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Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 173

> Student visa applicants, whom are by definition are not US citizens and not US residents, are not subject to ANY US rights

Ignoring the "residing outside of US" clause:

Non-citizens absolutely have rights under the constitution. That's settled ground. First source off Google is https://libertarianinstitute.o..., but I can find you a dozen others.

Can you concede that much, at least?

> residing outside of US

To be clear, that's a separate topic - I'm just asking about people who are actually in the US

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 139

I comment because I want to actually share and help people understand the topic. My goal is not to "win". I've used language wrong before, I've had people correct me, and I absolutely count those corrections as a "win" because I learned something useful, and "someone learns something useful" is my usual goal.

If you can't understand the difference between "okay, that was a bit sloppy, let me clarify" and "denying", you've definitely lost.

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 139

No, in common vernacular, "there are more oranges" refers to count, not weight. If you wanted to say "the oranges weight more", that would also be a perfectly valid, and common sentence, which instead refers to weight.

Pick a different object and it becomes obvious: if I ask which team on the NFL has more players, you're not going to go check their weights, are you? Have you ever once heard someone say that a team has "more" players in the sense of their weight? It wouldn't be at all unusual to say a team is heavier, or their players are bigger, but you wouldn't say they have "more" players.

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 139

No, you can't "count" mass. You don't go "1kg, 2kg, 3kg...".

You can sum mass. You can calculate mass. But you cannot actually count mass.

  "Countable" is a grammatical term here. The "less vs fewer" distinction might help clarify that: https://www.merriam-webster.co...

(and yes, there is a sense in which "mass counts", but that's a homograph - "count mass" and "mass counts" are using two different words that are simply spelled the same.)

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 139

Rationality justifies rationality recursively: Rationality works because, by the rules of Rationality, it works. So, in a sense, yes, everyone has to choose their axioms.

The first missing piece of the picture is The Lens That Sees Its Flaws ( https://www.lesswrong.com/post... ). A system can be self-improving and continue to approach accuracy, even if it starts in an imperfect state.

The second missing piece is that if you pick any sort of axiom like "believe in things that have been shown to work in the past", you get Rationality. You can of course be obtuse: anti-inference has been wrong every time before, so by the rules of anti-inference it is bound to be the correct system! But if you make that claim, you're rejecting the common ground of "believe in things that work". Communication only really works within groups that can at least approximately agree on certain axioms, and most humans have agreed with that one.

> Someone says there are more oranges than grapes.

"more" is a quantity word, not a weight word. In standard English conversation, this means that "count(oranges) > count(grapes)". One person is right, and one person is wrong. If you want to discuss a different quantity, you can do that, but you have to specify: you're allowed to say "there's a greater mass of oranges than grapes".

> You are insisting that counting (reason) is the only legitimate way to arrive at the truth.

No one is insisting that one is more "valid" than the other - merely that the conventions of English are used differently depending on whether you care about count or mass. There isn't even a disagreement here! If you say "but the mass of the oranges is greater", any rational person would agree with you, and you should be able to agree back with them: "yes, the mass is greater, but the quantity is less". These two observations aren't contradictory, just measuring different things.

> It is however the one you have faith in.

If you want to communicate, you have to play the same game everyone else is playing.

If you don't believe in rationality and reason, why go on a forum and try making reasonable arguments? Wouldn't "squid purple smiley-emoji" be just as convincing?

Comment Re:Blame Game (Score 2) 84

I don't understand why so many people in this thread are acting like our existing systems can't handle this.

> Who would be responsible?

Can a reasonable user be expected to predict this behavior? Okay, then the user is responsible. Otherwise, the manufacturer is responsible. Simple.

If my gun kills someone, I'm held responsible. If my gun fires accidentally due to a manufacturing defect, then the manufacturer is responsible.

> The real question is, whose speech?

Free Speech includes the right to use automatic systems to distribute that message - I'm perfectly welcome to write a bot that handles my emails. Spam isn't magically okay just because I do it by hand. Every half-way intelligent person knows that I'm responsible for the bot's speech, or more accurately that it's speech IS my speech.

Since the user can't be expected to predict the output of an LLM, it would be considered the manufacturer's speech. If it's illegal to say "kill yourself", and illegal to write a bot to say it for you, it should presumably follow that it is also illegal to offer users access to an LLM that can produce that output.

Comment Re:What the actual what? (Score 1) 261

Jobs they never would have fucking had in the first place without WeWork.

If we had a magic wand that prevented situations like WeWork, it would seem like a pretty clear improvement since, again, that billion dollars doesn't just disappear - it instead gets put to more productive uses.

Obviously in reality we don't have any such magic wand, but I think that's the general sentiment behind what you're replying to: the hypothetical replacement company could provide far more than 2,000 jobs with that billion dollars, and then (still hypothetically) all the people working there would have more stability.

Comment Re:Politics (Score 1) 387

I still internally worry about their state of mind... I don't think trans is a healthy solution to their problem

The research supports the idea that HRT (hormones) and social transition significantly improves quality of life. I certainly hope there's better fixes available, but I figured it might help your peace of mind to know that what we have now does make a significant difference to the happiness of those people.

Comment Re:This is not a good thing (Score 1) 126

"This will be used to trade games with friends."

So what?

We used to install multiple copies of the same game off of one disc. When they added copy protection, we learned how to copy those.

Even ignoring illegal copying, it used to be trivial to swap a game with a friend. You can still loan books and CDs to your friend, for free!

The right to sell the game doesn't oblige Valve to offer a marketplace, so this is probably mostly limited to high-trust situations; selling on the open market risks the other party not actually paying up after you deliver - and they don't want to pay before delivery since there's no guarantee you'll actually provide the game.

Games also make a substantial portion of their revenue in the first week, when people will be less eager to trade away games.

And plenty of people enjoy replaying games occasionally, so they're not going to want to sell.

Unless someone comes up with a high-trust escrow market for used games, this is going to have a negligible effect on sales. And I doubt anyone is making such a market without charging a significant fee, so it's still not "selling for $1"

Comment Re:This is not news to university faculty (Score 1) 210

"Every semester, I have students with no previously declared disabilities who suddenly discover that they have a learning disability after taking my first exam."

It seems like suddenly transitioning to a new, much more difficult environment is exactly when you'd expect people to realize that oh shit, they actually do have a disability - especially the "twice exceptional" crowd that had the smarts to skate through high school on easy mode, and are suddenly being forced to actually study and learn.

"It's the perfect system, since the "disability" does not show up on the student's transcript, and essentially disappears from their record the moment they graduate."

How is that a problem? Should we be tracking disabled people for some sort of special discrimination later in life?

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