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ArbitraryValue

@ ArbitraryValue @sh.itjust.works

Posts
2
Comments
730
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • They blew up a boat far offshore, killed eleven people, and called it justice

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  • Not a great article, IMO. Some points seem very weak. (Escalation? Escalation by whom?) The focus on international law is hardly relevant to how things are actually done in the world. I think the NYT does a better job of analyzing this incident.

    My own thoughts: designating drug cartels as military targets rather than simply criminals seems like it could be reasonable. They're not less organized or less brutal than terrorist groups that have been designated as military targets in the past. Violence against them has the potential to make the world a better place, if that violence successfully disrupts their operations. With that said, having the President unilaterally designate them as such is executive overreach, and having Trump in particular do it is also likely to be a mistake in practice (or worse, an action done with no concern about being correct) even if it could be justified in principle. The shameless celebration of killing is a separate problem and both the symptom of and the cause of a more widespread moral decay.

  • Just keep coding

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  • Your options are an ugly wall that works or the beautiful lack of a wall.

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • What is your perspective on a government permitting activities that are technically illegal?

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  • The rules of my building are an interesting toy model of this. Technically I'm supposed to have carpets everywhere (I don't and no one else whose unit I've been in does) and even painting a room a different color requires board approval and a bunch of fees. In practice, many rules are not enforced against people who don't make trouble. A neighbor of mine even has a dog - not exactly a subtle violation. I suspect that all those rules are a response to the fact that it is legally really hard to evict someone. You can't just say "He's an asshole and all his neighbors hate him." But if fact if he's breaking a whole lot of rules (just like everyone else) then you can decide to make an issue of it in his case.

    We're seeing this happen on a national scale with people like Lisa Cook now. She refuses to leave her job so Trump is threatening to have her criminally charged with mortgage fraud. Pretty much no one is ever criminally charged with mortgage fraud, but if the feds look closely at anyone's life then they will certainly find an error on a mortgage application or one of other countless possible crimes.

  • It's Time for Americans to Start Talking About "Soft Secession"

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  • The ability of red states to outright defy a Democratic federal government that followed the rules was quite limited. I don't see defiance by blue states against a government that does not follow the rules going very far. It would be nice if states had enough autonomy in this context to act as a safety valve on federal power (and a lot closer to the original intent of the Constitution) but almost no one actually supports that as a matter of principle so both parties take turns attacking it when they control the federal government and now here we are...

  • OK Rep. defends history cartoon claiming slavery was ‘better than being killed’

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  • I think that there's more to learn from history than just actions and consequences. There is "Who should I be?" rather than just "What should I do in this situation?" You can see what sorts of people tended to do good, and part of that is recognizing what they thought was bad and what was simply in accordance with the morality of the time; disappointing, perhaps, from our modern point of view but not the sign of a flaw greater than the one we have ourselves when we fail to morally innovate.

    I also think that there is advancement in morality, not just arbitrarily changes like in fashion. Maybe some things were better in the past (many other people seem to think so) but overall life for almost everyone is better now than it has ever been and that's because of progress not just in technology but in the rules that we have for relating to each other. I expect that I could probably be convinced that the people of the future were right and I was wrong if I knew what the future was, because I think that the future will probably be better than the present.

    That's why I place so much emphasis on moral humility. I expect that somewhere, I'm making a mistake. I might agree with some modern-day zealots in principle, but because I'm not sure that I'm right, I don't agree with their methods. That, I think, is the most important lesson of history.

  • OK Rep. defends history cartoon claiming slavery was ‘better than being killed’

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  • The topic of judging historical figures by modern standards is an important one and actually something that I support discussing in school. (But, for the record, not in the way this article describes.) Im not saying "teaching" because I think there's no one right answer, but the fact that prevailing moral standards were different in the past should be considered. (As should the implication that some of the things we do now will be considered wrong in the future.) If I were teaching it, my intent would be to present celebrating the accomplishments of historical figures without dismissing the bad things they did as one reasonable option, and learning the facts about history but choosing to celebrate only those people who acted entirely according to the students' modern moral standards as another.

    I would also like to include the idea of intellectual humility while making decisions under uncertainty. Often you have to make a decision even thought you know you might be making a mistake, so how should the fact that you might be wrong affect what you decide? What might historical figures have done differently if they weren't sure that they were right? The intent is to have children realize that it can be a bad idea to do something if the consequences of being wrong are awful, even if you think you're probably not wrong. But maybe that's too much moralizing for public school...

  • Epstein files released to Congress are mostly ‘recycled’ documents, Democrat says

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  • I continue to fail to understand how the full documents are simultaneously too devastating for Trump to release them but not devastating enough for Biden to have released them.

  • Live to eat or eat to live?

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  • It's straight to Hell for you, no Purgatory.

  • Ideal car

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  • I think that's what I was actually thinking of but I mixed it up.

  • Ideal car

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  • I read an article once about a guy who got a NO PLATE licence plate and ended up being automatically blamed whenever a cop wrote in that a car had no licence plate. I wonder what 0X00000 would do.

  • Live to eat or eat to live?

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  • Watch out, you're straying close to heresy.

    In relation to the process of digestion, the Catholic Church's teaching has been expressed in this way: "The substance of Christ's body is not subject to processes of digestion or to any chemical reactions. The qualities of bread of course behave in their normal way, undergoing a change as they are affected by digestion. Our Lord's substantial presence ceases as these qualities cease to retain those characteristics proper to bread."

  • Ideal car

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  • You can have non-alphanumeric characters on license plates? What do the cops do if they need to catch you? Do they put out an APB for emoticons?

  • In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses

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  • I'm not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave something sweet then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of some other desserts (baked sweets are often the worst offenders) is relatively high. That means that a lot can be gained simply by replacing one dessert with a different, equally tasty dessert. Hence my ice cream advocacy.

  • In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses

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  • Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.

  • In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses

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  • I don't see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.

  • In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses

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  • With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don't eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.

    Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.

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    What do you love the look of despite it being impractical, uncomfortable, or high maintenance?

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  • I definitely am interested in it, although I'm worried about buying a car from a new company's first production run. I haven't driven an electric car before but maybe it'll be fun.

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    What do you love the look of despite it being impractical, uncomfortable, or high maintenance?

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  • I don't mind hair everywhere (although I wouldn't get a dog with long fur because they overheat so easily) but I don't understand how people who don't live on a ranch take care of herding breeds. Australian cattle dogs are really popular in New York City but I would never dare to get one in an apartment. It was hard enough to have a dog with a strong prey drive - he could not be off-leash anywhere without a tall fence and double-layer gates, and he would forget that he was on a leash and take off at full speed whenever he saw a squirrel. I admit I envied the people with guarding breeds a little - my sister's pit bull mix looked like a crossbreed between a crocodile and a pig but that dog just followed my sister everywhere, even indoors, leash or no leash.