function_seven

Mine told me if I unscrewed my belly button, my butt would fall off.

I'm beginning to have my doubts about that, but I sure as hell am not gonna risk it.

Way back when Jet Skis had 2-stroke engines, you could buy an aftermarket exhaust pipe with water injection in a couple key spots. This allowed the pipe to be dynamically tuned to different RPMs by changing the speed of sound within the pipe.

The stock pipe was tuned to a specific RPM, allowing the reflected exhaust pulse to return to the cylinder just as the port was closing and “slam the door” on the fresh air/fuel charge.

With variable water injection, you could have more than one optimal RPM.

(All this is from memory as I read the ads in Splash magazine.)

From the Times article:

> [Rinsch] transferred more than $4 million from his Schwab account to an account on the Kraken exchange and bought Dogecoin, a dog-themed cryptocurrency.

Guy sounds like a dummy

> Unlike his stock market investments, this one paid off: When he liquidated his Dogecoin positions in May 2021, he had a balance of nearly $27 million.

Shit, maybe I'm the dummy?

Good. His money came with no strings*. In fact, if they had run this past him before making their decision, that would have been a breach of their duty as outlined in their charter.

They may have made mistakes with timing (making this decision too late), or with execution (not having a replacement CEO solidly lined-up and in the loop), but the core decision—to remove Sam—is definitely not something they should ask donors about. It's not Satya's business how the board makes decisions at this level.

* Other than a capped profit return if there is any.

Most high-risk investments still come with an understanding that the recipient will have a duty to the investor, making decisions that they believe in good-faith will lead to a return on that investment on some time-frame.

This one is very much an explicit, "You're giving us a donation. Don't expect a return." It's in an impossible-to-miss pink box. They can't be more clear about this.

If investors are concerned about those things, then they should not give money to people who pointedly leave those things on the table. Like this one:

> The Nonprofit’s principal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors.

Also, Microsoft got something for their money already. They have an independent license to the tech they can run themselves and iterate on.

The OpenAI board has no duty to Microsoft to get their input. MS might have believed their investment amounted to de facto control, but they're wrong.

Those investors were appropriately warned of this possibility:

> IMPORTANT

> *Investing in OpenAl Global, LLC is a high-risk investment*

> *Investors could lose their capital contribution and not see any return*

> *It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world*

> The Company exists to advance OpenAl, Inc.'s mission of ensuring that safe artificial general intelligence is developed and benefits all of humanity. The Company's duty to this mission and the principles advanced in the OpenAl, Inc. Charter take precedence over any obligation to generate a profit. The Company may never make a profit, and the Company is under no obligation to do so. The Company is free to re-invest any or all of the Company's cash flow into research and development activities and/or related expenses without any obligation to the Members.

I guess maybe they thought it was the same boilerplate every prospectus has?

Yes, which is why I also don't want my phone data to be hoovered up by data brokers and appearing in evidence exhibits.

The board issuing an apology could easily be the settlement that ensures this stays out of court.

"If you retract your statement, I won't sue."

"Ok, we retract it."

Just like that.

The dealership model and the States' protection of their business model has nothing to do with safety. These laws were intended to protect the business models of the franchise dealers from the rapidly-consolidating manufacturers. Dealers saw the consolidation happening, were scared that the automakers would strong-arm them, and lobbied their states to enact these protection laws.

"Written in blood". No.

Thanks. I did actually mean to use "deterministic", but only as it sits in opposition to "free will". Is there a better word for what I meant?

Of course there is randomness as well. So, yeah, I should clarify: We don't impose upon the world any kind of "uncaused cause", even if it feels like we do. Everything we think and do is a direct result of some other action. Sometimes that action can trace its lineage to a random particle decay. (Maybe—ultimately—all of them can?) Maybe we even have a source of True Randomness inherent in our minds. But even so, that doesn't lend any support to the common notion of our minds and consciousnesses as being somehow separate from the physical world or the chains of information that run through everything.

I'm in the same boat. It feels wrong to contemplate that our consciousness might not be a magical independent agent with supernatural powers, but is rather an emergent property of complex-but-deterministic actions and reactions.

Like it somehow diminishes us. Reduces us to cogs and levers and such.

But I can't imagine how it could be otherwise, though. I'm still baffled by the existence of qualia, phenomenology, etc. Awareness. But bafflement on that front isn't a good reason to reject the possibility that the only thing that separates me from a computer is the level of complexity. Or the structure of the computation. Sometimes things are just weird.

