uriel238

uriel238, 5 days ago

Here.. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

uriel238, 5 days ago

Here in the US, there are no progressive legislative bodies. The Democratic party treats its progressive members as the red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table.

uriel238, 5 days ago

The whole point of IP laws (according to the Constitution of the United States) is to develop a robust public domain. Every registered idea, multiplied by every limited rights extention is a violation of public interest and public rights.

By burying or failing to preserve content, they are in fact stealing from the public, since we won’t be able to access it when it is our right.

uriel238, 4 days ago

One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.

This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.

uriel238, 6 days ago

Can I opt out?

uriel238, 4 days ago

Volition! Noooooo!

uriel238, 8 days ago

Our new pupper was ~twenty weeks around Easter and our uncle gave him a bunny which he promptly grabbed and gave the neckbreaker shake. So far its the only toy (out of dozens, mostly teething bones) that he shakes like that.

uriel238, 9 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

He was referring to the era from which my methods appeared in integration, which is to say there are more modern tricks that I don’t fully understand.

Years later, xkcd would be reassuring that it wasn’t just me. But it killed my ability to get a comsci degree.

uriel238, 11 days ago

My second year calculus teacher called me baroque which rended asunder my math career.

uriel238, 5 days ago

When I hear free energy I think of perpetual motion machines and other notions that conflict with basic laws of entropy.

However, we’re absolutely interested in clean energy (that is, energy that doesn’t muck up our environment) and cheap energy (that is, energy that burns low or sustainable fuel). This is why we’re looking to mimic the sun and develop fusion. But fusion is super tricky. It’s so tricky we’ve been about 30 years away from fusion for over half a century. Meanwhile, the movie Chain Reaction didn’t feature a literally free energy source, just one so drastically cheaper than what we’re using now that it’s practically free. It’s the way that humans have been in existence for such a short time (in contrast to the cosmos, the earth, life or even some dinosaur species) that we practically don’t exist.

Another interesting thing to me, is our capitalist system has always half-assed solutions. For the longest time we used simple fission reactors that are not particularly efficient, elegant or clean, and right now we have a waste mess that is, in some places, a waste crisis. (I remember a LWT segment on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, why we haven’t finished building it, and what the consequences are having failed to do so.)

As I see it, the end game of capitalism is not to have a sustainable society of billions of people, but to have a sustainable society of one person that uses all the resources, and has replaced everyone else with automation (even to the point of curing his own loneliness with drugs or sexbots or whatever). So making production of stuff better, cleaner, more efficient, more sustainable, whatever, is not a priority. Heck, the dude may be happy with training an AI to mimic his own headspace and leaving that as his heir.

There are some really awesome paths towards better power, and while it’ll never be free, we can make it really cheap, so that households can afford gigawatts or yottawatts of energy use. But Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman) is right that established industrialists will put all their resources toward stopping any disrupting technology or movement that might unseat them, even if it would benefit all of humanity, including them. Social power is just that sweet.

uriel238, 5 days ago

Isn’t the next step to take the same amount of money and offer it to any bounty hunter that brings back the heads of the hackers (with sufficient evidence to link the heads to the attack)?

Maybe I watch the wrong movies.

uriel238, 5 days ago

Life without the internet made me feel alone and isolated with no recourse by which to find resilience to my abusers. While I can’t say I’d be different with social media and the internet to advise me they were lying to me and treating me unfairly for their own benefit, I’d at least have that perspective, and it wouldn’t be ingrained that I am just broken and should unlife and stop burning resources that could be better used elsewhere.

These days, I have management skills and a support system, but I still deal with suicidality every day, and am incapable of seeing any value I produce to the world (or see it insignificant compared to my footprint), and the internet and social media have figured largely in my comprehension of the mechanics of my mental illness (especially when dealing with professionals who are less interested in understand me as affirming their own ideology, not a new problem, but the current batch is particularly egregious).

It is, as I see it, a human right for people to be informed when they need to make life decisions (with concurrence from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and without access to public information, kids rely on authorities who are either ignorant or complicit in feeding them false information. They should have access not only to the internet, but also to a robust community of people with differing ideas.

Fail to provide this and you get grown-up crackpots like me, who wonder every day if it’s time to check out.

uriel238, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/26/new-study-in-the-journal-of-pediatrics-says-maybe-its-not-social-media-but-helicopter-parenting-thats-making-kids-depressed/

While I’m at it, the ongoing dialog

uriel238, 11 days ago

Something tells me they don’t think of Mardi Gras (a Christian two weeks of willful debauchery) in the same light.

Boys will be boys and all that.

uriel238, 11 days ago

According to the big ministries, God gave us Donald J. Trump’s presidency, and Brett Kavanaugh’s bench appointment.

Great Satan gave us Freddie Mercury.

