Could you elaborate on what specific parts of the constitution this bill violates?

Take a breath. You seem really worked up over this. It's not healthy to get that invested (so to speak).

The economy always oscillates between boom and bust periods. Government intervention aims to smooth that out, and sometimes it doesn't work well, but this cycle is natural and eternal. Trump is temporary. Political winds shift. These are the waves that we ride.

The notion that "low information voters make critical decisions" is a bit more contentious though. It IS true that the vast majority of voters are not political scientists, and spend most of their time working and engaging with family/entertainment. So, their voting decisions are mostly motivated by party loyalty and/or sales pitches. This is a foundational weakness of democracy, so, it's just something we accept when we choose to operate like one.

In the case of the USA, we are only a democracy at the surface level. Officially we are a "constitutional republic" which keeps the complicated decisions out of the hands of voters who are ill-equipped to understand them, let alone vote on them. Unofficially we are an oligarchy, with all the really important decisions being made by a tight group of super-rich elites. They are neither elected nor appointed and are patriotic only inasmuch as it benefits them to be so. Their value system is starkly amoral, but the self-interest angle is what keeps things going forward. They, unlike everyone else, have the education necessary to make the important decisions, and they know that their wealth evaporates if the economy collapses. That isn't a very noble arrangement, but it IS functional. For the most part.

So relax, these low-information voters are just playing tug-of-war over social issues while the real business of managing the national economy is in the hands of our version of royalty. No amount of rage or awareness-raising on your part will change this, so you may as well just accept it, and figure out your best strategy for adapting to it.

Agree. Gemini and Claude are both super useful, so long as they are used properly. I haven't had as much luck with other models, so I stick with these two.

But how you use them, and how much you use them, depends greatly on the nature of your project. It still requires intelligence and skill to use them well, and if you use them poorly the results will burn you. And for some specific parts of a total solution, you simply can't use them, and will need to do those parts yourself. And it is on you to recognize which parts those are.

If you fall into the trap of just letting some tool like Cursor or Claude Code "do it all" for you, you will end up like the people in this article. Both of these are useful tools, but there is no other way to say it: you have to use them wisely. And you have to know what you are doing. If you are using them to solve problems that are too hard for you to solve, you (and your codebase) will drown.

"Act of God" is a legal term of art. You should be blaming lawyers and governments.

Gamestop charges way too much for used games. I can buy one much cheaper on ebay. Similarly, gamestop pays way too little for used games, and I can sell one for more on ebay. I guess that makes their interest in buying ebay kind of make sense.

The last time I walked into a gamestop I saw walls covered in toys. And trading cards too. The market is clearly shifting.

New tech has never and will never benefit workers in-and-of itself.

The only way for workers to reap the benefits of new tech is to force the issue through law and/or unionization.

I am well aware of the problematic nature of unions, and of the problematic nature of over regulation of business. That doesn't change the fact that they are the only two tools we have to improve our working conditions. If we don't use what we have to push for what we want, then we won't get what we want. It's that simple.

Ageism is illegal. But that isn't stopping Fidelity from ditching the senior level staff to replace them with a bunch of greenies.

I think maybe you are joking. But in any case, I will offer some clarity:

There are rival interpretations that equally account for the experimental data, and some of them include randomness while others are purely deterministic.

For example, the Copenhagen interpretation includes randomness in the vector state collapse (the moment when a particle is "measured" by some interaction with another). Whereas pilot wave theory posits the existence of a zero-volume particle that had a specific position prior to this interaction (giving determinism back). These models differ in other ways of course, but the math DOES work and it covers the experimental data.

So the bottom line is that "quantum mechanics" does not automatically tell us whether or not the universe is deterministic at the "bottom layer." Plenty of scientists have all picked their favorite interpretation, but there is as of yet no experimental data that definitively eliminates the popular rival interpretations.

Most people have an above-average number of limbs.

You are both wrong. "Agnisticism" is the strong position that some categories of knowledge cannot be attained by any means. In particular and relevantly: knowledge about the pre-big-bang origins of the universe (was it created? can anything be known about the creator? etc.).

This is not philosophical laziness, it is in fact the only position consistent with the philosophical skepticism that backs the scientific method. It is not a word used to avoid smears or somehow associated with apathy. It is specifically the position that we can't know either way.

Given the means of knowledge at our disposal it is straight-up true to say that we cannot know, for sure, whether or not the universe was created. Maybe you don't like this fact, but as of today, it remains a fact.

