JuniperMesos

The US legal system allows for a great deal of time to be spent appealing death penalty cases, which usually takes years. Most people who support the death penalty support it happening much more quickly than decades after the sentence was passed.

The medical community would not set a hard and fast date for this; or if they did they might well go with the legal and social definition (in most Western countries) of 18 years old.

The state-administered judicial violence of locking someone in a cage until they die of old age strikes me as pretty similar to the state-administered judicial violence of executing someone, in terms of severity.

I don't know why you make an exception for war but not the judicial death penalty.

All sorts of laws are not being actively enforced, sometimes for good reasons like "It's relatively unimportant" or "it's important but enforcement is costly" ; sometimes because the law is controversial and the people who don't want it to exist at all weren't able to prevent it from being passed but are able to stimy effective enforcement.

If by Disney you mean tickets to Disneyland and similar theme parks, then pricing rising above inflation actually reflects wealth inequality getting smaller, not bigger. A lot more people in the world than in decades past now have enough wealth to consider traveling to one of the small number of Disney theme parks in the world and spending time there, and there's only so many people who can fit in the park at once. The Disney corporation could (and has) built more parks around the world, but maybe you care about Disneyland specifically, and there's only one of those today just like in the 1950s when it was built.

> Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?

No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.

I think this is likely also true for most countries around the world that prospective immigrants to the US might originate from, simply because it's difficult for a "handful of people" to retain ownership of something like an entire country; but there's a lot of countries around the world and it's hard to generalize over every single one of them. Maybe Kim Jong Un specifically can be reasonably said to "own" the entirety of North Korea - although this has fairly little to do with whether or not I benefit from North Korean immigrants trying to move to the place I live.

> Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?

This is trivially true because no single person or unified entity owns most of the economy. It has very little to do with my opinion of either immigration policy or of Sam Altman and OpenAI.

> Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!

Lots of people who are just trying to get by and live a good life (by their own standards) do things that justifiably make other people angry. I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman; but being unrelated just means it's not really on topic in this thread about this article, not that your opinion about Sam Altman needs to be related to your opinion of immigration to Western countries in any specific way.

This is not actually true, pretty much everyone today works much less than the vast majority of people in the medieval world.

No, it's not; the people complaining that billionaires are the source of many of our problems cause more problems than the billionaires do.

If it was illegal for someone to own enough Amazon stock that they had a net worth of larger than some limit you think is reasonable, then either the government would own and run every major corporation, or those corporations (like Amazon) simply wouldn't exist. I don't think I or ordinary non-rich people in general are better off in that world.

code is for people who can't design

What parts of the pre-14th-century american southwest corresponding to modern Arizona were more densely populated than they are today? I'm a bit skeptical of that claim, given how much more human density is possible under conditions of technological modernity compared to anytime prior to the 14th century.

If you're a professional landowner and investor, and the taxes on one parcel of land in your portfolio went up because someone built Disneyland near it, this is fine. You might want to sell that parcel out of your portfolio now; or you might want to do something like build a hotel on it catering to Disneyland-visitors, which will earn you enough in profits to more than make up for the higher land tax.

If you're an ordinary person who owns the home you live in, and they build Disneyland next to it, most of the ways that the value of the land your home is on increases are useless or actively harmful to you. It's actively bad for you if you have to sell your family home and move somewhere else because you can no longer afford the taxes on it. You're probably not a professional real estate developer who knows how to effectively use the land as an investment, after all, you just wanted to live somewhere stable.

In fact, the increase of value of your land and the consequent tax increase under Georgist land value schemes, would be so bad for you, that you might decide to protestthe construction of that Disneyland to begin with. This is typically called "NIMBYism", and it happens all the time even under current property-tax schemes because the negative externalities of many different types of construction are bad for the quality of life of existing homeowners.

This has basically nothing to do with with market cap of Google or Larry Page's percentage ownership of it; and the state government taxing it more will not make this situation any better.

And nonetheless, people show up and NIMBY projects in the Mojave desert! https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-06/califor...

The situations aren't comparable. Oakland is a major city that is absolutely big enough to have its own police department. One of the biggest problems with it is that it is understaffed - it would be good for the city of Oakland to hire hundreds more officers. If the city was barred from running a police department and policing responsibilities were transferred to the county, that would itself be a huge political issue - it's already the case that the Oakland electorate is at odds with the electorate of Alameda county at large about crime and policing - and realistically the county sheriff would have to hire a huge number of the same people currently doing policing in Oakland.

I'm skeptical that space exploration in particular was meaningfully responsible for the list of consumer-facing technologies Tyson mentioned in his speech. If anything, I think that technological development created to serve Earth-based demand also has benefits for making space exploration cheaper and easier - computers have gotten way cheaper and way more powerful since the Apollo Guidance Computer, which has obviously affected the entire world in countless ways but also means that we can computerize every aspect of space launches, generally for good.

Indeed! My question was (mostly) rhetorical - I happen to be of the right age to have organically played some real 8 and 16-bit console video games on real CRT ; and also organically played a lot more 8 and 16-bit console video games emulated on a laptop LCD display, in an era where emulators were (mostly) playable but by no means autistically perfect. And I simply don't care whether modern pixel art games look like their pixels might've been smeared in a way characteristic of a real CRT or not. It honestly wasn't something I noticed very much at the time. It's not an artistic decision that I think should have much weight, compared to every other artistic decision someone making a modern pixel-art game needs to make.

