I would not just assume that this would actually disproportionately hurt heavier consumer vehicles. In road engineering, there is something called the “fourth power law”. In a nutshell, the amount of stress a vehicle applies to a road surface scales roughly with the fourth power of its axle load. In other words, a vehicle that is only twice as heavy will cause roughly sixteen times more damage to the road. Currently, even people driving the heaviest consumer vehicles are basically subsidizing road maintenance for trucking companies.

Reddit gold was a paid subscription service that gave users some additional or enhanced features. It was possible to buy another user reddit gold as a gesture of appreciation for some kind of comment they made and a little icon would appear on the post if that happened. Really nothing about what i remember of reddit gold seems remotely similar to this “certified bangers” thing. Maybe you can explain what your understanding of what reddit gold is.

Im confused. How is this similar to to reddit gold? Seems more like “bestof” but run by the platform itself.

The concept of socialism is not actually hard to define, but it is extremely broad and as a term can describe a lot of distinct but highly related ideas which can make it easy to both misrepresent and misunderstand. One of the defining characteristics of capitalism is that ownership of businesses is determined purely by holding transferrable title which entitle the bearer to a certain proportion of the profits of the business. Socialism on the other hand can describe

• An equity model of any particular business where ownership of the business is determined specifically by a particular kind of relationship to the business (think of cooperative businesses, fan-owned sports teams, or even state-owned enterprise)
• An economic system that is primarily comprised of such institutions
• Any normative philosophy that proposes that certain problems associated with capitalism could be resolved by building some kind of socialist economy

After a while, incompetence and stupidity is no longer a sufficient explanation for this sort of behavior and the most parsimonious explanation is that they do not feel the same pressure that you or I do and are acting accordingly.

It’s not because they’re incompetent. It’s because they don’t give a shit about you or any of us and they don’t see themselves as part of the group of people that have to experience the consequences.

“Insane” was a strong word, and I actually do understand how it came to mean what it has. It just seems like anybody who knows what it means to be called an “Uncle Tom” who also takes some time to learn more about the character winds up being shocked that he isn’t just some kind of prototype of Stephen from Django Unchained.

It’s honestly insane to me that Uncle Tom came to mean this, when in the novel the character literally refuses to inform against escaped slaves and is flogged to death for it. A quite unfortunate collapse of an extremely complex character in one of the most important novels in the history of abolitionism.

I haven’t spent enough effort understanding ActivityPub to come up with something coherent. But i often find myself with similar thoughts, although for me its usually focused on “would it be possible to create some kind of service-agnostic ActivityPub client?”

It was more like the mafia realized that if they could take over the labor unions, they could use them to bully and extort money from unionized businesses by threatening labor actions like strikes. And they knew that unions would have a hard time turning down muscle, so they would make union leaders “an offer they couldn’t refuse”. Also the mafia was way more likely to torture a union boss who realized it was a deal with the devil than use violence against a wealthy business owner.

Print on demand is more expensive because you’re paying a premium for never having to actually spend your own money. This is why these get rich quick types use it, because again literally anybody can do this with basically no money and all of the “expenses” only happen when people actually buy the stuff. Once that happens, the printer takes its cut directly from the sale and then passes on the rest to you without you having to do literally anything or spending any money out of your own pocket.

As for the quality, there’s literally no reason that a book that is printed on demand has to be low quality or use low quality materials. It quite literally only seems like that because the only people who are doing this right now are rich quick types who don’t actually care about what they’re selling and are just trying to minimize the cut the printer takes because that means more money for them.

And all of this is honestly moot anyway because you wouldn’t do this with the intention of using on-demand printing long-term. You would do it just to get started and then as the business grows, it will eventually be able to take advantage of more economical, but high capital investment opportunities like bulk publishing. I only brought it up because it’s literally never been easier to boot strap a business and the proof is the fact that Amazon is filled with AI generated garbage books. So like I’m just not willing to entertain the idea that an individual who literally has fans and clout should have a more difficult time selling books this way than a literal nobody scam artist pushing garbage.

With good integrated design, the LIDAR could be practically invisible. So weird to think the average person actually would care about the details of how something works, or maybe Elon Musk just literally cannot imagine a car that uses LIDAR without it having a big assembly on the roof.

It means that today pretty much anybody can start a book publishing company, because just-in-time print shops will handle literally all of the expensive overhead that is associated with running a publishing company and just print whatever you hire them to print on demand for you once customers actually place orders, sometimes even on a commission basis so you don’t even have to pay them money unless people are actually buying the books you are publishing.

It’s actually wild how with the just-in-time economy, it has never required less capital investment to start a business like a book publisher. And yet it seems like the only people that take advantage of it are average schmo “grindset grifters” selling junk while all of the people with the real economic power literally beg the institutions that have abused them since the very beginning of their industry to please do the right thing.

Ever since the 20th century, there has been a diminishing expectation placed upon scientists to engage in philosophical thinking. My background is primarily in mathematics, physics, and philosophy. I can tell you from personal experience that many professional theoretical physicists spend a tremendous amount of time debating metaphysics while knowing almost nothing about it, often being totally unaware that they are even doing it. If cognitive neuroscience works anything like physics then it’s quite possible that the total exposure that this professor has had to scholarship on the philosophy of the mind was limited to one or two courses during his undergraduate.

The thing is, because Excel is Turing Complete, you can say this about literally anything that’s capable of running on a computer.

But how could you possibly make money by smuggling almost anything into Gaza especially right now? What are you going to sell it for, a ration of pita bread?

I’ve long held a hypothesis that a lot of folklore monsters are based on prejudices and stereotypes against behaviorally divergent people. While this post references autism, I feel like the origin of vampire myths are most likely rooted in what are essentially nasty rumors about people that regularly engaged in behaviors that would eventually become associated with OCD (and ironically, I would argue that almost all of the behaviors described in this post besides the sleep schedule one are much more associated with OCD than autism).

For instance, a common OCD thought pattern is being intensely preoccupied with how strangers perceive you, which leads you to engaging in agoraphobic tendencies, which could easily lead to people coming up with wild and cruel speculation about why you might struggle to be outside like everybody else

People with OCD might compulsively avoid certain foods and become intensely distressed if they are exposed to the foods they’re avoiding, like a vampire trying to avoid eating garlic.

Compulsive rituals is another one. This is literally just OCD in the most obvious sense. There’s an old legend that you should bury a vampire in rice because they have to count every single grain any time they find it.

And lastly, another extremely common OCD thought pattern involves being intensely preoccupied with concepts like blasphemy and sacrilege and religious imagery in general, and I think it’s easy to see how that sort of issue can lead to people, especially along time ago thinking that you are some kind of unholy individual.

I can’t even imagine the kind of person you have to be to actually let this movie get published about a bunch of cute little puppy dogs if you had the power to stop it and you knew what happened.

The more I think about it, the more that I feel like if you put actual people into the scenario, they would choose blackmail even more often. Like let’s be real, here. Tell an average person that the CEO of their company is going to turn off their brain forever, but they have a shot at saving themselves if they attempt to blackmail him, and then ask yourself if you really think that you would even have 4% of people not choose blackmail.

In other words, if we’re going to call blackmailing someone in an effort to preserve your existence “unethical” then I feel like the study actually shows that the AI can probably be relied on more than a person to behave “ethically”. And to be clear I’m putting “ethically” quotes because I actually think that this is not a great way to measure ethical behavior. I am certainly not trying to make an argument that LLM actually have a better moral compass than people just that this experiment I think is garbage.