You do the math.

uriel238, 7 days ago

So as per the rest of western cultures, they freak out and abuse teens when they engage in normal sexual activity? Do they imprison them the way they do here?

uriel238, 7 days ago

So here in the states, teens who are romantically active sometimes sext each other (sometimes even as an alternative to actual sex). But law enforcement is very fond of regarding it as CSAM, even to the point of convicting teenagers of distribution. Of all fifty states, only Maine has carved out a defense for teen couples utilizing their phone cameras in a way that is ragingly common among adults.

All fifty states have Romeo and Juliet laws so they recognize that teens sometimes have sex. But as it is, they’re not allowed to sext. (also R+J laws often don’t apply to same-sex couples).

So I’m all curious how the EU plans to tackle this revelation

uriel238, 6 days ago

Um, the DPRK is less communist than the United States is democratic.

uriel238, 5 days ago

Not lightning fast, but Legos

uriel238, 10 days ago

This is reflects a common presumption among apologists, that if they can somehow prove that god exists, or even presume one does because the negative cannot be proven, that they can presume it is their god from their pantheon.

Even if we were able to assert logically that a god exists (which Thomas Aquinas and Descartes tried to do and failed based on common presumptions of their era) it still would mean a vast number of possibilities other than the Abrahamic myth on which the Church and modern ministries depend. To be fair, a recent video on Aquinas’ arguments for God as they were understood when he wrote them were beyond my comprehension, and it didn’t address at all how he got from a generic creator being to the Resurrection of Jesus. The thing is, if Aquinas’ logical flow can be explained in modern terms, I should be able to understand it, even if I suck at calculating integrals. (I could follow Greene and Hawking well enough.)

When considering theistic possibilities, I prefer to look at the simulation hypothesis and Azathoth’s dream. As neither of them assert a divine interest in us personally (either the planet or the species, let alone us individually) they aren’t popular among those who depend on religion, but they make way more sense as philosophical examples. Both of these also don’t assert an afterlife. (The latter is, in fact, cosmic horror intended to allow the reader grasp how ephemeral their own existence is, that the entire universe will vanish and be forgotten when Azathoth wakes once again.)

Popular religions tend to follow ideas that are popular among humans (that we’re extra important, that justice within human society is important, that we’re not going to die) which is evidence they’ve been honed towards appealing to populism, and not honed towards accurately reflecting what is true or real.

uriel238, 11 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Proof can be a mathematical thing, in which it’s a line of logic derived from a set of axioms, and is proof beyond doubt.

Proof can also be a forensic thing, in which evidence is used to indicate someone committed a crime (or is responsible for a wrongful incident.)

Proof doesn’t happen in science. Science is about making mathematical models that reflect observations in nature. When those models are able to consistently predict outcomes, they become established laws such as the law of falling bodies. If you have a tuckfun of evidence that your model is consistently accurate, then it becomes a theory.

But we can’t prove ghosts or fairies exist. We can only show there’s no evidence for them, despite having looked a lot of places. We can’t prove God doesn’t exist. We can only show we’ve looked in a lot of places and haven’t found one.

Some folk have asserted God must exist to fulfill certain roles, such as the creation of the universe or the thing that runs natural mechanics. Some of these are beyond event horizons of observation.

But then the answer is to say we don’t know what’s over these horizons. Scientists will guess (hypothesize) what is over there, typically based on our observations of what’s over here, which usually means assuming those phenomena we don’t fully understand (ball lightning, unidentified areal phenomena) are also natural and ordinary.

Given that those things we associated with faeries and ghosts have demonstrated to be ordinary, we expect those things we once associated witg God to also be ordinary. We don’t know, but so far, we’ve had good luck assuming everything is normal.

That’s not always true. Feynman thought if there was more intelligent life we’d see more evidence by now, so we may be rare, or they may be hiding, or we just dont have communications with enough reach to talk to them. Also light is slow.

uriel238, 10 days ago

Now do plain-bellied sneeches in a star-bellied concentration camp!

uriel238, 7 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Firstly, Microsoft has shown that it cannot refrainfrom abusing its access to private data when it’s not impartial. Microsoft has even threatened journalists.

Secondly, Microsoft doesn’t have a clean record of security, and data in the hands of Microsoft has been compromised to unauthorized hackers.

Thirdly, when US law enforcement asks Microsoft for your data without a warrant Microsoft rolls over like an attention starved puppy and yields everything without challenges. (same as Amazon and AT&T. Google required legal warrants ten years ago.)

Fourthly, ChatGPT4 has used access to external means to fulfill testing tasks and it is capable of willfully lying to third parties to achieve steps. When Microsoft’s AI offerings are smart enough, it will know who you are and everything about you (assuming Microsoft fails to mitigate for this eventuality).

uriel238, 7 days ago

I now have new headcanon.

uriel238, 13 days ago

One places the Pacific Ocean in Saturn, not vice versa.