I vividly remember a CS homework assignment back in college where we had to get a word frequency table for a corpus to try to identify authorship. We had to do it in Java. I sanity-checked my work before I started by doing a tiny shell one-liner (something like tr '...some punctuation regex...' '\n' | sort | uniq -c). The Java program was maybe 50-100 lines and ran ten times slower. I learned a lesson all right, not necessarily the intended one, but one which was useful in my computing career.

As Heinlein said, "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal."

Nothing but a truly massive fine will stop them picking and choosing which laws to obey. A billion is a drop in the bucket, the cost of doing business. A hundred billion, maybe they'll pay a bit more attention.

Facebook had an "AI" assistant like this maybe 10 years ago. They were hoping to collect training data to build actual models, but transformers weren't around yet and it fizzled out. But there the lag was obvious; any LLM today responds far faster than any human could. There's no man behind the curtain.

We can't cleave to the standards of previous decades. By the standards you are advocating, there are no left-leaning parties in the UK or Germany either - the consensus has shifted far to the right in the last 4 decades.

What *is* meaningful is the orientation of the parties relative to current society, and that's how everyone does and should interpret them. For example, the Democrats want to move the existing for-profit health system towards single-payer, which is leftist. In the UK, the Tories want to move the NHS toward more privatization, which is rightist. Everyone understands this, so this nitpicking relative to a standard frozen in time in 1970 is completely unhelpful and pure pedantry.

I agree with you that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and not an apartheid state, but just as a factual correction, Iran has one Jewish member of parliament, as the Jewish community in Iran has one allocated MP by law.

Israel also has state land reserved for Jewish citizens, only conscripts Jewish citizens to the IDF, leading to unequal disbursement of benefits and opportunities reserved for veterans, and has housing policies akin to redlining in the US. Whether you think these rise to the level of an apartheid state - and I do not - they are certainly deep flaws in its implementation of democracy. And that is just within Israel proper, never mind the occupied territories.

Also, you make it sound like Hamas are just terrorizing the innocent civilian population of Gaza - but Hamas enjoys 70-85% support amongst the populace, even after the October 7th attacks, according to polls conducted by international organizations. Elections or no, terrorist organization though they are, sadly, this is what the people of Gaza want. Similar to how the war in Ukraine is supported by a majority of Russians living inside Russia.

Finally, bombing does not have to involve conventional bomber aircraft like the B-52. Most bombing is done by drones, close air support fighters, and fighter-bombers, plus of course people include rockets and artillery when they mean carpet-bombing. I happen to think that the response to October 7th is justified but let's not shy away from the nuance.

I am Hungarian and lived through the end of Communism. When the masses revolt, the dictator doesn't always fall - sometimes they send tanks and murder everyone revolting. It happened in my country in '56, in Czechoslovakia in '68, and in many places around the world at different times throughout history.

Heck most of them take screenshots by taking a photo of a laptop screen with their phone.

When I finally moved from a Comcast area to a Fios area, it was the best thing ever. I've paid a flat 39.99 per month for the last 4 years, with never a change in price, hidden fees, not even taxes on top, and I've never had an outage or a hiccup. Comcast made me want to scratch my eyes out, and Fios makes me forget I even have an ISP. It just works, and that's how it should be.

Including the macbook's trackpad? Because I loathe every other trackpad on every other laptop ever manufactured, but Apple's trackpads actually beat the mouse for me. It's a combination of the massive size, incredible sensitivity, and smart software to eliminate the effect of accidental touches.

Are you sure? I use Firefox and the few times I've been forced to use MS 365 I've had zero problems with it. If Firefox can do it, surely Chrome can too.

You're effectively punishing scale, but scale is necessary for some things. We wouldn't have Unix and C if Bell hadn't been big enough to be able to afford a research division.

We need a mix of small and large companies in every sector, but your solution would make it cost-prohibitive to get big.

Instead of scale, let's punish anti-competitive behavior. That's what the current system is designed to do, and it's designed well. The problems are ones of execution, not of basic idea.

I'm currently enrolled in a US PhD program and my stipend is 40,000 per year. We are going to be receiving a raise to 47k-48k soon. Not sure when the GP did their PhD but times, prices, and stipends change quickly.

As to your other point, the US spends over twice as much as Canada on R&D as a fraction of GDP. In fact, in absolute numbers it is the world's greatest spender, and very high in relative terms as well. While I dislike the GOP's spending priorities as much as the next person, let's not jump onto every single issue with the same axe to grind.

Daniel Galouye published Simulacron-3 in 1964, before PKD ever explored the subject (Ubik, 1969). Let's give credit where credit is due.

Galouye explored his simulation as implemented entirely in hardware and software, and gave lots of details on the implementation. Many things in the Matrix come from Simulacron-3, like breaking out of the simulation, glitches when the simulation is being changed, agents, even the use of telephone booths as portals to the level above. The tech is from the 1960s, but everything about it is recognizable to us today.

PKD's Ubik instead depicted it as some kind of chemically-induced group hallucination, happening inside people's heads, in a world where telepaths and precogs were common, with all details handwaved away or attributed to psychics, eventually devolving into a typical PKD surrealistic fantasy.

I thought Simulacron-3 was by far the better book. It was directly adapted into the Thirteenth Floor, and inspired The Matrix. PKD's ideas got turned into movies like Minority Report instead.

That's objectively not true, given that 3 million more people voted for her than Trump.

She was unpopular, no argument there, but Trump was even more deeply unpopular. Just not in the right places.