hello

[javascript-official]

Geniuenly round of applouse for the person who wrote the wikipedia page for santa claus who did an amazing job in an almost impossible task, like on one hand they have to keep their promise to factual information but on the other hand, you know... kids have access to wikipedia

I can't imagine how many revisions this paragraphs took

[globalincident]

An unbelievable number. At one point that whole section was just one short paragraph saying among other things that he "lives in the hearts and minds of millions of children and adults around the world who believe in him". It's definitely had a lot of work on it.

[machine-saint]

my current project is figuring out how to trap the daemon of words inside my laptop so that it can only perform tasks within the scope of its remit

[machine-saint]

there's a lot of interesting work that goes into "how do you run a semi-untrusted piece of software on your machine and limit what it can have access to", given that the traditional unix model is "everything running as a user has access to everything else running as that user"

[globalincident]

I'm curious to know the solution you came up with.

[loki-zen]

hey bros and girls redpill me on something:

Is there any argument for why someone who does not believe in G should nevertheless believe in AGI?

[the-grey-tribe]

Honestly, no. Category error either way.

[centrally-unplanned]

I actually don't see much of a contradiction, though ofc it is a definitions debate. To steelman not believing in G, the model is that the various activities that require "intelligence" all have dedicated "parts of the brain" or w/e metaphor we wanna use that do each individual activity, right? So there isn't one generalized intelligence trait.

So an AI tool can also just have all of thise dedicated subparts too. It is a multi-function model that is fully competent at the all/most of the individual activities - there isn't an infinite spread of relevant activities or anything. And one of the subparts it is good at is AI design, so it can autonomously improve parts of itself. And as an AI it is infinitely replicable and relatively cheap to run.

That is AGI, right? It can do everything, better than humans, it can improve itself, it can run the economy, whatever. AGI itself is a vague concept, there is no strict definition it has to meet. What matters is the results, and your theory of mind isn't gonna have much bearing on that.

[globalincident]

I mostly agree, but as a side note, I'm not totally sure we should expect AGI to look the way you're imagining it. It's not clear to me that the AI needs to be able to do absolutely everything better than a human in order to have effective control over the world. Like, I can visualise an AI where if it needs to, say, play Starcraft with someone, it can spin up some CPUs and do a good enough job at it, but it's not going to invest much resources into that unless it really needs to because it has better things to be doing.

[keepcalmandcarriefischer]

What would be the actual technical problem with letting someone use literally any character when creating a password? I've had some passwords that were case sensitive and some that weren't. I've had some that had letters, numbers and "special characters" required and some where the "." Gets disqualified for a "no punctuation" rule.

Like.

If I can type it with a keyboard, I should be allowed to make it my password.

If my cyber security is my responsibility to protect, I should have the freedom to make my password "password123" or "𓂸𓂸𓂸" if I felt like it

[globalincident]

The problem is that the system is processing your password as unsanitised input to a system somewhere, which could break the software if certain characters are included. The ideal solution is to... not do that. But if the programmer who implemented the password field doesn't have control over that part of the system, they don't really have a choice. So to get around that, certain characters are disabled.

[collapsedsquid]

In his inspector general complaint, Robert wrote that besides vacations, he had bought Varvaro Cartier jewelry and expensive handbags, despite not wanting a sugar daddy relationship. He alleged that Varvaro told him previous sugar daddies had paid for her college education and bought her $40,000 worth of jewelry. She holds a Ph.D. in Homeland Security from St. John’s University in New York.

No I'm sorry, there cannot be a "Ph.D in Homeland Security", I refuse to believe that exists

[globalincident]

As far as I can tell, there's no PhD in it, but there is a slightly different kind of doctorate available according to the university website. So your source is technically incorrect.

[collapsedsquid]

A zoom school doctorate in Homeland Security, what diploma mill shit is this?