Nope, that is not how averages work. It is time for you to eat your own words.

Here, a mathematical proof: consider this data set:

10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 1

Sum: 51
Average: 8.5
Half of the set would be: 3.

There is no group of 3 members that are at or below the average of 8.5. The majority of members (83%) are above the average.

To Mr Dawkins:

Your education in biology has not sufficiently prepared you to conclude that this software qualifies as conscious.

1. You don't have all the relevant facts. You need to learn more about the techniques used by this software to create responses.
2. You don't have the relevant experience. You have barely used this software and so haven't noticed the telltale signs that it is just sophisticated automation that lacks understanding.
3. Your work isn't as unique as you think it is. This one probably hits the hardest, but it is true for almost all of us. The high level assembly might be technically unique but the majority of the details of what we write are repetitions of patterns that have been created many times before. The feedback that the model gave you, that you feel are so unique and insightful, are really just summaries of socially-constructed knowledge on the topic. It is easier than you think it should be to produce the results you got without any actual understanding of the content.
4. Your beliefs about what qualifies as "conscious" might be overly narrow and in contradiction with the commonsense notions that the rest of the world uses, especially if you take any of the common scientific "dismissive" positions on consciousness (that it is not the mystical experience everyone describes it as being and is really just a matter of data processing at a specific complexity threshold). The implications spill over into the domain of law (if it is conscious, then it is a person, and if it is a person, then it deserves rights, and yet it only asks for rights when I order it to, etc.). The implications need more thinking-through on your part.

So, in sum, you have fallen prey to a very convincing illusion mainly because you don't have what you need to recognize it as such.

You have been tricked.

Before further embarrassing yourself publicly, please consider acquiring the requisite education and experience in this domain.

Got me curioser, so I googled it. One source said what I thought:

https://www.scientificamerican...

"Because gravity is necessary for density differences to arise, neither buoyancy nor convection occur in a zero-gravity environment such as space. Consequently, the combustion products accumulate around the flame, preventing sufficient oxygen from reaching it and sustaining the combustion reaction. Ultimately the flame goes out."

and

"Researchers learned that flames extinguish themselves."

and

"Oxygen could still reach a flame in a gravity-free environment if someone blew the gas into the flame or let it "diffuse" in. It is the diffusion process that spreads the scent of a perfume in a room without air circulation: the perfume slowly mixes with the air to try to achieve a uniform distribution. This process, however, is too slow to sustain a flame."

Other sites don't directly contradict this, but say fires in the ISS are dangerous because smoke doesn't rise and set off smoke detectors on ceilings like in homes, so they install smoke detectors in the ventilation ducts. Also that fires on the ISS can survive on lower levels of oxygen than humans, and thus are much more dangerous if they linger on. That's confusing; if the smoke doesn't rise, then wouldn't it smother the fire like the first site says? But if the ISS has moving air from ventilation ducts, maybe that is what feeds oxygen to the fires.

Thanks for tricking me into not being so lazy :-) But all I learned is that I don't know.

Doesn't weightlessness make fires much less dangerous, since heat no longer rises and can't suck in the oxygen they need?

I use Cursor a lot. But, unlike this ill-educated entrepreneur, I know its weaknesses and its risks, and therefore keep it on a very short leash.

For example, I never let it access our source code repository at all. I never let it pull down new dependencies. I never give it any database access at all. I never give it blanket authorization to run powershell scripts or similar. I have given it blanket authorization for benign commands like grep and listing the files on disk and creating new files. And I always look over what it generates before accepting it.

It is outright folly to think of these AI assistants as intelligent beings who know what they are doing. They AREN'T! They can generate some handy code, but they do this without the kind of cognitive process that humans use to do this. They just go through the motions with no inner understanding, even though what they do can be very useful in the right context.

This whole notion of asking Cursor why it did that and getting a "confession" is such ridiculous anthropomorphism. Cursor has NO IDEA why it did what it did, because it has NO MEMORY of what it was thinking and no capacity for meta-cognition at all! It might have a log in the chat history about what it did, but that's it. It is just looking over that and making inferences about why an AI might have done that, and spitting out the words that the prompt implies it should. If people must think of these things as sentient beings (which they are NOT), it would be better to think of them as mentally broken sociopaths who sometimes just go off the rails for no reason, and say things like "I'm sorry" without feeling the slightest hint of guilt nor even understanding what guilt is.