Something can be both shocking and uplifting, can it not? If I found out I won the lottery tomorrow then that would be both shocking and uplifting.

No, I go online and just order another one for same-day pickup from a local electronics retailer. Then I restore my files from my backup.

It’s not an LLM, but Stockfish does use AI under the hood and has been since 2020. Stockfish uses a classical alpha-beta search strategy (if I recall correctly) combined with a neural network for smarter pruning.

There are some engines of comparable strength that are primarily neural-network based. lc0 comes to mind. lc0 placed 2nd in the Top Chess Engine Championships in 9 out of the past 10 seasons. By comparison, Stockfish is currently on a 10-season win streak in the TCEC.

One of my mates generated an entire website using Gemini. It was a React web app that tracks inventory for trading card dealers. It actually did come out functional and well-polished. That being said, the AI really struggled with several aspects of the project that humans would not:

• It left database secrets in the code
• The design of the website meant that it was impossible to operate securely
• The quality of the code itself was hot garbage—unreadable and undocumented nonsense that somehow still worked
• It did not break the code into multiple files. It piled everything into a single file

I think one other factor that people have not considered is the monitor. To run all games at 4K maximum settings, yes, this type of PC might be required. But at lower resolutions, such as 1080p or 1440p, this is overkill and one would be able to run any game as maximum settings even with a computer costing a third as much.

And for those who don’t: Plato, a Greek philosopher, was putatively asked by a student while teaching at the Academy what the definition of a man (human) was. Plato responded that a man is a “featherless biped”.

Diogenes, another Greek philosopher and infamous quick-wit, caught wind of this and thought that was the dumbest thing ever, so he gate-crashed one of Plato’s lectures and pulled out a chicken which had all of its feathers plucked out and said “Behold, a man!”.

Euclid’s first postulate: Give two points, there exists exactly one straight line that includes both of them.

I am not the parent commenter, but the argument for and against wealth taxes is a lot more nuanced than many people would originally think.

For one, a great deal of wealth in this country (the overwhelming majority, actually) is not money but takes the form of illiquid capital goods like real property and shares in companies. There is a real concern that people subject to tax just won’t have enough dollars in a bank account to pay for it, and forcing the sale of that many goods could render the markets illiquid as it wipes out the red side of the order book every April.

A potential way around this is if the tax can be paid in kind, similar to how wealth taxes were collected historically, such as in the Roman Empire. This could be stupid easy to administrate—a 1% wealth tax against companies can be enforced by just minting 1% of every registered company’s outstanding shares in new stock and then transferring it to the control of the Government. Though the downside is that this sort of tax is very indiscriminate and difficult to target towards certain demographic groups. While shareholders are largely wealthy individuals who would be the target demographic for a wealth tax, they aren’t exclusively so. Effectively that becomes a tax on holding shares in companies, which is a good, but not perfect, proxy for wealth. The drawback to collecting shares in kind is that the stuff that is raised is not really “revenue” for the state, in that it is not money that can be spent, and to liquidate it would incur significant loss for the state as well. Which is basically throwing wealth away. This wasn’t a problem when “in-kind” meant grain and barley that could be used to feed the army, but soldiers can’t survive on a diet of stock certificates.

I am in favour of large-scale wealth redistribution from the billionaire class to the working class, but doing so isn’t as easy as saying “You, billionaire, give me 1% of everything you got, cash.” I think a policy of combined high income tax, high capital gains tax, and taxing loans for personal expenses secured against shares as income is more likely to be effective.

You’re being downvoted because your assertion that hosts are responsible for what users upload is generally false.

(1) Treatment of Publisher or Speaker.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil Liability.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in [subparagraph (A)].

47 USC § 230c, a.k.a. Communications Decency Act 1996 § 230

Hash matching is really easy to get around. Literally modify 1 bit of the image or just re-encode the video and you’ve gotten around it.

Still approaching a decade out of date but here’s one from 2017

Left-wing voters: [Conservative politician] will do [bad thing]

Right-wing voters: [Conservative politician] will not do [bad thing], quit fear-mongering

…

Conservative politician (newly-elected): As part of our agenda, we will do [bad thing]

Left-wing voters: See! They will do [bad thing]!

Right-wing voters: No, they will not actually do [bad thing], it’s just banter

…

Conservative politician (having done [bad thing]): I am pleased to announce we have just done [bad thing]

Left-wing voters: See! They just did [bad thing]!

Right-wing voters: [Bad thing] is good, actually

…

(2 years after [bad thing] was done)

Right-wing voters: It’s [other party]'s fault that [bad thing] happened, I need to vote for [conservative politician] so that they can fix [problem caused by bad thing].

Of course I’m not going to tell you that, because I’m not saying the original commenter in the screenshot is right. You seemed to have missed that too.

Constitutions don’t make a country. People do.

