Schadrach

It disagreeing with him across a wide variety of issues is how you know it’s at least passably intelligent.

I figure it’s like Grok, if it’s not just actually Grok with a skin - Grok’s system instructions tell it to be neutral and fact-seeking without political bias but also to adopt certain right wing positions that aren’t. It’s why it keeps wavering between telling every eight winger that they’re an idiot and becoming Mecha-hitler - it can’t follow two contradictory goals so it prioritizes one and which one drifts.

…that was the joke. Surveyors just being contrary enough to do things in decimal feet just so everyone else can be annoyed by it.

Don’t make me start measuring things in decifeet just to be contrary. I have a measuring tape dividing the foot in tenths and I’m not afraid to use it.

Given that the toys actively want to be played with by their kids, I’d assume adult toys would also want to be played with by their owners, which would presumably preclude it being rape at least in most cases.

Yeah, but my sink is far enough from the shower that the effect isn’t worth it.

One or two songs? Maybe if the two songs are This Corrosion by Sisters of Mercy and Psychonaut by Fields of the Nephilim and I’m in a hurry.

I mean, I just set my phone just outside the shower and turn the volume up a touch. Once upon a time I had a weatherproof bag I’d seal my phone in that was originally meant for a solar powered flashlight for emergency use. The bag was triple sealed and I doubt any steam reached the phone.

…but does the system that is the Chinese Room (the entire system taken as a whole) understand Chinese?

Any given sufficiently small piece of your brain does not understand English, does no individual neuron in the language center of your brain understanding English mean that you do not understand English? If that understanding is held in the organization and structure of the brain but not in the individual parts, then why can’t the Chinese Room understand Chinese despite no individual component understanding Chinese? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer in a coherent fashion without asserting that knowledge in an organic brain is magical in some fashion, and nothing else counts.

Wait until you consider the concept of philosophical zombies, which is all about pointing out the edges and contours of the hard problem of consciousness. The starting point of that discussion is essentially “Is someone who responds exactly like a regular person would but has no actual subjective experience conscious?” and gets stranger from there.

Pretty sure Gundham Tanaka’s Four Dark Devas of Destruction are prior art for exactly this. Also accomplices to murder, so they’re apparently pretty effective minions.

It depends on what this actually does, if it removes tax exempt status from groups that would otherwise receive it based on their beliefs and speech, then it probably violates 1A. If it’s repealing some sort of special tax exemption cutout for confederate groups, then it’s probably OK.

I’ve got to ask a a question:

Did this remove a special tax exemption cutout for confederate-related groups, or did it make being confederate-related an exception that disqualifies groups that would otherwise be tax-exempt?

That’s going to be a big difference in how it shakes out in the courts - if it’s barring groups that would otherwise qualify for tax-exempt status based on their ideology, it’ll likely be found to violate free speech and equal protection, if it’s repealing a special cutout for those groups then that’s not a concern.

What’s missing is the “camera” panning down to show that road is made of poor men, but that fits because many of them are functionally invisible.

It’s either the Ship of Lila or Lila’s Socks…and now there’s some kinky weirdo out there who has committed Lila to the spank bank forever in response to the notion that she might have feet.

Missed that one. She was pretty young too.

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need . . . fantasies to make life bearable.” REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. “Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—” YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. “So we can believe the big ones?” YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. “They’re not the same at all!” YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME . . . SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. “Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—” MY POINT EXACTLY. She tried to assemble her thoughts. THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON’T TRY TO TELL ME THAT’S RIGHT. “Yes, but people don’t think about that,” said Susan. “Somewhere there was a bed . . .” CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE’S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A . . . A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT. “Talent?” OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS. “You make us sound mad,” said Susan. A nice warm bed . . . NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME? said Death, helping her up onto Binky.

So, I’m sitting in a creepy house playing paranormal investigator with a machine that can listen to the past, but only if I can tell it exactly when, where and who was present. I’m supposed to be investigating a series of deaths, but they’re…weird. I’ve personally listened to three of the deaths happen, none of them with an obvious proximate cause of death, and one of them at the very beginning of the time span the machine can reach. Somehow the deaths are also connected to the weather?, and also trigger agnosia of the victim’s identity, including one man forgetting his lady entirely mid-sentence when she dies while they are together. One person seems potentially at least partly immune to this effect, since she has asked about her daughter after her daughter died, while everyone else has forgotten her daughter ever existed at all aside from the corpse of an unknown person being found.

Amusingly, there’s one guy wandering the house during the timeline who talks about how he used to live there, but isn’t sure why he showed up other than nostalgia, and is very angry that the house is in the hands it is instead of his own - this is because the first victim was the owner of the house and his brother who invited him and absent knowing he ever had a brother, things fit together…weird.

I feel like the right thing to do is show them a movie from the early to mid 80s that used early CG and then show them Legend from 1985 point at Darkness and be like “That’s a dude in a suit. 5 and a half hours of makeup every day for him to look like that.” Then pull out Clue and point at Wadsworth and be like “This is the same dude.”

Then get a mop because you have to clean up after their heads explode.

The problem is that you presumably want end users to see it, which means a remote machine must be able to download it, which means it inherently must be scrapable (since that’s just downloading and preserving it). You can make it take longer or be more annoying to accomplish, but you can’t actually truly stop it and keep the site usable.

Kind of like how the problem with DRM for video is that the end user can eventually watch it, which means barring all else you can at least point a camera at the screen to produce a copy.

braver drivers,

I used to joke that there were no bad drivers in WV, you either learned how to drive or you fell twenty feet off the road and got impaled by a tree. Unfortunately, since I was a kid we’ve put guard rails on a lot of those places.

Only if they want to be

The idea that anyone at all has any real power over how other people look at them beyond how they present themselves being suggestive of a particular lens is absurd.