

it's a dynamic system where we feel less able to see ourselves as adults each time we gain therapy language to articulate trauma. something is gained with this language, but something is lost too

it could be fun to make a toy compiler that takes an arbitrary literate prompt as input and uses an LLM to output a machine code executable (no intermediate structured language). could call it llmllvm. perhaps it would be tremendously dangerous

i love Linnea Sterte books, stages of rot is also excellent

intelligence is an abstract concept, and sure, iq is a lossy way to measure it. but the idea that you could quantify intelligence into a scalar is absurd on its face and impossible to take seriously

i would argue that when you say "alphabetical order" you mean "lexicographic order"

there's a really interesting book called "When Prophecy Fails" that documents a doomesday cult. the cult had predicted a huge flood sometime in the 1950s and some sociologists infiltrated the group posing as believers to document their psychological response to the calamity not occuring

one of the core theses of the book is that adherents to a prophecy paradoxically believe in it much more strongly AFTER it's been disproven

Java is an Oracle product

If we're being pendantic it should say "Pierogi in low earth orbit"

at the end of the day, if you run it on an iPhone, it's iOS that renders the text, and apple is routinely subpoenaed

In fact there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

I have no first hand experience of Pyongyang, so I have no way to say what's typical, but I really enjoyed this YouTube video of a morning commute

https://youtu.be/CDcfiEX__cA?si=tqSHZp2tsK_viRnA

Pyongyang by Guy Delislse also paints a charming if twisted picture of commuting in the city on foot.

Keep in mind, in the really malicious cases where an extension has changed hands, they often just sell the credentials to the Google developer account, so this won't detect those cases.

Lunar illumination was once used by Abraham Lincoln to defend a murder suspect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff_Armstrong#Murder_trial

There's a straussian dynamic at work here where the company wants to informally encourage generic use of their brand, but must also formally defend proper use of their brand for legal reasons. Courts need to see you at least appear to defend yourself.

this story does more to persuade me to switch to 1.1.1.1

This isn’t an example of shooting the messenger because you dislike the message. The SF Chronicle just has a track record of anti SF bias, then turning around and complaining about the effects of their own reporting https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/sf-downtown-doom-l...

It’s sadly not a trustworthy source on these matters

To preface: I don’t really have an opinion on affirmative action per se:

That said, the elephant in the room is that institutions like Harvard and UNC aren’t really about education. They’re “ivy leagues” for preserving class inequality having been marketed as schools.

To the extent that race is a distraction from class, the fact that counteracting racial bias in admissions has failed to uplift the poor just puts too fine a point on this arrangement.

I would imagine RTO/co-working to be more of a benefit to union efforts, since organizing in non official channels is so greatly simplified.

I think that's a little harsh on RIAA/MPAA exexs. Their comfortable way of living gets validation from how enthusiastically property laws are enforced. That leaves plenty of room for them to believe they're doing the Right Thing™.

Even though, as an article of basic critical thinking, they certainly aren't.

I don't read the post as drawing an equivalence across these four, but I think the two you picked out are actually the most comparable pair. Certainly corporate profit interests have harmed ESG discourse, but the leading AI developers right now are corporations and it's only a short matter of time before whatever legitimate AI risk concerns will get contaminated by profit-protecting PR campaigns.

For a big tech company, the regulatory regime is the world. For Twitter that's the US.

I wouldn't say it's a given that the TVA is bad. It depends profoundly on who you're asking.

I stopped using adblockers generally when I considered both 1) we get very little visibility on when an extension changes-hands/updates, combined with 2) you have to give it access to all your browsing data.

People sell popular browser extensions to malicious parties all the time and AFAIK there's no systematic way to notify users when this happens.

There's a way of looking at this as pretty much normal. I think we have yet to really face the fact that systems of common-law are ad-hoc LLMs (in contrast to statutory-law, which is more similar to standard programming).

In particular, common-law uses an enormous "model" of case precedents that gets incrementally updated by human curators with minimal influence over it.