cbolton

I'm not defending what the Iranian government did to their people. I suppose I am defending their reaction (closing the strait) to the assassination of their head of state and other government officials.

The reaction was predictable and very much understandable from a human psychology perspective. So in my mind the responsibility for the strait being closed rests mostly with the US.

> The president is fine, btw. It was the "supreme leader" that got killed

In Iran the supreme leader is the head of state. In the US it's the president.

> he is known to have ordered the extermination of 600,000 Syrian muslims

Do you mean the Syrian civil war? According to Wikipedia it's 650,000 deaths on all sides together (more than half being combatants). I'm not sure it's fair to attribute all these deaths to Iran. By the way these numbers are similar to those of the Iraq War of GWB.

Would you say that blocking the strait is more unacceptable than bombing the US and killing the President and most high-ranking government officials? Just trying to establish a scale on what's acceptable in terms of war crimes, international law and such.

I mean you can connect the computer to sprinklers that activate when the system detects rain in the simulation if that's what you're after (that was just an aside to note that of course you don't get wet from a simulation disconnected from the real world).

But I guess that was a distraction from the main point: If consciousness emerges from biological processes in the brain connected to the world with a body, why would it not emerge from a simulation of these processes connected to the real world with sensors and actuators?

It seems like circular reasoning to me: The simulation is not like the real thing because it lacks the special thing that enables consciousness (that's Searle's biological naturalism). And it lacks what enables consciousness because it's not the real thing (that's the weather analogy).

Well I don't understand how one can accept this argument. I mean if you believe in mind-body dualism it can make sense. But AFAIK Searle doesn't, instead he holds that there's something special about the brain biology that enables consciousness and that you won't find in a computer. I don't see why that would be the case if the computer can simulate the real world, and I find Searle's argument against simulation, that simulating rain doesn't make you wet, falls flat: it can make things wet in simulation, and if you connect it to sprinklers it will make you wet.

I'm curious what would be a good example of something where this falls short of what you need?

I mean this Typst package just lets you import the notebook content in your Typst document. All the formatting is done in Typst which is also what you use for your final output...

> My only complaint is that all functions are pure functions; there is not a way (that I know of) to share state from one function invocation to the next.

Indeed user-defined functions are pure. You can work around it like the suiji package[1] does: have the function return a value that you pass as argument to the next call.

[1] Random number generator in Typst: https://typst.app/universe/package/suiji/

For what's it's worth you can render Jupyter notebooks directly from Typst using the Callisto package. You can then style the notebook content as if it was written in Typst, using show rules, etc:

  #import "@preview/callisto:0.2.5"
  #callisto.render(nb: json("notebook.ipynb"))

though as the sibling comment says Quarto also works great for this, and Typst doesn't do epub (yet?)

I had to follow your link to get it: I hadn't realized that 57 is not prime. At least I'm in good company.

Remember the XZ backdoor? Or do you mean that Rust build script attacks are less likely? (Probably true but not much comfort)

I wonder if using Typst would be a viable solution: the compiler can be built into a wasm component that runs locally in the browser (that's what the Typst webapp does) and it generates good PDFs with working selection/copy/paste.

There's even a package (cmarker) than can translate Markdown to Typst which could be enough for a MVP.

Privacy addresses... Isn't it silly to talk of privacy if the prefix doesn't change?

The first picture looks like aura quartz to me (crystal with an artificial metal coating). Is it natural?

On the other hand I read chicken is much worse than beef in terms of animal suffering. But that's much more dependent on the producer than the energy calculation and climate impact I guess.

Consider the cost on local civilians of the Vietnam and Iraq wars (the GWB war likely killed more Iraqi civilians that Hussein did in 24 years). And the literal trillions of dollar these wars costed. And the real possibility that regime change could have occurred anyway by less horrific means. Are you getting at a tiny silver lining or do you actually think these wars were remotely a good idea?

Or at least stop starting wars.

In this case it's especially depressing that the war's rationale exists only because Trump wanted to tank the deal made by Obama. Which was not a perfect deal but better than the status quo back then, and much better than any likely outcome of this war.

The non-profit still controls the board doesn't it?

