You’ve certainly whitewashed Dems quite a lot. You’re fundamentally not wrong though. As bad as the Dems are, and they are very bad, MAGA is undeniably worse. If we had some other electoral system, we could safely explore other options. But we don’t. We have FPTP, which makes it a binary choice between bad and worse.

And worse is just so, so much worse. That doesn’t make bad good, but it’s still a binary choice. You’d have to be evil or stupid to try to muddy the waters so that bad seems close enough to worse that people don’t feel the urgency of choosing bad to prevent worse.

Who’s my precious little

Tiny baby boy?

Who’s my tiny little

Precious baby boy

Baby boy?

The exact melody and lyrics vary, but it’s always in the Dorian mode with lots of little arpeggios. And always sung with an operatic voice, with the “r” in “precious” heavily rolled

Thanks to increased speed settings on videos, I can spend upwards of 90min an hour online.

About 30 miles, couple towns over. We moved away when I was 5, and back to roughly where I live now when I was 9. I consider my current city to be much more my home than my spawn point. Spawn point is in a pretty boring red county.

Never watched the show but it looks to be pretty obviously based on alchemical symbols, style-wise.

Anecdotal, though I’m sure you can find plenty of people to corroborate.

Idk, they’re cool, but I kinda like sliders. I don’t have a window jutting out into the room

If you’re hunting to eat, the express purpose of hunting is to acquire meat.

Then go to the store. If you’re hunting, assuming it’s not for sport, your express purpose is to kill something to eat. You don’t get meat without the death. Likewise, the express purpose of A/C is to move heat outside. You don’t get the heat out of the inside without releasing it to the outside.

The definition of “express purpose” is focusing on the result.

The laws of thermodynamics are not a side effect. Again, you cannot “produce” cold air, it cannot be the purpose because it is not physically possible. The result is transporting heat from inside your house to the outside atmosphere. That is the express purpose of the air conditioner.

That’s like saying the express purpose of hunting isn’t to kill something, it’s to acquire meat. The express purpose is to move heat from inside to outside. You can’t “produce” cool air, you can only move heat.

But an app that arbitrarily claims to “improve your brain” with little addicting games? That’s the opposite thing.

I mean, quick-fire math problems and memory games and such don’t teach you anything, but they do help keep your brain “agile”. If you want to compare it to physical fitness, then learning is like weightlifting and brain games are like cardio.

the air conditioners and filters in the cabin have an express purpose of manipulating the temperature and climate, that is their only purpose.

I think you’ve accidentally uncovered a better example. Regular home A/Cs work by releasing hot air into the atmosphere:

To make the inside cool, they have to disperse hot air (which is definitely a chemical or substance) into the atmosphere. That is their express purpose.

So by this law, A/C in Florida is banned.

I remember most of the R Daneel books, but I admit I haven’t read all the various robot short stories.

It just doesn’t resonate with me. I’ve heard people say it’s an outlet for certain feelings, but I guess I just don’t feel those feelings very strongly.

Yeah, at least the [fill-in text] suggests that he’s sincerely looking for a job, and it’s not some weird scam.

The laws were baked into the hardware of their positronic brains. They were so fundamentally interwoven with the structure that you couldn’t build a positronic brain without them.

You can’t expect just whatever random AI to spontaneously decide to follow them.

It’s also stupid to waste resources to run an inefficient LLM that a regular search and a few minutes of time, along with like a bite of an apple worth of energy, could easily handle.

From what I can tell, running an LLM isn’t really all that energy intensive, it’s the training that takes loads of energy. And it’s not like regular searches don’t use loads of energy to initially index web results.

And this also ignores the gap between having a question, and knowing how to search for the answer. You might not even know where to start. Maybe you can search a vague question, but you’re essentially hoping that somewhere in the first few results is a relevant discussion to get you on the right path. GPT, I find, is more efficient for getting from vague questions to more directed queries.

After all that, you’re going to need to check all those sources chatGPT used anyways, so how much time is it really saving you? At least with Wikipedia I know other people have looked at the same things I’m looking at, and a small percentage of those people will actually correct errors.

I find this attitude much more troubling than responsible LLM use. You should not be trusting tertiary sources, no matter how good their track record, you should be checking the sources used by Wikipedia too. You should always be checking your sources.

Many people aren’t using it as a valid research aid like you point out, they’re just pasting directly out of it onto the internet.

That’s beyond the scope of my argument, and not really much worse than pasting directly from any tertiary source.

I’m going to keep it 100%, I’m probably never going to pirate again. It was fine when I was young and broke and couldn’t think of anything better to do than watching stuff. But my free time and appetite for shows and movies have plummeted, and I have a decent income. I don’t mind paying a couple bucks to not have to worry about it on the extremely rare occasions I feel like watching something, and if I’m going to watch something it’s because it’s really good; I’d rather the creators get some kickback and streaming services have somewhat accurate metrics about content popularity so those creators are more likely to get to make future content.

Just using the “information” it regurgitates isn’t very useful, which is why I didn’t recommend doing that. Whether the information summarized by Wikipedia and ChatGPT is accurate really isn’t important, you use those tools to find primary sources.

My ex and I broke up before getting back together, we were not back together for very long.

My wife and I talked about breaking up a few times, but after talking it through we decided it wasn’t what either of us wanted and we resolved to address the issue that got us there.

You say that, but every piracy site I’ve ever seen was plastered in ads.