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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Like him or hate him, Biden was never not going to back Israel. He’d been an Israel supporter for a long time before he became president, and there’s really no excuse for not knowing that if you’re at all interested in American politics. People wish they could elect some sort of ideal president, but I’ve never seen one, yet.

    So, given that, you might alternatively say that Hamas’s enduring legacy will be the destruction of America. When they attacked Israel at that time, because of the players involved, the GOP’s chances of winning big in 2024 really surged.




  • This is kind of an intentional cognitive dissonance for Twitch due to its having a conflict of interests.

    On the one hand, it wants to tell viewers and advertisers that it cracks down on adult only content.

    But on the other hand, the more adult content they let through, the more money they make.

    It would be very easy to either make an age restricted section where adult stuff would be allowed, or to completely banish streamers who are the modern equivalent of burlesque. But one is bad PR and the other is bad for revenue.



  • The purpose of the frosty analogy is simple: it’s absurd for any one to make any argument- no matter how reasonable and then assert that that is how it is.

    I started off by letting everybody know I was making an argument. When you’re making a legal-style argument, you try to convince people that it’s true. So, you say things as if they’re obviously true.

    This is literally what lawyers do when they’re making arguments. If it’s “absurd”, as you say, then our entire adversarial system is absurd. But this is the way things are actually done.

    If I was doing something other than an argument, say, a legal analysis, I would use different language.

    you feel the need to insult my intelligence

    I actually tried fairly hard to make sure that my comment did not insult your intelligence, but focused on your argument. But I also said that you probably didn’t have the knowledge of a constitutional scholar to actually make the argument. You might find that an insult, but it was part of my argument because you said it was something you were “easily” able to do. You were the one who brought up your own abilities (“I could just as easily argue that it says dipping french fries in frosties is illegal”) as part of the argument. If you didn’t want me to talk about them at all, then you either shouldn’t have brought them up as part of the argument, or you should have done the thing that you said you could easily do.

    while still ignoring the point

    I get the feeling, because you keep trying to bring up other things, that you feel that I’m somehow being off-topic. But then, you still keep arguing against those same points that I’m making, so that makes them on-topic. If you don’t think they’re worth arguing, then don’t argue them. From my perspective, all that happened was that I brought up a valid argument, and you keep attacking it, which is fine. But all of those attacks lack merit, so I feel the need to defend it. If you’d stop attacking, or if you somehow proved your point (which I don’t think is possible), then this thread would simply end.

    (By the way, I want you to know that I don’t believe in comment downvotes for anything except completely off-topic things like spam. I haven’t been upvoting your replies, but I certainly haven’t been downvoting them. I am actually impressed when I meet another person like me who argues, but doesn’t downvote, which is what you’re doing, as most of my comments have zero downvotes. So overall, I commend you for that. I’m sorry that other people are downvoting you.)


  • I could just as easily argue that it says dipping french fries in frosties is illegal

    My argument referenced the contents of several parts of the constitution, including two amendments. It referenced current practices by states as well as reasoning as to why not following the recommendation can have poor outcomes. In response to your comment, I even referenced the contents of existing case law.

    Your “argument” lacks anything approaching an argument. Where’s a reference to any part of the constitution? Where’s any precedent? If you can make a similar constitutional argument about dipping french fries in frosties being illegal, feel free to do so. But you don’t get any credit for simply claiming you can do it. I doubt you could make a coherent argument on french fries if you tried. Maybe not even if you were a law student, for example. But I’d bet a constitutional lawyer would be able to make an argument. But anyways, the point is that you didn’t even try. You just claimed victory.

    I feel like we’ve gone through the part where I disagreed with you. Then you reacted by misinterpreting my comment. Then, I explained everything, and now, we both know that there’s nothing factually wrong with what I said, but you are still somehow trying to make new arguments. There’s nothing to win here, and in fact, your last argument is quite low quality, trivial to refute.

    My point is that I don’t understand your motivation. It seems like you should just acknowledge that you understand what I mean, and we can all get on with life doing other things.


  • The constitution is a legal document that has over 200 years of being interpreted by courts. Legally, it says a lot of things that it doesn’t explicitly say, and those things are the result of something called “arguments”.

    In my comment, my first words were “I would argue that”. This is because I am making an argument that the constitution recommends Trump be removed from the ballot. You know, similar to how somebody made an argument that the constitution guarantees that people are allowed to marry between races, and so now that’s what it says. But you can’t point to the part where it explicitly says it.

    If I meant, “the constitution explicitly states that”, then I would have used that language, instead. You can tell that by the way I used that exact language in my second paragraph.



  • Every part of your comment has something factually wrong or fallacious.

    I don’t get feedback just because you read it.

    My reading the part I am giving feedback on is a prerequisite for actually giving feedback. I am obviously a person who graciously responded to your request, not somebody that you somehow ordered to give feedback. I don’t know what you think you gain from viewing it this way.

    I’m thankful for feedback but my sentence was accurate.

