Trantarius

Aren’t tankies authoritarian leftists? What’s “right” about them?

It’s not made from milk though, right? It wouldn’t be vegan if it has any animal products. And if it isn’t made from milk, it’s just not cheese, even if the microorganisms are the same.

It annoys me that people keep saying “figuratively” is what they mean instead of “literally”. “Figuratively” may be the opposite, and technically correct, but the use of the word “literally” in this way is to strengthen a statement. A more appropriate correction would be “actually” or “seriously”, which holds the intended meaning. “Figuratively” is the last thing it should be replaced with.

I’m pretty sure the baseline questions are things they already know the answer to. Like what’s your name, where were you born, etc. So lying about them would be obvious.

Book burnings are bad when they are used to prevent the free sharing of information or ideas. It is a form of censorship. Burning the Quran is not censorship, because this is not an attempt to ban the Quran or prevent anyone from reading it. Its an entirely symbolic gesture. Its comparable to burning the American flag, which I’m guessing you’re not so against.

A lot of games have fully multithreaded components (for physics or navigation for example). So they can use any amount of cores. Its pretty rare to see a game max out all cores on such a system since they are usually limited by something else first.

I used to consider myself republican, and I think I’m still closer to republican than democrat. I prefer small government, which is at least sometimes a republican ideal. I am also against identity politics of any kind, so I am against affirmative action. I am in favor of gun rights, with regulations that allow for appropriate tracking of who has guns where, how they are stored, how they are transported etc. However, regulations that prevent particular people from owning guns or ban any particular weapons should be very conservative. Even felons should regain gun rights after an appropriate period of time. Only ridiculously dangerous weapons, like nukes, should be outright banned. Stuff like full auto weapons should be legal, but restricted to only be stored at a gun range or something. As far as LGBT goes, I don’t think the government should have anything to do with them. Let them do what they want, let people react how they want (as long as it isn’t violent of course, which is already illegal under other laws). I’ve never been really sure about abortion. My gut reaction is to just let people do what they want, but I struggle to logically justify it as anything but murder. Not to mention the impracticality of banning it.

I wouldn’t really call myself a republican anymore though. This is largely because of the religious aspects. I don’t know if republicans have actually become more authoritarian or if my perception has just changed, but either way they don’t seem to prioritize the same things as me anymore. Things like right to repair, net neutrality, and E2EE are important to me, but they don’t align with that at all. The party also keeps embracing identity politics, just with different identities than their opposition. Religion should be a non-factor from a governmental perspective. It doesn’t need any special protections, just to be ignored.

If I had to call myself something, I guess I would be a ‘libertarian socialist’, however much of an oxymoron that seems to be. For instance, I like the idea of UBI, largely because it would allow almost all welfare/social programs to be eliminated (including social security). Doing so would reduce government control, because they no longer have an ability to tweak who gets what, since everyone gets the same amount.

That’s still best achieved with SBMM (just a less strict version). With random matchmaking, you are only equally likely to see better/worse players if you are in the 50th percentile.

Also, each player is independently selected (when random). This means there will probably be a mix of high skilled and noob players in every game. You would not see a team of mostly noobs or mostly pros. For a player in the 50th percentile, with a team of 6, the chance of being better than every player on the other team team is only 1.5%. For the 25th percentile, it is 0.02%. So a very significant number of players would (almost) never experience an “insane spee on noobs”. However, the chance of having at least one player in the 75th percentile on the opposing team is 82%. So they would frequently encounter situations in which they feel hopelessly outmatched.

The only way to solve this is to use matchmaking that attempts to take skill into account.

The Chinese room argument doesn’t have anything to do with usefulness. Its about whether or not a computer that passes the turing test is conscious. Besides, the argument is a ridiculous one to begin with. It assumes that if a subcomponent of a system (ie the human) lacks “understanding”, then the system itself (the human + the room + the program) lacks understanding.

That sounds nice and all, but is useless as a definition. The way I see it used, wisdom is knowledge and intuition that is gained from experience, whereas intelligence is a property of a person that allows them to learn quickly.

In the first couple panels I can’t stop seeing her mouth like a mustache

I know it’s repetitive, but (some) people still don’t seem to hear it. Everyone complains about windows doing a million annoying things, but so few actually consider an alternative. Some people need to be reminded that they don’t need to wait for Microsoft to fix their problems. Admittedly, I doubt very many of those are in this community, or on this platform though.

Does this not work?

I think you can do the same in the post

That solution isn’t really a solution.

The minimum cost to live in each jurisdiction

There is no clear objective way to measure that. The absolute minimum to stay alive would technically be just enough for the single cheapest available food, and just enough water to avoid death (maybe not even that, if it’s legal to just drink out of a river). I’m sure that’s not what you meant. But anything beyond that has to consider the incredibly subjective quality of life question. So what you propose is really just a goal, not an actionable policy.

If you can impose a fine you are a jurisdiction and it is your responsibility to implement

That’s a way bigger headache than I think you realize. At any location in the country, you could be fined by the federal gov, state gov, other states if you do business there, multiple levels of local gov (county, city, etc.), even your HOA might be able to fine you. But that all depends on thousands of existing laws and precedents.

You linked a webpage as an embedded image. If you meant to make a link, use:

Chat control V2

If you meant to embed:

I have a metal cup on my desk. This cup used to be a rock. Humans took that rock, and placed it into an environment specifically tailored to remove just the molecules we want from it. It was melted, using temperatures far exceeding what a human could survive. It was formed into a sheet, then pressed into shape, using tools specifically crafted for that one purpose. It was painted with a compound not naturally found anywhere on earth, because someone thought it should be green. It was packaged in organic compounds carefully formulated and shaped through hundreds of processes to ensure it couldn’t be damaged on its trip to the other side of the planet. All of this for a cup. Why? Because it’s slightly more comfortable to drink out of. A problem that wouldn’t even register with any other living thing, solved with efforts far beyond their capabilities. And that is our closest competitor.

Humanity has accomplished more in the last hundred years, hell even the last ten, than anything else on earth (or beyond, for all we know) ever has. Yeah, war, greed, and racism are a thing, but it hasn’t stopped us before, and won’t stop us now. You are comparing real people to some idealized fantasy. A fantasy that only seems attainable because of what we have already accomplished, not in spite of it.

We only aspire to do better because we know what we are capable of.

Well letters don’t really have a single canonical shape. There are many acceptable ways of rendering each. While two letters might usually look the same, it is very possible that some shape could be acceptable for one but not the other. So, it makes sense to distinguish between them in binary representation. That allows the interpreting software to determine if it cares about the difference or not.

Also, the Unicode code tables do mention which characters look (nearly) identical, so it’s definitely possible to make a program interpret something like a Greek question mark the same as a semicolon. I guess it’s just that no one has bothered, since it’s such a rare edge case.