I asked Gemini to reproduce the poem "The Road Not Taken". I got it in full (as far as I can tell without Gemini fetching anything from the web). I didn't provide any verse of the poem so I guess that counts as a clean room "implementation"?

Just calling out the false equivalence (Grok self-regulation: dragging their feet and doing the absolute minimum too late after deflecting all blame on the users, while the competition proactively tries to harden the models against such use)

I don't think that's a candid description of how X handled this.

> Yes we are now dealing with an automated Photoshop. And somehow the people in charge have decided to do something about it, probably more for political or maybe darker reasons.

I don't get what's difficult to understand or believe here. Grok causes a big issue in practice right now, a larger issue than photoshop, and it should be easy for X to regulate it themselves like the competition does but they don't, so the state intervenes.

> maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?

You're basically asking "why do a surgical strike when you can do carpet bombing"? A surgical strike is used to target the actual problem. With carpet bombing you mostly cause collateral damage.

> Anyone skilled at photoshop

So let's say there are two ways to do something illegal. The first requires skills from the perpetrator, is tricky to regulate, and is generally speaking not a widespread issue in practice. The second way is a no brainer even for young children to use, is easy to regulate, and is becoming a huge issue in practice. Then it makes sense to regulate only the second.

> People can now 3D print guns at home, or at least parts that when assembled can make a functioning firearm. Are now 3D printer makers to blame if someone gets killed with a 3D printed gun?

Tricky question, but a more accurate comparison would be with a company that runs a service to 3D print guns (= generating the image) and shoot with them in the street (= publishing on X) automatically for you and keeps accepting illegal requests while the competitors have no issue blocking them.

> Where do we draw the line at tools in terms of effort required, between when the tool bares the responsibility and not just the human using the tool to do illegal things?

That's also a tricky question, but generally you don't really need to know precisely where to draw the line. It suffices to know that something is definitely on the wrong side of the line, like X here.

Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?

I think systemd is the one to learn now if you want to learn Linux. Maybe someone can make a Unix from Scratch for people more interested in the Unix philosophy than Linux per se.

Isn't it of course both? What do you think?

Yeah there's no reason it should be a linear function, but it's a moot point anyway until we define what it would mean to have "X times more abilities".

My point is that having tycoons with 1,000,000 times the wealth of the median person is not a fair distribution, no matter which reasonable function you choose.

If you think superficially of "fair" like in a game, then yes a winner-take-all system can be fair. But when talking about socioeconomics, I think fairness goes a bit deeper. For example I would say a society with a lottery that picks one winner and tortures all others is not fair to those who lose (even though it's game-fair).

Right, and the risk aspect is only a second order effect. The main effect applies even when you restrict yourself to low-risk investments: it's simply that the more you have, the more you can invest so the more you make on average. But yeah, higher risk tolerance means you can also aim for higher returns.

Would that help in any way with the increasing concentration of wealth? It doesn't seem to be particularly tied to land.

> The term "capital" is an abstraction that's not helpful here

It was not so abstract when Musk came up with 44 billion to buy Twitter... The details are complicated but in the end it's still wealth.

> Bezos owns 9% of Amazon stock. That's why he's "rich." What should happen to that stock? What happens to his voting control over Amazon?

Presumably he would sell the stock to pay the wealth tax (or whatever mechanism is there to limit wealth)?

As for the voting control: when you're down to 9% this ship has sailed hasn't it? Anyway I don't think society has a moral obligation to allow individuals personal control of a trillion dollar company because they founded it (and if society disagrees with me, super-voting shares can be used as Alphabet does).

Isn't there also an effect like the second billion dollar being easier to get than the first? I mean all your points are good but the fact that the system allows you to leverage your wealth to increase it is probably the most important factor to get to $250B.

> Going from zero to billionaire in two generations actually says something remarkable about our system.

This data point doesn't distinguish between a system that fairly rewards abilities, and one that works like a lottery. My guess is that the US is in between: it unfairly rewards abilities, and chance plays a large role.

Taking Jeff Bezos as example: 1) he certainly has remarkable abilities but maybe not 1,000,000 times more than the median American, yet he has about 1,000,000 times the wealth; 2) it's plausible that the US population of 350M includes several people with abilities similar to Bezos yet no notable wealth due to various circumstances. Both points suggest an unfair system.