fluoridation

Fair enough. I've only ever used XMPP when Google chat used it and at work in the days before Slack.

What do you mean? You have to accept a friend request before someone can message you. It's more spam-resistant than email, not less. That said, I don't know if there's anything that prevents spamming friend requests.

What are you doing taking on that kind of risk and starting ventures if your earnings are low? I'm sorry, but if you're a delivery boy living from paycheck to paycheck, you should be trying to get an education, not start a business. That's true in Finland and in the US.

I don't think any bank will give you such a huge personal loan that you could end up in debt for your whole life, since they typically want the loan repaid. The only way I can imagine that happening is if you're a sole proprietor and you get sued or fined. I can't think of another way to get exposed to that much liability.

Fair enough. I was thinking of center of mass as equivalent to the centroid and only taking into account geometric shape, not leverage.

I'm not equivocating anything, I answered your question and provided further information. Yes, it's a real human and it's also a real copy of the simulated human. Your point?

You're just asserting that. Why would the center of mass be further to the right from the vertical bisection? That would make it so the left side has a mass of 12.5 versus 8.5 on the right. If you were to pivot that shape freely from that point, it wouldn't stay balanced, it would swing until it ends up as an upside-down T.

Fair enough. I expressed it that because I was asking a genuine question, not being rhetorical. That was the argument I used to convince myself that my (unstated) intuition was indeed true and wanted to know if there was something I was missing.

Huh. The Spanish Wikipedia doesn't mention it either, just has a brief blurb somewhere defining the Latin phrase.

I'm saying the opposite, that not erasing a phone is not a crime. Meanwhile, building and not exploding a bomb is a crime.

My point is even if it hadn't blown up you would've committed a crime anyway, whereas if you rig a phone to erase its own data upon entering a PIN and the PIN is not entered, you haven't committed a crime. The two situations are different enough not to be analogous.

That's interesting. Where can I read more about this?

It's already a crime to build a bomb, so it's a moot point.

It's not the exact same situation. Whether it's similar enough to be prosecuted or convicted is a different question.

It's 2D because it's the surface of a sphere.

Celestia might be what you're looking for.

I find that highly questionable as a general description of what intelligence does. That's more like a description of a general knowledge base. When I think of someone intelligent, I think of someone who's able to draw unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated facts. In the broadest possible terms, I'd call it the ability to make abstractions and analogies. This is not just compression, but the ability to mentally operate on webs of meaning.

Intelligence is compression? What do you mean? Intuitively that doesn't seem right.

>What I don't understand is why LLMs haven't been able to do this yet

LLMs are just trained on what humans have said. Why is it surprising that it's still not possible to reconstruct the intelligence that wrote all that by working backwards? Think of your own work experience. When you look at a piece of code, say, are you always able to discern why the person did what they did, just from the code, with no additional context?

For example?

Um, sure, but my argument is that the function will always be continuous, as long as you're slicing a single shape.

I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. The whole point of the center of mass is that it's at the intersection of all the bisecting lines. If you slice a shape in two and you don't get two parts of equal area then you didn't pass through the center of mass.

Well, I'm listening.

Am I being stupid? Isn't this mind-numbingly obvious? Collapse the shape into a function describing the area of the left side if you were to cut the shape at that X coordinate in that orientation. On one end the function has value zero and on the other its value is the area of the shape. Is there any reason why this function might not be continuous?

Asking rhetorical questions as a form of argumentation is the Socratic method.

You're trying to use the Socratic method to show that the havingness of the book is a spectrum, and I'm taking the position of a hardliner who considers that "having the book" means having the original string of symbols from beginning to end, and anything besides that is not having the book. I'm trying to show you that your line of argumentation is uncompelling to such a person.

You don't have the book, you have someone else's interpretation of the book's contents, re-expressed into a language you can read. Both steps can involve a loss or distortion of information, either because the translator doesn't fully grasp the original language or context, or because in the re-expression they chose to leave out details that were relevant to you. The more distant the original language to yours, the more translation involves interpretation, too. A translation is really not too different from a commentary; it's just a different text.

>If you have a translation, do you have the book?

No, you have a translation.

>Even if, like the Odyssey, there are hundreds of wildly varying translations?

Precisely why translations are not considered equivalent to the original text.

>What about an abridged copy? What about the Sparknotes version?

An abridged copy is not a copy of the unabridged version.

>If you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, do you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice?

No.

I'm honestly surprised these were the questions you chose to ask, when you could have asked what if you have 90% of the pages, or what if most of the pages are missing pieces because the book was shot with a shotgun, or what if the book was scanned and OCRed and all the "rn"s were replaced with "m"s and all the lower case Ls with ones. Hell, is a scan of the book close enough to having the book, or is it far enough that one can no longer be said to have the book anymore?

In math they shouldn't be computing at all, they should just be performing symbolic manipulations.

I'm saying young children shouldn't be led to believe that that's what math is. People should probably learn how to do basic operations, but it should have much, much less emphasis than it does now, and it would be much more useful to teach intuitions regarding how to stop when you've made an error, how to estimate, which operations useful when, etc. As an example of what I mean, my mom is an accountant and I've caught her on at least one occasion multiplying a monthly interest rate by 12. That's an OK method to estimate, but it's pointless when you're doing it on a calculator anyway.

>Then afterwards just give them a calculator.

If problems were properly designed the students shouldn't even need calculators. In math the specific numerical value of a result is far less important than how it relates to the inputs. Raw calculation doesn't develop the intuition of when one operation is more appropriate than another.