[globalincident]

It's probably not great, but the fine print is slightly more encouraging:

To cater to the scheduling needs of both midcareer professionals and traditional students, the DPS program is offered in both a traditional classroom format and an online/limited-in-residency format. The limited-in-residency program is designed for working professionals seeking to pursue a doctoral degree in Homeland Security on a part-time basis. To accommodate participants' time constraints, the DPS will only require students to be in residency for one week for each academic year of the program.

[collapsedsquid]

In his inspector general complaint, Robert wrote that besides vacations, he had bought Varvaro Cartier jewelry and expensive handbags, despite not wanting a sugar daddy relationship. He alleged that Varvaro told him previous sugar daddies had paid for her college education and bought her $40,000 worth of jewelry. She holds a Ph.D. in Homeland Security from St. John’s University in New York.

No I'm sorry, there cannot be a "Ph.D in Homeland Security", I refuse to believe that exists

[globalincident]

As far as I can tell, there's no PhD in it, but there is a slightly different kind of doctorate available according to the university website. So your source is technically incorrect.

[collapsedsquid]

Incomprehensible, gibbering lunacy

[globalincident]

Both Iran and the US have imposed simultaneous blockades on the Strait, preventing ships bound for or coming from each other or their allies from passing through the Strait. I think Trump has somehow managed to get the two blockades mixed up.

[experiment41]

very funny to me that both dig dug and pac-man are divorced but like one of them is just canonically in universe divorced and one of them is real-world, actually legally divorced

[jarmes]

Please elaborate

[globalincident]

Dig dug is divorced in canon. The Mr Driller games feature lengthy cutscenes and characterisation, including the detail that the titular Mr Driller was divorced. The Mr Driller games were originally just loosely inspired by Dig Dug and its sequels, and their canonicity was unclear, but they were eventually firmly established as being part of the same canon, and the two main characters unified into one, by the official game Dig Dug: Digging Strike.

Pac-Man is legally "divorced". The character of Ms. Pac-Man was originally established as Pac-Man's wife, but due to a legal dispute Namco lost the rights to the character. So in the later games in the Pac-Man series, she was replaced without explanation by a new character, Pac-Mom, Pac-Man's new love interest or possibly second wife.

[kaity--did]

Having an adventurous eater is all fun and games until you're arguing with a nearly 5 year old about why she can't eat the raw pecans out of your yard and yes Penny that will make you sick and no its not just like the inside nuts, Penny can you please not argue with Mommy on this one please I'll get you some cheese its PUT IT DOWN!

My neighbors think I'm insane

[kaity--did]

Every day after school Penny offers me a "sandwich" which is just a cheese it, a grape a cheese cube a strawberry slice and then another cheese it stacked together and every day i say oh no thank you and without fail she then shoves the entire thing in her mouth

[kaity--did]

Without even thinking today I handed Penny her pulled pork sandwich and then made my own, and she watched me very closely and then demanded I put some of that "yummy crunchy stuff" on her sandwich

I had forgotten to add the coleslaw to her sandwich and mad to remake it immediately 😂

[kaity--did]

Husband walked away while penny was eating breakfast and she did eat 3 full donuts. Which hell yeah sister it's just that she then also got up from the table and pet the dog before washing her hands and then she had dog hair stuck to her hand and Boomer is was trying to lick sprinkles off his own head. A sight to behold

[kaity--did]

*at a diner*

Me: and she'll have the 5 silver dollar pancake meal, but can she have an extra egg, and a side of toast with it?

Server: (seeing a very tiny 5 year old playing with jelly containers) oh it comes with an egg

Me: yes ma'am I know (we come ever every Saturday)

Server: (again looking at the 5 year old who can't weigh more than 40 pounds) ... are you sure?

Me: yes ma'am I'm sure...you can stay and watch the carnage if you'd like

[kaity--did]

Me: what do you want for a snack baby?

Penny: uuuuuuuhm... FROOOOOOT TRAAAAY!!

Me:.... yeah sure okay why not

Penny : * chanting fruit tray while trying to shove pineapple in her mouth from said tray*

[globalincident]

you need to introduce this child to the world of competitive eating

[javascript-official]

Do you think it is technically possible to follow all religions at once? Like I know most religions have a clause that says: Don't follow other religions. But if I got a team of lawyers and got them all to find loopholes in religious texts do you think I could follow all of them at once?