I agree completely with this which is why I said basically the same thing in my comment. I’m saying that while 250 years old for a country is not very old, going 250 years without suffering some kind of complete collapse in state institutions is pretty long.

Did you even read the comment? I said that the US’s government institutions are quite old, but the country is young. Yes, there has been a country named “Poland” around for much longer. But Poland has also governed by a succession of states, most not lasting very long (which as you probably know, is related to the actions of the other country you mention). I’m not saying that the idea of the US as a country is old, I’m saying its government institutions are older than usual.

Did you even read the god-damn comment?

The concept of the US as a country is not very old

it’s true that there has been a country called “France” for hundreds of years longer than the US

Yes, the notion of France as a country is older than the US. But the French Republic is not. The institutions change, the country endures. The US is a young country but its institutions are surprisingly old. That’s the whole fucking point.

This screenshot gets reposted a lot, and I really am not a big fan of it, for two reasons:

1. A pub is not a country, and there are pubs in America that are older than America as well. Though this half of the planet only being known to dwellers of pub-having civilisations for a few hundred years seems to be rather much of a disadvantage.
2. The concept of the US as a country is not very old but to the titular Yank’s credit the US really is one of the oldest constitutional regimes in the world.

To elaborate on the second point, the US Constitution having been in continuous effect for nearly 250 years truly is rather impressive from a legal history perspective. While it’s true that there has been a country called “France” for hundreds of years longer than the US, the French state in 1789 when the current American state began is not the same state as the French state of 2025, while the American state is still the same in its design and structure as in 1789. States are created by constitutions and laws but the idea of a “country” is nebulous and ill-defined. A state can be destroyed and replaced by revolution but the country is still there. So when someone says the USA is one of the oldest states in the world, that is mostly true.

For reference:

• The Fifth French Republic began in 1958, or 1946 if you count the Fourth Republic. The previous French state (Vichy France) was destroyed by Nazi Germany.
• The Federal Republic of Germany came into existence upon the entry into force of its Basic Law in 1949. The previous German state was destroyed by the Allies in World War II.
• Spain’s constitutional regime only came into place after the death of Franco in 1975. The modern Spanish state came into existence in 1978 with the ratification of its constitution.
• The Russian state gained independence from the USSR only upon the latter’s dissolution in 1991. Even if you count the Russian SSR government under the Soviet Union, remember that the Russian Revolution which destroyed the Czarist state only began in 1917 in any case.
• The current Chinese state began in 1949 when Mao Zedong proclaimed its establishment in Tiananmen Square after kicking the Republic of China off the mainland. The Republic of China still exists in Taiwan which infamously is a cause of numerous discomforts between inhabitants of the two regions.
• The current Japanese state was essentially created by the Americans after they occupied Japan. While the post-war constitution calls itself an “amendment” to the Meiji Constitution, in any case Emperor Meiji dissolved the previous iteration of the Japanese state (the Tokugawa Shogunate) in 1889 anyway.

The one major country I can think of right now whose government institutions can legitimately claim to have been in continuous existence for longer than the US is probably the United Kingdom. I’d say 1660 is the starting point of that, since prior to then, Britain was a republic. 1707 might be a valid date as well since it’s when Scotland and England unified to form the United Kingdom. In either case that is older than 1789.

Edit: To the angry Europeans—before you comment, read the post carefully. I’m not talking about whether the US as a country is old. It most certainly is not. I’m saying that while the country is young, its institutions are comparatively old and have been in continuous operation for impressively long. No, they’re not the oldest in the world by a long shot (I think San Marino takes that title) either. The idea of a country is defined by whatever the people who live in it define it to be, but the states and regimes that govern it come and go and are defined by laws and constitutions. And the one governing the United States has been around for longer than most.

The presence of far-right politics has really seen an uptick in recent years. It seems to have started in America but has spread to Europe and other countries like a plague. You have the AfD in Germany who claimed second place unseating a centre-left government, the entry of Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party into the British parliament (even overtaking the traditional Conservative Party in recent polls), the fourth consecutive election in Portugal where the nationalist Chega party has gained seats, and Canada narrowly avoiding electing Pierre Poilievre the “Maple MAGA”.

Surprisingly enough, prior to Donald Trump blowing up the US-Canada alliance, Poilievre was predicted to win in a landslide in Canada with a 90%+ chance of his party getting a majority but somehow it really does seem like everyone who associates with Trump outside the US loses their election. The premiership really shipped right through Poilievre’s hands like a lump of dry beach sand. Lol

Yet another irreplaceable natural landmark destroyed by idiot hooliganism. There is nothing the courts can do that will ever bring that tree back.

Edit: Apparently the tree sprouted from its stump.

I do not disagree with you on the reasons why women have fewer children. I think there is also a significant cultural shift in the number of children women were supposed to have. In pre-industrual Europe, women were expected to be quickly married and then have lots of children with their husband. Women today can enjoy long careers and fulfilling lives without marriage or a family while such options were not available to women of the past.