I’ve been at some festivals where the bartering system was alive and well! People would trade beer for camping chairs or a volleyball for some duct tape. Good times :)

Not 100% true: I know some places in Norway that have unreliable internet connectivity. They have terminals in the store that will save your purchase and wire it to the bank when connection is restored. Of course, this means you can over-draw your card, but I’ve never heard of that being a big issue in those small places.

This take just baffles me… you can disapprove of a war, and still respect people willing to put their life on the line for something they believe is right. Even in war, opposing sides have a long history of showing their enemy a certain amount of personal respect, even though they clearly disagree about something to the point of killing each other over it.

Your take is just condescending and unempathetic. You can respect someone for sacrificing themselves without agreeing with them about what they’re sacrificing themselves for. Regardless, it shouldn’t be hard to see how someone fighting to depose an infamously brutal dictator (Iraq) or a fundamentalist regime that stones women for wanting a divorce (Afghanistan) can believe that they are doing something good.

People not getting this… computers are inherently binary (until quantum computers become truly viable). That’s the joke.

That’s exactly your problem. You understood that they had no ill intentions, but you still had to spend time badgering them and going after them to prove a point.

You could have chosen to interpret their post in a way that didn’t offend you, but you chose to get offended, and then you try to make them look like the asshole for not bending over backwards when you “hurt yourself in your confusion”.

Also, it’s practical. If you know something is twice as concentrated (12% instead of 6%) you know to drink it more carefully, rather than if you get a jug of something and it just says how much alcohol is in there, then you have to mentally calibrate how strong it is by considering the volume of the jug vs. how much alcohol there is.

There seems to be a slight misunderstanding here: If you imagine the “moment before” the big bang that is a state where the entire universe is compressed into a singularity, which necessarily has no entropy, because it can only have one state. Once the universe started expanding, you get a whole lot of disorder, because, while you are forming particles (introducing order) those particles are moving away from each other at relativistic speeds. The available volume for the particles (the volume of the universe) increases extremely rapidly, meaning you have more possible microstates than if all particles were compressed into a point.

Exactly! Then you agree that because chatgpt can be coerced into spitting out raw, unmodified data, distributing it is a violation of copyright. Glad we’re on the same page.

You should look up the term “rhetorical question” by the way.

If I scrape a bunch of data, put it in a database, and then make that database queryable only using obscure, arcane prompts: Is that a derivative work permitted under fair use?

Because if you can get chatgpt to spit out raw training data with the right prompt, it can essentially be used as a database of copyrighted stuff that is very difficult to query.

First of all no: Training a model and selling the model is demonstrably equivalent to re-distributing the raw data.

Secondly: What about all the copyleft work in there? That work is specifically licensed such that nobody can use the work to create a non-free derivative, which is exactly what openAI has done.

Wat?

Since you seem to know a lot about this: I would think that at some point the purely physical size of a device is prohibitive of using shared cache, just because the distance from a cpu to the cache can’t be too big. Do you know when this comes into play, if it does? Also, having written some multithreaded computational software, I’ve found that there’s typically (for the stuff I do) a limit to how many cores I can efficiently make use of, before the overhead of opening and closing threads eats the advantage of sharing the work between cores. What kind of “everyday” server stuff is efficiently making use of ≈300 cores? It’s clearly some set of tasks that can be done independently of one another, but do you know more specifically what kind of things people need this many cores on a server for?

I see your point, which is kind of what I meant about the exception for people that are “just there for the gig”. And I agree that when we take those into account, we have people who are legally required to defend/protect things they don’t personally support. I also think taking those people into account is a different kind of discussion, because then we’re talking about people taking an oath to uphold institutions they don’t believe in for self-serving reasons. Whether or not someone can faithfully do that is an interesting discussion in itself.

I won’t repeat the whole argument, but I have to admit like it seems you didn’t catch the core part.

You should be able to get food and survival on basic pay. Prices should increase slowly over time. Basic pay should therefore increase at the same pace, or slightly faster, than prices are increasing. The issue you have now is not really the current inflation, but that inflation has outpaced wage growth for the past couple of years. Price growth isn’t a problem if everybodies wages increase at the same rate as the prices grow, or faster, agree?

Now that inflation has slowed down, wages just need a little time to catch up. <= That right there is an important point. You don’t want prices to decrease to match your current pay. That breaks the economy bad. You want your wage to increase to match the current prices.

Another major issue you have is that minimum wage hasn’t kept up with inflation, that’s a regulatory issue. Also your unions had their collective back broken a couple decades ago, that didn’t help either.

This may seem like splitting hairs, but I honestly don’t think it is:

Military and police are groups that defend/protect their country, it’s laws and it’s fundamental principles, which they most likely support. Just like your previous argument: Police can defend and support the right to protest, without supporting the content of the protest. This extends to pretty much anything.

Doctors and lawyers can support a universal right to life, good health, and a just trial, and by supporting those things, it makes sense to help, defend and protect a patient / client regardless of their background, practices or actions.

In both cases, we could make an exemption for police / military / doctors / lawyers that are there just for the cash. At that point, it’s basically, “I’m defending / protecting because I support me getting paid.” and the whole argument is kind of moot.

Voting blank? I can respect that as making a political point. But even though you say you’ve made up your mind: Can I please encourage you to stay up-to-date on what is being done by the candidates, and to keep an open mind that you may still be won over?

Elections are still almost a year off, idk what it could be, but perhaps you see something and think “that was actually pretty decent, I could vote for that guy if he does more of that.” And the way I see it, that’s the best possible outcome right now, however unlikely it may be/feel.

Sorry mate, but as of this coming election, these are probably your choices. If you don’t vote, the only thing you’re doing is increasing the risk of the greater of two evils.

If you want better politicians to run for president (which is a very reasonable wish to have) you’re first going to have to vote them in at lower levels. The problem, to me, appears to be that those who make it to the top end up being bad choices for a lot of people. I attribute that to low voter turnout in lower level elections, which leads to decent politicians never making it to the point where they can run for top level offices.

I’m not going to shred on you for feeling apathetic, I can understand that. I’m just going to point out that when given the choice between two evils, you need to reflect on whether you think it’s right to not choose, even if that leads to the greater of the two coming to pass.

Pils?

There have been actions as well. Among them an EO to the administration to work harder on antitrust enforcement. This has resulted in a significant increase in antitrust cases.

When you see Biden “just talk about something” it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that quite a bit is already happening behind the curtains, or even in the open. He’s talking about it to bring attention to it as well.

You have to remember: Inflation tells you how fast prices are increasing. We want a certain degree of inflation (typically around 2% is healthy for the economy). The problem occurs when inflation is too high, so that wages don’t keep up, that’s what we’re seeing now. When inflation decreases, that means prices are growing less fast, not that they’re decreasing.

Decreasing prices (across the board) would be deflation, which is terrible (think Great Depression / 1930’s Germany terrible). If your 100$ is worth more tomorrow than it is today, then why would you spend it today? You wouldn’t (except for necessities). That leads to a massive drop in investments, not only in the “Wall street” sense, but in things like building houses, building factories, hiring people etc. it also causes wages to decrease. This goes on until production and wages hit a low point where there’s huge amounts of money in circulation, very low production/employment, and very low prices. That’s when you get a whiplash to a situation where everyone has money to buy stuff, but no one is making it, aaaaand we have HyperInflation™

In short: Your 100$ has in fact never been worth less than now, and that’s a good thing. We just want it to decrease in value more slowly, and things are going in the right direction. It could still take a year or two for wages to catch back up, but we’ll get there. Current policies are helping the situation.