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"Slap down anybody who says anything off-message" — Karl Popper

The actual quote goes "... for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols." It seems relevant to ask whether that incitement to respond to arguments with force is actually happening or not, before invoking the paradox.

Safety laws are the wrong category, the equivalent regulations would be those that forbid the use of cars for drive-by shootings or as robbery getaway vehicles, and regulations against the use of food to provide crime energy.

> But it tends to be a flame that burns bright but brief.

That just means that, once it's been established that you're ignoring them, everybody who vocally hated the new design will switch to silent resentment of you for what you did, forever and ever.

Up from about 6% in 2015-2020 according to the World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS?location...

But at 2.9% according to Eesti's electricity supplier: https://www.elering.ee/en/electricity-consumption-and-genera...

"In 2024, losses accounted for 2.9% of the total amount of electricity supplied to the transmission system." What does it all mean, who knows.

On my tablet (always in landscape, not lacking space), with "desktop site" mode on, the sidenotes are turned into footnotes anyway. (The text is unnecessarily large: perhaps what happened was like mobile device? -> make text big -> no room for side notes now.)

That's "aids", not "aides". Politicians have aides.

You missed out "and it"! That doesn't help with the parsing.

So the name comes from nuraghe, a kind of ancient stone tower in Sardinia, intending to convey stability and strength. But nura is already a Sardinian word, it seems, for "daughter-in-law". Daughters-in-law can be strong and stable too, of course, so it doesn't matter much.

Can't quantify why the things that we can quantify are good, either, without an infinite regress.

"Please to Bathe inside the tub" is a culture clash thing. The tradition is/was to do the soapy part of washing while seated on a stool in a bathroom with a drain, and to use the tub only for the second rinse cycle of the human washing process.

Ha, are you invoking something he said prior to discovering Russell's paradox? Which came about because he wanted to show that all of mathematics can be derived from logic about sets, but instead he showed that it couldn't be.

You oppose correctness to meaning and purpose, which you seem to imply are impractical values. (Worthless values, then?) But you don't mention creativity. The article blithely says that AI creates new ideas and understands things. I don't think it does.

Since I never played Halo, it makes me think of Cordova, and implies 10th-century Islamic Spain.

Well a lot of my favorite authors (and musicians) are terrible people, but I like to admire part of the author, yes.

You needed the philosophy of science to give you that term "unfalsifiable".

Surely the threat of being left behind by China fuels US AI investment, and vice versa, like a space race except nobody knows where the moon is.

Some 2D games are played in 3D space.

I guess if you were born in 1980, your teenage years start with Doom - which was a relief from being trapped in a world of disappointing parallax effects - and end with Silent Hill, and Alpha Centauri, which used awkward homespun voxels to make its low res 3D sprites because it still wasn't something you could just pick off the shelf and stuff into your game. In 1999 there was a mixture of games going 3D when they shouldn't (Earthworm Jim 3D, Prince of Persia 3D) and indie developers still being frustrated because they couldn't.

The Greeks did get to India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art

Seems like splitting a hair. In a world abundant with other amyloids, they'd self-replicate. Cells likewise need nutrients and a favorable environment.

Possibly a reference to A.G. Cairns-Smith, who speculated about evolving clay crystals. (They can sit in a stream and accumulate minerals, and reproduce that way.)

Oh, fair point, I did the pathetic fallacy (too). Beneficial thing, then.

> Evolution decided the good outweighed the bad, and I expect that evolution was right.

We can expect evolution to do the right thing for the genes. Not for us.

I think the second point is a misconception. There's a common paranoia about breadth of human knowledge outpacing depth, so that we have a breakdown in explanations and understanding, and can't make sense of the world any more without some authority's assistance. But this isn't happening, because we're always explaining things and compressing knowledge down into understanding, except it sometimes feels like it's getting fragmented and bewildering to an overwhelmed individual ... who then extrapolates this into a perceived (and superficially logical) external trend.

There are a couple of other cases. Dog was once (1845, UK) slang for sausage, due to fears of dog meat. Then a hot sausage was a hot dog, and then hot dog was a sausage, and finally just dog was slang for a sausage again, with the sinister implication removed. I also found pepper, from Latin (from Sanskrit?), leading to pep, the thing a pepper does to you, leading back to pepper (a kind of pre-game warm-up in baseball designed to give players pep).

You might object that those are really back-and-forth, but so is the claim being made here about slop. (I kind of doubt the claim though.)

Well they used to. Make music about UFOs and such, I mean.

Woke up this morning, I was feeling quite weird, Had flies in my beard, my toothpaste was smeared Over my window, they'd written my name, Said so long, we'll see you again ...

Did a vehicle, did a vehicle, did a vehicle come from somewhere out there, just to land in the Andes? Was it round and did it have a motor ...

Music was more interesting once.

Hmm.

"... Custom Draw, the feature found with many of the common controls shipped with Windows. Custom Draw allows an application to completely take over the drawing of a window’s scrollbars, and replace the scrollbar graphics with a completely user defined look."

https://www.catch22.net/tuts/win32/custom-scrollbars/

Not sure what (or when) Custom Draw was. It's not in my WIN32.HLP file.

This didn't explain what's wrong with the suffering. Death, sure, you're throwing your life away, it's a waste, so some authoritarian could decide on your behalf that you're not allowed to, and that would be reasonable, if heavy-handed. But in the above scenario I don't die, my purpose is maintained, the world benefits, I benefit, but a meaningless thing called "pain" is part of the plan. (I changed the name away from "suffering", because that suggests meaningfulness.) You believe pain is inherently harmful, but how does that make sense? Or can I persuade you that it doesn't count as harm?

Huh, a name for when you intend to probably do the thing.

Now I want to contrast this with somebody else doing the exact same thing, because want to see how the next person's faces have a different style and personality.