>"In the case of phone records there's no need for warrants as said records are public."

That's not true:

Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 138 S.Ct. 2206 (2018), is a landmark United States Supreme Court case concerning the privacy of historical cell site location information (CSLI). The Court held that the government violates the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution when it accesses historical CSLI records containing the physical locations of cellphones without a search warrant.

Prior to Carpenter, government entities could obtain cellphone location records from service providers by claiming the information was required as part of an investigation. After Carpenter, government entities are required to obtain a search warrant to access that information.

Almost positive a state tax agency using cell-phone records would run afoul of the 4th amendment, especially if they didn't get a search warrant which almost certainly they didn't

Here's the thing, though. A simulation implies that the conductors of the simulation have complete control of every quantum particle in it and would run it in a deterministic way.

Well not really, because in a simulation surely there would be certain outcomes that are predetermined (maybe the creators are testing a hypothesis and 9/11 was always going to happen, for example) Then every variable that went into making 9/11 happen was also predetermined, etc. In which case the constellation of humans involved in the event of "9/11" would have to be induced somehow to take certain actions, like some important individual got the flu the week they handed student visas to the terrorists, something like that.

So if the universe is a simulation, free will becomes malleable and possibly illusory.

Or something along the lines of choice is an illusion. You thought you were making an informed decision to buy a red Tesla, but what if you were always going to buy the red Tesla, in this universe at least. Is that free will?

No, I think it's more along the lines of given infinite time and energy an intelligence would evolve to where they could simulate a universe, and eventually an infinite number of universes which if that's the case the likelihood that our universe is one of those simulations is very high. Not quite a tautology.

>As soon as it happened, the creators would just rewind it and patch the bug.

We live in the version where most bugs have been patched, lol!

But just imagine, you're thoughts aren't your own, you were programmed on some quantum level to think/act that way. Maybe the simulation chose who your parents were going to be. Would be crazy if true. But then again I doubt very much human beings have a handle even on our basic day-to-day reality, let alone contemplate something like a simulated universe.

>Saying we are in a simulation doesn't provide any meaning or any course of action.

Just asking the question can result in developing tests or experiments that, if in fact we were in a simulation, would work. Or let's say such an experiment is successful and scientists can "hack" the simulation and increase the speed of light or something along those lines. Or they could disprove it entirely and maybe some new physics would come out of that. Who knows?

It helps that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman owns 8% of Reddit. Is there a shareholder discount for training I wonder?

A chair is a chair...

...A rock with a pillow, is a rock with a pillow.

I had a "coding" challenge that was obviously the company trying to get free work from the interview. It was a PHP coding challenge where they wanted you to parse data in a very specific format where it was obvious that your work during the "challenge" would be useful to their business. But they wanted you to do it for free under the guise of an "interview".

>and it will gladly spit out 4 images of a happily married black couple.

It's ironic, because 70% of black children are born to single mothers.

Sure, 'conservative' media universe, like (the former) Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Glenn Beck et al. tends to cater to the pieties of an older, whiter demographic whether that's fear of illegals, gold speculation, anti-mask paranoia, etc.

However left-wing out lets also have their own conspiratorial pieties. Just watch 10 mins of democracynow or look at the headlines of jacobin.com or thenation.com. Articles meant to spike the ire and get the clicks of lefty progressives

People literally leaving their car windows down in San Francisco so junkies and criminals don't smash them trying to break in...
They wish it was just the proverbial stereo being stolen.

Lol!

https://abc7news.com/san-franc...