Ideas:

-Get half circumcised like only the left hand side, as to follow both stances

-uhh that's all the ideas I have at the moment

[globalincident]

As far as I can tell, Islam is very clearly incompatible with almost anything else, because the Surah At-Tawbah in the Quran bans polytheism, and also calls out Christianity and Judaism by name as being banned. So I don't know how you're planning to reconcile that.

[argumate]

huh a guy presumably praying to Mecca but he’s facing towards Canada, are they jamming gps for the war to prevent supernatural assistance

[argumate]

femmenietzsche said: Remember the Earth is a sphere; the shortest line from Sacramento to Mecca is in fact NNE

the shortest line to Mecca goes through the planet! are prayers constrained to follow non-subterranean trajectories over the arctic like ballistic missiles? is that why Trump was so set on taking Greenland??

[femmenietzsche]

I don't think Allah would require worshipers on the other side of the world to pray while doing a handstand, that seems ungenerous

[argumate]

and yet the hajj is a religious duty even for those on the other side of the world, hardly convenient!

[shacklesburst]

if you just happen to live in/near mecca, do you just get the same amount of karma for the hajj as someone doing the trek from patagonia?

[argumate]

should definitely be karma proportional to the logarithm of miles travelled to Mecca

[fragariavescana]

Here's the map projection you need to calculate both travel distance and direction to Mecca

File:Hammer Retroazimuthal with Tissot's Indicatrices of Distortion.svg - Wikimedia Commons

[globalincident]

Also, here's an actual "straight line" from Sacramento to the Hajj:

[dduane]

Grammarly to stolen experts: "No, we won't stop using your names. Opt out if you don't like it."

Grammarly will keep using authors’ identities without permission unless they opt out

[email protected].

...Schmucks.

[globalincident]

I feel like the much bigger problem here is for the consumers. They think they're getting good advice endorsed by the authors in question, whereas they're really getting potentially hallucinated garbage.

[squeakadeeks]

did you guys know there are wikipedia pages for just straight up numbers

4 - Wikipedia

go read about 4

[globalincident]

well yeah, where else would you find out that it's the sacred number of the Zia?

[dogpuppy]

[absolutejamer]

The little “(?)” is everything to me

[globalincident]

LIVE? WASP

[collapsedsquid]

Tariff refunds are theoretically interesting because the importer who paid the tariff can sue to get its money back, but it’s not obvious that the economic incidence of the tariff is always on the importer. If a foreign supplier cut prices to make its products more competitive in the US, or if the importer raised prices to consumers to pay for the tariffs, then the importer didn’t “really” pay the tariff, but is nonetheless the party that can ask for a refund. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed out that “the United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others.” I don’t know how big of a practical problem this is — in practice tariffs don’t seem to have had that much effect on consumer prices, in part because everyone was uncertain about their permanence — but I suppose you might worry about it. If you bought stuff on Amazon and Amazon gets a refund, can you ask for your cut?

Matt Levine addressed this point that many others have brought up, the thing is though I felt this "what about the tariff refund for the consumers?" point was bullshit. If you're the final customer then the details of pricing for intermediates and suppliers are out of your area, you pay the price on the sticker and that's it.

[youzicha]

Maybe it's out of your area as a consumer, but what about as a tax payer? Like, Trump imposed the tarrifs, they were passed on (let us assume) to the consumers, who paid $175 billion in an extra sales tax... and now that money will be paid out to some essentially randomly selected intermediate in the sales chain? That has to be extremely suboptimal, both not refunding it at all or refunding it to the consumer ought to be better policy.

[collapsedsquid]

It's not a sales tax, it's not counted as a percentage or number, it enters into the messy area of consumer prices. I don't think it's random who gets it, it's a matter of contract, merchants and business knew the tariffs could be refunded or not and could make contractual arrangements appropriately or choose not to.

