82 karma · joined May 1, 2024
and if not, why not? is it because people who have a house are good people and deserve it, while CHILDREN who are born to the wrong parents are bad people and don't?
My mother spanked me when I misbehaved. She caused real pain as punishment.
It was never cruel.
Punishment and cruelty are not equivalent.
Please note, I am not in favor of spanking children, and never spanked mine.
Now as to your final point, that justice is the state taking revenge on behalf of the victims. I replied to you above that I see the validity of this, and for the same reasons you give (discourage eternal feuds). And for those same reasons Justice is restraint. At most equivalent harm, no more than an eye for an eye.
I think it was your anger that made you say these ethics we both share are bullshit rules designed to hurt your family.
Now in the current case, for that point to stand, we need to ensure that the prisoners have in fact harmed identifiable others. Google tells me "Roughly 40% of inmates in Texas prisons are incarcerated for non-violent offenses". Thus 40% of the time, there is no cause for vengeance.
And where prison is vengeance, if it is just, it needs to be restrained. Not cruel. Not unusual. Just as punishment is not cruelty, justice is not cruelty.
For other readers, as I mentioned above, while I see a valid ethical stance behind NoMoreNicksLeft's anger and hurt, I do not share it. I seek mercy, and as for Justice, "Justice is mine sayeth the Lord"-- in other words, I leave it to God. I find it sick that the US, the "land of the free" has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Look, I've had bad interactions with bonafide unredeemable unrehabilitable psychopaths, and I'd like to see such people locked up for life. But I do not wish them cruelty beyond the innate cruelty of life behind bars.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you present your view, and also see it's validity-- that one purpose of prison is for the government to take a measured and limited 'revenge' for the victims of harm. Where the alternative is blood feuds.
Thus prison should not be comfortable, for those rightfully convicted of crimes involving harm TO OTHERS.
But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.
Your comment on which god you might choose suggest you are not a fan of mercy. Have you ever made a mistake and wished for mercy for yourself? Have you ever received forgiveness that maybe you didn't think was deserved, if even only from you family?
I can agree with you that justice calls for punishment in response to a harm, and thus harming the person who caused the first harm. And if one considers any intentional harm to another as cruelty, then yes, "the purpose of punishment is cruelty". However, justice also limits the cruelty. The earliest example is "an eye for an eye"-- because the prior system was "a death for an eye" or "I burn your village for an eye", and Hammurabi saw that this lead to endless blood feuds. Vendetta, i.e. you hurt me so now I cause you and your family as much pain as I possibly can, that is not justice.
In fact, I was taking your side in this argument. Many others talk about prison as rehabilitation and keeping society safe, totally dropping the psychological need of the victim for some sense of vengeance. And while I agree with those others, and prefer to leave the vengeance to God rather than to the prison system, I took your side and legitimized the victims need for vengeance.
I am sorry that you have such anger that you saw this as bullshit rules from someone who doesn't care for you and wants to disadvantage you.
That's a pretty messed up morality. I don't even know where to start on this one.
How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
Its also messed up ethics.
The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta. And from the first time this ever came up it came up as the government saying justice should be balanced. "eye for an eye" == "Punishment fits the crime"
Here is one example where knowledge was well maintained over 12000 years.
https://indigenous.sl.nsw.gov.au/recent-updates/ancient-abor...
Maybe now the wakeup call is loud enough to actually wake more people?
for example, a reliance on apple wallet, instead of an open standard.
With that quibble aside, I do like the basic structure of your solution.
prof.dr.Edsger W.Dijkstra's views: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
I humbly add my own.
Natural language is valuable for the things it doesn't say. The ambiguity is core to the functionality. Which can be very helpful when navigating social complexities.
And then written language is also valuable for the things IT doesn't say. Under the theory that 90% of communication is non-verbal, then writing lets you say things without having to communicate that other 90%. Which can be very helpful when negotiating something, for example.
Love this.
Likewise "free markets" which work great when embedded in a system of laws and regulations. Or more critically, in a high-trust system where people keep their word because that's what matters.
But not sure how many people are in favor of the more unregulated black markets, where contracts are enforced by rule of violence instead of rule of law.
As if we've forgotten Hobbes, and the horrors he lived through which informed his philosophy.
https://www.carmel.in.gov/government/departments-services/en...
a city frequently ranked in the top 10 places in the US, also frequently ranked as one of the best cities in the US for cyclists.
You might be surprised how many UK and US scientists of that time supported eugenics, see for example https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014
and as for computers and atrocities, see IBM's history from the time or perhaps some more recent tech companies.
Few of us are saints.
> To systematically investigate the role of end-user semantics of derivational traces, we set up a controlled study where we train transformer models from scratch on formally verifiable reasoning traces and the solutions they lead to. We notice that, despite gains over the solution-only baseline, models trained on entirely correct traces can still produce invalid reasoning traces even when arriving at correct solutions. More interestingly, our experiments also show that models trained on corrupted traces, whose intermediate reasoning steps bear no relation to the problem they accompany, perform similarly to those trained on correct ones, and even generalize better on out-of-distribution tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13775
Beyond Semantics: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Reasonless Intermediate Tokens
Thus explaining why RFK has his current position.
The interesting question is how to define 'average'. Over what probability distribution?
Hey, anyone remember this from earlier in the week? https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
I fully agree with your base perspective, that the main focus should be on preventing authoritarians from coming to power in the first place.
I also agree with your final point, that the government doesn't need tech to lean on a person.
We disagree in the middle, on how tech that makes evil orders of magnitude easier might be a contributing factor and might enable the government to lean on many more people than it would otherwise.
I want to agree with you, but wonder if you have ever been poor? When you need the car to get to work so you can feed your kids, but you can't afford all of
- feed kids - rent - insurance
because you got hit by a surprise medical bill (kid got sick, maybe?)
I'm strongly in favor of your end goal (less car-dependent life), I'm just cautious about using punishment as a way to get there.
Unless we made the fine proportional to income?
Building the family's house alongside Dad sounds much more valuable than anything they would have learned playing on the school's soccer team.
The idea starts to make a lot of sense once you look at its framing. This includes the argument you make above (why can't you hire help out of pre-tax income, like any other business can?) and more on the legitimacy of taxation.
price point is a little higher than the cybertruck, but hey, probably worth it.
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So it depends how you define "diversity". I can see how from your view (range of life choices) humans today are more diverse than most species. However, if you go back not so long ago, there are species of ants with more worker roles (40+)than your typical midieval village.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14151
Double descent is a surprising phenomenon in machine learning, in which as the number of model parameters grows relative to the number of data, test error drops as models grow ever larger into the highly overparameterized (data undersampled) regime. This drop in test error flies against classical learning theory on overfitting and has arguably underpinned the success of large models in machine learning. This non-monotonic behavior of test loss depends on the number of data, the dimensionality of the data and the number of model parameters. Here, we briefly describe double descent, then provide an explanation of why double descent occurs in an informal and approachable manner, requiring only familiarity with linear algebra and introductory probability. We provide visual intuition using polynomial regression, then mathematically analyze double descent with ordinary linear regression and identify three interpretable factors that, when simultaneously all present, together create double descent. We demonstrate that double descent occurs on real data when using ordinary linear regression, then demonstrate that double descent does not occur when any of the three factors are ablated. We use this understanding to shed light on recent observations in nonlinear models concerning superposition and double descent. Code is publicly available
If it is serious, you could always set a timer.
maybe not that one :)
some argue (using data and experimentation) that trees and/or other plants express all of these behaviors
The "upload csv file" box does not show up in the test project.