p-e-w

6 ms·

1.
by p-e-w 4d ago
The comment was about harm . Mens rea is about guilt. “No harm, no foul” is completely and utterly false as a general rule in criminal law.
2.
by p-e-w 5d ago
> No harm, no foul. What? That’s not how criminal law works, at all.
3.
by p-e-w 5d ago
> This line of reasoning doesn't hold up for many harmful habits that people voluntarily partake in. It absolutely does, you just believe you can decide for others what’s harmful for them.
4.
by p-e-w 5d ago
Tens of millions of people disagree with you. What makes you think you know better than them what is right for them?
5.
by p-e-w 5d ago
Decent physicians do the same: “And the next time you feel your heart going out of rhythm, just hold your breath, and remember I will see you again a couple of weeks from now.” Ah wait, no they don’t, because “resilience” is a worthless con
6.
by p-e-w 5d ago
Then you probably believe that the US government only consists of the half dozen clowns you see on TV every day.
7.
by p-e-w 7d ago
> But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. Ironically, that’s how I always imagined actual space
8.
by p-e-w 7d ago
> You try to build a mental model of this mystery person from a mysterious time I’ve read many ancient texts with great delight, and not once have I tried to “build a mental model” of their authors. It’s a dimension of literary analysis
9.
by p-e-w 7d ago
> By “police state” people generally mean one where day to day behavior, speech, and thought are tightly controlled by the government. That describes most Western countries today.
10.
by p-e-w 7d ago
> The value of the emotion it elicits is much lower than knowing the person who wrote it or in what historical or social background they did so. Then the value of many ancient texts must be close to zero, because we often know nothing ab
11.
by p-e-w 7d ago
> And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them. There isn’t, and has never been, a nation in human history where regul
12.
by p-e-w 7d ago
The funny thing is that countries commonly called “police states” aren’t, while countries not thought of as such are. Most Western countries have 2-3 times as many police officers per capita as China and Russia. Many people in China have ha
13.
by p-e-w 7d ago
> Don't be silly, only our high priests can. A strange framing, given that a gaming PC can now run models that absolutely crush frontier models from 18 months ago. You can do whatever you want with those, and 2 years from now, you’l
14.
by p-e-w 7d ago
> I for one don't even know why there's a forgery market for ancient pottery Because people desire owning ancient pottery and are therefore willing to pay for it.
15.
by p-e-w 8d ago
> Well, we name conjectures after the conjecturer not the (dis)prover That’s not universally true. Some conjectures are renamed after being proven. For example, Fermat’s Last Theorem is now sometimes called the Fermat-Wiles Theorem, the
16.
by p-e-w 8d ago
Sure. But a government agency has secretly rebuilt all the same infrastructure without Python, on a shoestring budget compared to what Big Tech is spending, yet it’s a lot more efficient than what they use, right?
17.
by p-e-w 8d ago
That’s not what the GP comment said though. They claimed that they are storing everything they can intercept, which is weapons grade horseshit.
18.
by p-e-w 8d ago
There’s no way a single datacenter costing a couple of billion dollars can store “all Internet traffic the NSA can access”, unless the traffic the NSA can access is a microscopic fraction of the total Internet traffic. Think about it. The I
19.
by p-e-w 8d ago
That’s not a message activists tend to care about though. In places where speech is dangerous enough for this to matter, there are usually far more immediate threats.
20.
by p-e-w 9d ago
> “Hi, tool author here.” A useful explanation of Burrows-Wheelers transform as used by bzip3 FWIW, the Burrows-Wheelers transform is also used by bzip2, so this isn’t a new feature even though that quote kinda sounds like it is.
21.
by p-e-w 9d ago
Why would they? The worst thing that can realistically happen is a $1-$5 billion fine a few years from now, which they only need to pay a few years after that when they have exhausted their legal remedies. That’s easy to calculate with, and
22.
by p-e-w 10d ago
> An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously mov
23.
by p-e-w 11d ago
95% of the top 10% are middle class, because the vast majority of the world’s population are middle or lower class.
24.
by p-e-w 11d ago
None of the countries you name is even close to SpaceX. Not even close. Their most ambitious prototypes are on par or behind the rocket SpaceX has been flying for a decade commercially.
25.
by p-e-w 11d ago
It blocks many shady domains, which stops many exploits before they ever reach your browser.
26.
by p-e-w 11d ago
It absolutely does help, because it blocks hundreds of thousands of shady origins.
27.
by p-e-w 11d ago
Telling you that you have power is one of the ways by which they ensure that you don’t have any power. Elections work the same way.
28.
by p-e-w 11d ago
The top 10% of the planet aren’t “the rich”, what a gross and incendiary misuse of the term.
29.
by p-e-w 11d ago
Indeed. At this point I’d say that the “green movement” has done more damage to the planet than the fossil fuel industry. The entire Western world (with the exception of France) pretty much stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago
30.
by p-e-w 11d ago
> Germany has its problems, but it's consistently in the top 15 most democratic nations in the world. According to what? Some think tank’s “democracy index”, carefully constructed to preserve the illusion that Western countries are

More ›