Do you honestly believe that mass debt forgiveness -- after COVID was already over! -- was a necessary emergency response to the pandemic? Suspending payments (and interest) during the pandemic made perfect sense, and that was not struck down. I don't recall that it was even challenged.

No, the debt forgiveness clearly had nothing to do with the (already-ended) emergency, it was just an attempt to skirt the law, and the courts were quite correct to strike it down as executive overreach. If Biden wanted to do that, he should have lobbied Congress to change the law. He didn't do that, of course, because he knew Congress would refuse -- even though his party held both houses.

Your comment mischaracterizes what has happened. The Supreme Court has absolutely bent over backwards to let Trump do what he wants in temporary rulings, including jumping in to to stay lower-court orders that no previous court would even have responded to. But their on-the-merits rulings, when they have to issue a full opinion, have been much less friendly to Trump. There have been some incredibly bad ones (e.g. immunity) but Trump has lost more than he has won in SCOTUS final judgements.

So, "People With Disabilities Don't Exist" then?

My father was recently paralyzed by Guillain-Barré, so I'll let him know, thanks.

You're treating the current law as a standard handed down from on high, incontrovertible and guaranteed-correct, which must be applied verbatim. And, indeed, laws must be applied as written... but that doesn't mean the laws are perfect forever. Laws are written within a context, and when the context changes, the laws have to change.

In a world where all cars are driven by humans, if you want to protect highway workers one way to do it is to attach serious prison time to killing one and to publicize that fact loudly so that all of the drivers know that they should be especially cautious around highway workers, even more than they would around other sorts of pedestrians (let's put aside the moral debate about whether we actually should protect highway workers more than other pedestrians).

In a world where some cars are driven by software systems, that strategy doesn't really work -- as your question correctly points out -- but the right conclusion isn't "Therefore self-driving cars shouldn't be allowed", or "Therefore we must identify some scapegoat human at the company to put in prison". The right conclusion is "Therefore we need a different kind of regulation to keep highway workers safe from self-driving cars". What should that be? I can think of lots of possibilities, both pro-active (e.g. require self-driving vehicles to demonstrate in rigorous testing that their vehicles stay far from highway workers, with whatever minimum distance you want to specify) and reactive (severe penalties, up to heavy fines and/or immediate loss of permission to operate). The point is that the law should choose an approach that works with the new context.

And? They still drive 10% better than the average driver. And I realize that number is just an example, not intended to be accurate, but I still feel like I should point out that, statistically, it's too low.

The fact that the self-driving cars will all concentrate their worst behaviors in the same regions of the space of all driving conditions doesn't change the fact that, on average, they're quite a bit safer than human drivers. This wouldn't be true if the roads somehow changed so that the problematic-for-self-driving scenarios predominated, but they don't.

So you consider most human drivers too dangerous to be on public roads.

You're taking a binary position (too dangerous to be on public roads), so you should expect people to evaluate your position in a binary way. Your other position, trying to position Waymo safety within the wide continuum of driver safety, is more nuanced.

My position is that if they're statistically safer than average human drivers, which makes them far safer than the worst human drivers on the road, then replacing human-driven cars with self-driving cars makes the roads safer. This is straightforwardly obvious. It doesn't mean the companies shouldn't be held accountable for their failures, and certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect them to to continue working on improvements.

This might work when there is a simple, easy search that can verify a fact. But that's often not the case. In my experience most cases of hallucination are cases where the LLM needs a fact mid-response, and the fact check requires both a non-trivial query and complex evaluation of the response data, sometimes involving judgement calls. When that happens, the LLM just gets lazy and goes with its guess rather than doing the check.

I'm speaking in the context of advanced models, mind, not the kind of thing that was available in 2022, nor the kind of thing that is available in Google search's limited-capability model, or open source models. Those are far more prone to hallucination. I won't say that, say, Claude Opus never hallucinates, because it does... but the hallucinations are common only when the models is being pushed hard, operating near the limits of its capacity, which makes it prone to taking shortcuts.

Well, I think Trump would be immediately stopped by the courts, too. Probably faster than they stopped Biden, since they've very reasonably gotten intensely skeptical of almost everything this administration does.

Partisanship aside, presidents really should obey the law. If the law is bad, the solution is to change it, not to break it. Yes, that means we need a functioning Congress, something we haven't had for quite some time, but that's still no reason to break the law.

Indeed, truth and accuracy is important to me, and I think it should be important to everyone. It baffles me that so many people don't seem to care about whether what they believe or say is true. I recognize that those people who care are often in the minority, but that just makes it harder to understand, not easier.

What is this devilry?

Never seen one before! Is that basically a filter coffee thing with the filter around all sides for convenience?

My main filter (it's the one at work) is one of these:

https://www.nisbets.co.uk/novo...

It takes a rather large paper filter. Less convenient for one cup, but it'll crank out 12, and keep them warm while cranking out 12 more.

Lower cost but not lower risk.

Why are people so I'm live with it? It's worked pretty well so far. Turns out global warming is the massive elephant in the room and will be fast now destructive than all the nuclear accidents including Chernobyl, the weapons ones and everything put together times 100. And all the major economies with lower carbon footprints have substantial nuclear energy in the mix.

Germany is the worst of all the comparable European states.

They are the worst in terms of absolute numbers and the worst in terms of improvement.

What they appear to have is a very good PR campaign based on unrealised future promises.

Is the future nuclear? Probably not too a major extent but to dismiss the efficacy up to now you kind of have to dismiss carbon dioxide as a big problem.

What's a coffee pad?

Mostly I drink kirkland signature filter these days (at work) and whatever's available locally in a cafetiere at home.

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

I think you tried to the wrong person. I was quoting the op.

Either that or it's a persistent urban legend.

The Soviets decided that they could save money because the probability of those reactors failing was very small.

Not really. They decided they could save money because they were short of cash and engaged in an arms race that they couldn't keep up in. They wanted something to bolster their weapons programme as well as generating power.

So they built a reactor with a void coefficient of 4.7!

Nothing like that has ever been built outside of the USSR. It's a completely mental design and of literally no bearing on anyone who isn't in the USSR. No one's built anything like that for power generation outside and a defunct empire won't make anyone build one like that either.

In both cases, the risks were known, and in both cases they were downplayed by the people making the decisions. Soviet or democratic, both systems failed.

The magnitude is somewhat different. Chernobyl was way worse, and wasn't assisted by being hit with a tsunami. Orders of magnitude more people dead. Orders of magnitude radiation released. Orders of magnitude bigger exclusion zone.

So the whole "yah but they both failed" is about akin to saying Starmer is no better than Tuss because they're both bad.

Nothing is perfectly safe (not wind or solar either). Everything is a money/death tradeoff. Including renewables. And coal. Which as you may know is needed to smelt the iron ore required to build renewables and nuclear (though less per GW for nuclear).