[centrally-unplanned]

I think people make this out to be some special case when actually this applies to the majority of taxes! If you rebated corporate income taxes, those were often passed down to the consumer with higher prices. High-end workers absolutely get higher wages to compensate for higher taxes sometimes when competing across varied tax geographies, meaning income tax raises and cuts spread down the chain. All sales taxes affect listed prices.

There is nothing different with tarrifs here. A specific organization took on the liability to owe a tax, and paid the taxes. They get the rebate. And everyone else continues to have every price they pay be affected by tax rates, like it always is and always will be.

[globalincident]

In addition, just as we expect that a tariff or tax will to some extent be passed onto consumers in the form of price hikes, we can also expect that the corresponding rebate will to some extent be passed to consumers, in the form of price drops. Plus, this isn't just specific to taxes either; any unexpected hazard or windfall experienced by a company might be passed onto consumers, even if there's nothing government related going on.

[vexwerewolf]

There’s a principle I talk a lot about in relation to Lancer game design which I call the Knight Boat Principle. In Season 6, Episode 13 of The Simpsons, “And Maggie Makes Three,” this exchange occurs:

TV Announcer: We now return to Knight Boat, the Crime Solving Boat! [a boat chases several men on jet skis] Michael: Faster, Knight-Boat, we’ve gotta catch those starfish poachers! Oh no, they’re headed for land! [the starfish poachers switch from jet skis to motorcycles and speed away] Michael: We’ll never catch ‘em now! Knight Boat: Incorrect. Look, a canal! [cut to the Simpsons’ living room] Bart: Aw, every week there’s a canal! Lisa: Or an inlet! Bart: Or a fjord. Homer: Quiet! I will not hear another word against the boat.

I actually hold the belief that it’s perfectly fine for there to always be a canal, or an inlet, or a fjord, because this is a show about Knight Boat, the crime-solving boat, and if you don’t have a waterway down which Knight Boat can travel, you are kneecapping the entire premise of your show.

Lancer is a game about mech fights. Major problems in the Lancer universe must always, in some way, have a solution that includes fighting in mechs. If players travel to a place in their mechs, it should be a place with architecture sized to reasonably accommodate them.

This is the guiding thematic principle around which I write for Lancer. I need to justify why the mechs are fighting in a theme park, but I do not need to justify why the mechs are able to fight in the theme park – In Golden Flame and in the greater extent the whole of Lancer is a setting about giant robots being used for things they definitely shouldn’t. If you need me to explain to you why the theme park uses fully-armed giant robots as mascots, you are in the wrong game.

[globalincident]

Plot Tailored to the Party - TV Tropes

A plot carefully constructed to use all the character-specific skills or abilities of the ensemble. Often referred to as "Eigen Plot", after

[the-tumbler-text-adventure]

I look around?? I guess?? Punch the walls and shit??

Looking at your surroundings, you see that the room contains a table, with an empty flowerpot sitting atop it. A small wooden stool is slid underneath. A modest frosted window near the ceiling lets in some form of light. A wooden door is set into the far wall, and the walls themselves are made from smooth, dark stone bricks.

Punching the wall hurts somewhat, and produces no notable results. The stone does not yield.

[globalincident]

I open the window and peek outside.

[the-tumbler-text-adventure]

The window creaks slightly as it opens, and as you stand on your toes to see through, it reveals the expanse of the green fields surounding the tower in which you reside, and the distant forest beyond. Naturally, being in a tower, your view is several stories off the ground. You can't see much else at this angle

[globalincident]

I look at myself. Who am I? What am I wearing? Is there anything in my pockets?

[the-tumbler-text-adventure]

You look down at yourself. You are, of course, the honourable thief Horace Emberfoot. Or at least, you'd like to think youre honourable. You're wearing fairly unremarkable peasant's clothing, aside from an oversized wizard's hat you found in this tower and grabbed on a whim when you arrived. Your pockets contain a few silver coins along with two runestones you hope are expensive. you have a small dagger sheathed and attached to your belt

[globalincident]

Go through the door.