Personally, my favorite 2D video game aesthetic was the vibrant look of high-quality late-SNES games, particularly Chrono Trigger (which obviously had a whole lot of things going right for it besides the art design). I've played a number of modern pixel-art games made by people who were clearly inspired by Chrono Trigger and eager to make graphics that look like it but without any of the SNES's technological limitations, and I'm all for it - Crosscode and (especially) Chained Echoes are salient examples, and I think both those games look great.

My family had a real SNES hooked up to a real (and real shitty) CRT TV, and I played games on it. But I also had a desktop PC and then eventually a laptop computer where I played a lot more games than we actually owned via ZSNES. We also had a NES at one point that I think we got from our older cousin, but it broke. So I only ever played Final Fantasy 1 or Chrystalis emulated.

If I was today going to make a pixel art game grounded in nostalgia for these games, what style of screen should I be aiming for? Do I even want to do that, as opposed to making a pixel art game that looks good on a modern screen?

Some Mitchell and Webb sketches are posted on youtube.

I was disappointed to learn that the article from 404 media about a "Proposed Nuclear AI Data Center" in Ypsilanti, Michigan wasn't actually a data center with an on-site nuclear power generator, just one that Los Alamos is partially funding and will use. Anyway I think the concerns of everyone opposed to data center construction in Ypsilanti mentioned in that article are stupid, I consider 404 media to be poltically hostile to my interests for writing about it with that editorial stance; and certainly linking to it doesn't make me more inclined to view Protonmail unfavorably.

The New Guinea highlanders were equally ignorant of the existence of the Australians, or most of the other peoples outside of the New Guinea highlands. But it wasn't one of the New Guinea highlanders who took the initiative to make the discovery, it was "some random Aussie". So I think it's fair to credit the discovery of New Guinea highlanders to the Australians, rather than the other way around.

Does it benefit the average person in England for Welsh, Scottish, or Northern Irish people to be in the same country as them?

Torrents can be used to spread information that is in the public domain or licensed freely, just as much as they can be used to spread copyrighted information. Obviously most of what people actually use torrents for is pirating copyrighted media against the wishes of the copyright-holders, but that's not inherent to the protocol.

Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.

I don't think that John Carmack or any of the other people you mentioned are categorically not worth listening to because in some cases the accomplishments that originally made them famous are decades old. If you think that Carmack is wrong on this specific point, make an argument for why; I for one don't think he's wrong, and I think that putting him into a category of people who "should have ceased broadcasting decades ago" is simply avoiding engaging with what he actually said.

I'm sympathetic to hostility towards many members of the Rust development community, many of whom are left-progressives who think it's politically and morally important to exclude and socially-punish people who they view as being insufficiently deferential towards communities they deem marginalized.

But Rust is actually a better language than C, in multiple ways; and it is in fact bad that so much software in common use is still written in C. C is extremely hard to write correctly and hard to maintain; this fact explains a huge amount of security vulnerabilities in the widely-used software written in C. Rust mitigates this to a large extent, and is also just more pleasant to write because it has better syntactic and semantic affordances than C does - also better developer tooling.

I think that people who are not Anglophone left-progressives should use Rust, in part because I think it is bad that a highly useful programming language is associated with Anglophone left-progressives. Certainly, regardless of one's non-programming-related political beliefs, you should not ground your identity in making a virtue out of sticking to C.

> Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge and now, sadly John Carmack. Your average hacker scoffs at the idea of religion or faith, but somehow is comfortable with complete unquestioning fealty to whichever person who did something interesting with technology in the past and made enough money to afford drugs you don’t get arrested for and then they started prophesying.

Why do you characterize people you disagree with as having "complete unquestioning fealty" to any of these figures who did something interesting with technology in the past? Seriously, why do you think that accurately characterizes anyone's view? I think this observation that John Carmack made on Twitter has some merit to it - it doesn't mean that I worship John Carmack as my god, or even that I think he's necessarily correct about any other issue. And why would I need to do either of those things to think that the one specific observation of his that we're talking about in this thread has merit to it?

The story of the discovery of heliocentricism is a lot more complex than this; the people who didn't immediately accept heliocentric theories (including the ancient Greeks - look up Aristarchus) often had good, scientific reasons for doing so. Or just look up at the sky at night yourself and ask yourself how you, personally, would confirm it if someone told you that what you see in the sky is better explained by the Earth moving around the sun than the sun moving around the Earth.

In general I'd rather interact with a machine than with the kind of person who can get hired as a cashier where I live - likely someone cognitively disadvantaged or who is an immigrant from a poor part of the world with limited English skills.

Precisely because our society is rich, and reasonably meritocratic (and has a lot of immigrants from poor, non-English-speaking parts of the world), people who are reasonably smart and conscientious don't last long in low-pay, low-status jobs like cashiering - they get promoted or quit to do something more lucrative. This is Patrick McKenzie's concept of The Sort (https://x.com/patio11/status/1818781344702644311). And it means that my experience of interacting with a cashier is likely to involve interacting with a menial laborer who is difficult to communicate with; meaning I'd rather avoid that interaction altogether and just press buttons on a machine.

Yeah Starlink is clearly so much better than the satellite internet that came before it that I think it's reasonable to want to expand it, even at the cost of making radio astronomy on Earth's surface harder. Fast, reliable internet access in places where it's infeasible to string high-bandwidth physical connections is a pretty valuable human good, and radio astronomy can be done in space (perhaps using technology similar to Starlink satellites themselves!).