    I didn’t say it was inaccurate, but that it didn’t tell people why to read the article. You didn’t ask me to tell you inaccuracies. You asked for “feedback”. You also don’t seem to be thankful, because if you were thankful, you’d simply accept the feedback instead of throwing up straw-man arguments.

    I don’t benefit if you read it.

    You have exactly repeated your previous statement that I already proved wrong.

    I will offer you one last piece of feedback. Just stop arguing. You can never look gracious pursuing an argument where you ask for advice and then argue with people who took time out of their day to help you.

    Upvotes and downvotes don’t determine whether people are factually right, but they do help you gauge what people think when they read your comments, and what I’m seeing is that you’re not ingratiating yourself to the people who you are asking to read your article. Even if you could win this argument, and you can’t, you wouldn’t want to, because you’d look bad in doing so. When you ask for feedback, and feedback is given, just graciously accept it. If it’s bad feedback, then just ignore it.



  • It’s true that the actual “story” is very short. 1 kB is 1000 bytes and 1 KiB is 1024 bytes. But the post is not about this, but about why calling 1024 a kilobyte always was wrong even in a historical context and even though almost everybody did that.

    Yes. But it does raise the question of why you didn’t say that in either your title:

    Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes

    or your description:

    I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

    This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It’s about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

    Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

    The title and description were your two chances to convince people to read your article. But what they say is that it’s a 20 minute read for 10 seconds of information. There is nothing that says there will be historical context.

    I get that you might want to make the title more clickbaitey, but why write a description out if you’re not going to tell what’s actually in the article?

    So, that’s my feedback. I hope this helps.

    One other bit of closely-related feedback, for your writing, in general. Always start with the most important part. Assume that people will stop reading unless you convince them otherwise. Your title should convince people to read the article, or at least to read the description. The very first part of your description is your chance to convince people to click through to the article, but you used it to tell an anecdote about why you wrote the article.

    I’m the kind of person who often reads articles all the way through, but I have discovered that most people lose interest quickly and will stop reading.


  • I would argue that the constitution not only recommends Trump be removed from the ballot. It almost requires it.

    The constitution explicitly states that people like Trump who participated in an insurrection are ineligible for office. This is similar to other requirements for the office. For example, you must be a natural citizen over 35 years old, etc.

    Constitutionally, each state chooses how to run their own elections. However, that freedom does not give them the power to go against the other parts of the constitution.

    Traditionally, states will not put people on presidential ballots who do not meet the requirements to be president.

    But do they have to do that? I would argue that the case with Trump proves that, going forward, they do have to exclude ineligible candidates for president. Because Trump is the first ineligible candidate who is leading in polls.

    Every state election he might win is a constitutional crisis. Each state has the duty to follow the Constitution and ensure that Trump doesn’t win the presidency. The current method for doing this action is removing him from the ballot.




  • I did say that people and AI would have similar poor results at explaining themselves. So we agree on that.

    The one thing I’ll add is that certain people performing certain tasks can be excellent at explaining themselves, and if a specific LLM AI exists that can do that, then I’m not aware of it. I added LLM into there because I want to ensure that it’s an AI with some ability for generalized knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are very specific AIs that have been trained only to explain a very narrow thing.

    I guess I’m in a mood to be reminded of old Science Fiction stories, because I’m reminded of a story where they had people who were trained to memorize situations to testify later. For some reason, I initially think it’s a hugely famous novel like Stranger in a Strange Land, but I might easily be wrong. But anyways, the example they gave in the book was that the person described a house, let’s say the house was white, then they described it as being white on the side that was facing them. The point being that they’d be explaining something as closely to right as was possible, to the point that there was no way that they’d be even partially wrong.

    Anyways, that seems tangentially related at best, but the underlying connection is that people, with the right training and motivation, can be very mentally disciplined, which is unlike any AI that I know, and also probably very unlike this comment.


  • People are able to explain themselves, and some AI also can, with similar poor results.

    I’m reminded of one of Azimov’s stories about a robot whose job was to aim an energy beam at a collector on Earth.

    Upon talking to the robot, they realized that it was less of a job to the robot and more of a religion.

    The inspector freaked out because this meant that the robot wasn’t performing to specs.

    Spoilers: Eventually they realized that the robot was doing the job either way, and they just let it do it for whatever reason.


  • The provision of the 25th Amendment that I believe you’re talking about requires the vice president and the majority of the cabinet to agree, but those people are literally all chosen by the president. Based on Trump’s past behavior and recent comments, it’s likely that he’d only choose people for these positions who swore a personal oath of loyalty to him. So, they’d be unlikely to exercise that power.

    Every single opinion about what would happen, including Glenn’s, and mine, and yours, is “just guessing”. This would be unprecedented.

    As a prosecutor who appears to be excellent at her job in an adversarial system, Fani Willis is going to always present the situation in the light that she expects to get the best results.

    In the end, my opinion, and that of at least some legal experts, which like you said is just a guess, is that practicality would require an agreement between the Georgia state government and the federal government to allow the office of the president to function properly.