I get the same amazement when I think about an ant I see on a tree five feet away. A photon was born somewhere in the middle of the Sun thousands (or more) years ago. It eventually made its way to the surface and—at extreme improbability—it traveled directly toward Earth. With more extreme improbability, it found itself on an intercept course with a tiny little ant on a tree.

Layer on yet another high improbability, that photon-ant collision just so happened to send it directly toward me. Wait, not just me, but the tiny little pupil in one of my eyes!

Tremendously large numbers and crazy minuscule fractions can be found in your backyard. Don't even need to leave the Solar System.

50% would be a lot. I don't know what the optimum number is, but 0.02% (0.0002 rate) is just not plausible.

One way to resolve this is to not have secret courts. Then we can judge the merits of these warrant applications in the light of day. If National Security is an issue, then delay the publication of court records by some fixed amount, and require an onerous process to keep the ongoing stuff sealed for those rare cases where it's needed.

But in practice, you or I or anyone else should be able to pull up all the warrants issued in 2016, or 1994, or 2021. We should be able to assess the quality of the supporting PC, we should be able to track the success rate of these searches (How many ultimately went nowhere? What was the FBI focused on in a particular year? Etc.)

All of this is a bare minimum requirement for a free and open society. Instead we get secret courts and a single statistic (99.98% acceptance rate). That's basically the same as a North Korean approval rating, or the electoral performance of a dictator. It's just too perfect to pass muster.

When a government makes a court secret, I tend to infer the worst interpretation of the activities they're hiding from us. We have no means of checking whether the FBI is putting any care into their warrant applications. We have no way of knowing if the judges even read the affidavits, or what level of scrutiny they apply to the requests, etc.

All we know is that they grant 99.98% of the warrants asked-for. That's a massively suspicious rate of approval that is more likely explained by the rubber stamp than careful consideration and evaluation.

Nothing in this world has that kind of success rate without some sort of shenanigans.

That's the literal definition of a "rubber stamp" process! That you won't be denied, that the granting of your request is essentially automatic.

True, but you must still contend with your observational influence. Whatever number you crown as "most interesting" will become even more interesting for wearing that crown!

So you must take this duty with extreme care and thoughtfulness, for when you anoint such a number, your action may crystalize it as such for all eternity. Other numbers will have to go further to supplant it.

There's definitely two worlds on Youtube. (1) The good ones who put out those 10 or 20-minute videos that just get to it. (2) The rest of them who have useless 1-minute intros, followed by 3 minutes of "Today I'm going to show you X, and Y, and you'll be shocked at how Z doesn't do what you think. But first..."

I've built up a pretty good subscription list that doesn't have (2)'s in it.

This is a classic Netflix move. 4-, 6-, and 8-episode “docuseries” that could easily be a single movie. Lots of padding to drag it all out.

I remember it the same way you do. Maybe they had multiple versions of it?

They own Fusion360, which is the most popular CAD program used by hobbyist maker types. I think they see Instructables as a funnel of sorts?

Here's a commercial with that jingle at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M76ABmdbkTI

That website gonna crash so hard on Tuesday…

“Boss! We’re being dee dossed!”

“No, son, it’s Tuesday”

> No TSA.

Yes.

> No license plate scanners.

Yes.

> No fare gates for trains.

Sure. A lot of places will do the fare check on the train.

> No locks on doors.

Well, no mandated locks. I hope I'm able to leave my front door unlocked if I choose. It's my door.

> No anti-shoplifting tags.

Ok. Again, I don't see why these should be required by law.

And mine:

> No compliance surveillance built into my possessions.

Yes.

When you're combining letter names with other commands, even in perfect recording conditions, there will be confusion. The command "back Q" sounds very very close to "back U", but "back quench" is different than "back urge".

In either case, you're using the same number of syllables, so there isn't any speed lost. You just have to spend a day learning the alphabet.

Oh yeah those days are long gone. At least on the strip.

Back then you could find $5 blackjack tables, and $3.99 buffets. Now a typical buffet on the strip will be $80 a person or something like that. The cheap blackjack tables are $25 a hand.

And to reinforce your point, the later seasons suffered (in part!) due to the plot armor that suddenly enveloped the main characters.

Among other reasons.

I have no problem with going where the people are. But I think this is backwards. The information should be somewhere public, with links to it posted on FB, X, NextDoor, or whatever closed platform has a chunk of your audience.

If there's a button somewhere, there's gotta be a place I can splice into and pretend to be a finger, right?

What's old is new again!

https://www.core77.com/posts/103681/When-Houses-Had-Built-In...

Would it be a good idea to first move the focus to an adjacent item before disabling the submit button? Like, have something that says "Submitting...", move the focus to that, disable the [Submit] button, and also tag the form element with an attribute that marks it as already sent.