voluble

Sort of cheating - flush it down the toilet.

Playing by the rules - turn it into dust with an angle grinder.

I have a sense that you know all this, but, just wanted to chime in- the system in Canada where you have to take a course and pass a screening is costly & a pain in the ass. Bottom line, legally, it's neither fast nor easy to get a firearm in Canada, and on top of that, the RCMP can deny any application that they see fit. But ultimately, I think the existing licensing system is a reasonable management of risks, and overall a good thing.

Unfortunately, gun control here is a wedge issue, and political points are easily scored by banning / confiscating guns from legal owners, who, as you mention, were never the problem in the first place. Actually fixing the gun crime issue here would be difficult, costly, and an optics minefield.

IMO, the penalties for being found with an illegal firearm or using a firearm to commit a crime should be much more severe. Surely people of all political stripes could get behind that? But, no. We're in a situation where, on the left, any policy that doesn't include a sweeping ban is criticized as unacceptable and weak. It sucks, because it means that the actual problem affecting citizens goes unsolved, and nobody seems to care.

all it took to convince them evolution is completely wrong is a couple paragraphs about Lamarck and giraffes and Haeckel and embryos

That's incredibly shocking and concerning.

By proclaiming Newton is wrong, it leads to people concluding that all science is wrong, because there is always someone working on the next iteration

I've never had sympathy for this line of thinking. Is the average person truly too ignorant to understand that science is a constantly developing process of better understanding our universe, not some set of unimpeachable rules carved into stone tablets once and forever? The fact that science can be updated, changed, revolutionized, is what makes it powerful.

If people need to be 'protected' from that fact, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way science is taught in schools. I can't accept that the average person can't comprehend such a simple idea that would take less than an hour to convincingly communicate.

Just kind of dawned on me while looking at the number, Reddit's licensing deal with Google is valued at $60 million per year. That's really not very much money at all, considering the amount of data Reddit has and continues to accumulate. And chump change for Google, no doubt. Reveals how little leverage Reddit actually has at this point. This was their flagship deal, and the best they could get was $60mil per year.

Also puts the API fiasco in a new light. "Look, we need to charge for API calls, because we need to restrict public access to data as a precondition of selling all your shit in a few months to Google, for the financial equivalent of a cup of coffee."

it’s an AMERICAN MILITARY DEFENSE CONTRACTOR worth billions

Probably one reason why the FAA isn't immediately shutting Boeing's shit down, you know when doors fall off their planes mid-flight, and investigations uncover more problems.

Think it's more of an allusion to lurking habits, active times, metadata, stuff not related to public posts. I'd imagine the average user has plenty of stuff they've browsed through that they wouldn't want their family / co-workers, etc. to know.

Would also need to get a burner phone number w/ answering machine to take calls from 240 million grandmas, cheapskate businesses and cash-strapped public schools for any & all tech support questions until the end of time, because if there was an issue with system stability in any way whatsoever, or if the router went down or the printer stopped working, they'd assume it was the fault of 'the guy who changed everything'.

Linux is great & everything, but this sounds like a recipe for utter disaster, not a way to make an easy buck.

Wouldn't checkering itself, even in the abstract, need to reference two discernible colours or shades, and so, wavelengths of light, and so, some extension along a z axis, and position in time? Is it possible even for an abstract checkered pattern to be defined in any less than 3 dimensions + time?

Interesting. I'm curious to know more about what you think of training datasets. Seems like they could be described as a stored representation of reality that maybe checks the boxes you laid out. It's a very different structure of representation than what we have as animals, but I'm not sure it can be brushed off as trivial. The way an AI interacts with a training dataset is mechanistic, but as you describe, human worldviews can be described in mechanistic terms as well (I do X because I believe Y).

You haven't said it, so I might be wrong, but are you pointing to freewill and imagination as somehow tied to intelligence in some necessary way?

Thanks! I'm not clear on what you mean by a worldview simulation as a scratch pad for reasoning. What would be an example of that process at work?

For sure, defining intelligence is non trivial. What clear the bar of intelligence, and what doesn't, is not obvious to me. So that's why I'm engaging here, it sounds like you've put a lot of thought into an answer. But I'm not sure I understand your terms.

By a doctor, I very much want to be seen strictly as the biological organism that they have spent their life studying. The fact that there are very few doctors, and every person born on this earth will be a patient, means that a standard for unvarnished and concise language is morally praiseworthy in terms of its service of the greater good.

I guess my feeling is, there's no good reason to get offended by the standard of language that the medical system operates in. There is an ocean of ill people who need help, and we're not all special, in that sense.

A doctor who is led into a cognitive trap by seeing "diabetic" on a chart, is a bad doctor. I'm not sure small refinements of language are the remedy for that doctor's deficits.