If they’re at MY door, what else can be done but defend my life with my life?

That’s what I meant with you wouldn’t do anything. First you’d still have other options and if ICE is at your door and you start shooting at them it will probably kill you faster.

You sound pretty flippant with people’s lives

That was not my intention. It totally get why nobody is doing anything, especially with guns, because of the consequences. I just pointed out that so many people in favor of armed civilians bring completely flawed arguments and now we actually see in action how useless a “regulated militia” is.

why don’t you go grab a gun and suicide into an armed force for great justice?

Why would I? I don’t have a gun and never argued in favor of armed civilians, because it’s completely useless (and research shows that it only increases the chances of domestic violence and suicide). Maybe it wasn’t useless at the time the constitution was written but the current situation shows that it is now. Besides that I live in Vienna.

Things don’t scale linearly like that. Many things are proportional to either the surface (so x²) or volume (x³) or complex combinations of those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country

America is top of the list yet nothing happens. Seems like those “to defend against rogue government” arguments are just talk anyway and the entire world told you that for years.

Looks like Americans are all talk and just keep the guns around just for a higher suicide rate and school shootings.

Yet nothing in the news, because Americans are all talk.

Chances are you wouldn’t do anything, like all the other people seeing kidnappers with masks and doing nothing. Looks like the rest of the world was right when they told Americans that their arguments for keeping guns to prevent the government from going rogue was all talk.

Why are the first two ifs in infix notation and the third isn’t?

Interesting that Americans always argue that they need their guns in case the government goes rouge. So many comments say that they will get shot, because they absolutely look like kidnappers, yet nothing happens. Looks like you keep those guns around just for a higher suicide rate and school shootings.

3? Are you nuts? I have two and see them maybe twice a year in person. Most friends require way too much time and I’m glad my friends are low maintenance and don’t get annoyed when I ghost them for weeks.

I see what you mean but that’s not what I thought China did. I thought they just declared every prisoner automatically an organ donor which would totally be fine IMHO.

I live in Europe (Austria) and the solitary-based health care system is amazing. Automatically declaring everybody a donor is the best thing you can do (in in that case there wouldn’t even be a difference if you are a prisoner or not).

If you ask me we should even get rid of the option to opt out unless in well founded court approved exceptions. Opting out of being an organ donor is probably the most egocentric, selfish thing one could do. You are dead and you still want to deny helping others at literally no additional cost for you.

It also has practically the opposite effect of what you mentioned. If you only have a few organ donors and one is in a bad condition in a hospital there a probably a few people that hope they don’t make it to get the organs. But if everybody is an organ donor the situation gets much simpler because there isn’t this artificial scarcity.

Long story short, I haven’t heard a single good argument for not being an organ donor except that people could care less about the paper work to opt-in. That’s why the European opt-out system is way better, but many US citizens probably would call that communism :-)

Why would they phase that out? Once you are dead you don’t need organs. I’m so happy to live in a country where you have to explicitly opt out of organ donation if you don’t want to be a donor (many EU countries do it that way).

Every country where you have to opt in to be an organ donor has it completely backwards.

Update: ok maybe, I should have read the article

sometimes when patients are still alive

Ok that’s fucked up

No that’s impossible with your voice even for those slow speeds back then. But one could implement a similar system that converts sound to data/images if you invent you own modulation depending on how precise you can make sounds. If you are totally ungifted with your voice like me, the simplest would probably be something like morse. If you have perfect pitch you could use many different frequencies and amplitudes and combine those (a bit like QAM but without phase modulation, because humans can’t control the phase with their vocal cords). The more different frequency-amplitude combinations you can make and the faster you can switch between them the faster you “manual” data transmission could be.

Sounds actually pretty fun to play around with 🤣

PS: I personally would drop amplitude modulation and only use different frequencies (FM) and only pick a few different values (maybe four? or eight - one octave cdefgabc’) with variable speed (decoding based on short pauses between notes) to be most reliable.

PPS: what did you (and adhd) do to me 😅. Now I want to make something like that and have no time on my hands anyway.

The screaming was not only during handshake. The acoustic coupler you see in the image was making that “scream” all the time (that’s how the data was transmitted), so no noise, no communication/data.

People got so used to the noise that some of them could even diagnose connection issues based on the sound the coupler made.

When modems were updated they internally converted the data directly to electrical signals to be sent over the telephone via, without the audio indirection, but most modems had a built in speaker anyway that still played back the audio during handshake (on default settings) to allow users to hear/debug connection issues.

Practically all modems from that time allowed you to turn off that noise - even during handshake.

Over the years the need to “hear” the data went away.

Any backups of the repository itself (and not the GitHub rendering)?

LLMs are not AGI tough.

How about driving with at most that speed that would allow you to break to a full stop inside the range you can see. Or within half that range if the street is to narrow for another passing car.

I didn’t say they have no knowledge, quite the opposite. Here a quote from the comment you answered:

LLMs are extremely knowledgeable (as in they “know” a lot) but are completely dumb.

There is a subtle difference between intelligent and knowledgeable. LLM know a lot in that sense that they can remember a lot of things, but they are dumb in that sense that they are completely unable to draw conclusions and put that knowledge into action in any other means besides spitting out again what they once learned.

That’s why LLMs can tell you a lot about about all different kinds of game theory about tic tac toe but can’t draw/win that game consistently.

So knowing a lot and still being dumb is not a contradiction.

The “may” carries a lot of weight so it probably depends. The way US law works is pretty weird IMHO and the reason for many of such disclaimers/waivers. “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”, “Contents may be hot”, etc.

But wouldn’t you point still be true today that the best AI video models today would be the onces that are not available for consumers?

(sorry for the long answer)

Besides the vendor-lock-in and “enshitification” things (which are also a direct consequence of capitalism) just compare the Microsoft Office Suite against LibreOffice. It’s not even close.

Don’t get me wrong it works good enough for typical use-cases but the difference in depth, quality and polish is huge. Same with Photoshop vs Gimp, After Effects and other Adobe stuff.

Tons of software doesn’t even have proper Open Source equivalents because they are so nieche (compared to office software or VLC for example).

Unity (vs Godot), IDA Pro (vs Ghidra), EnCase, SolidWorks, etc.

Check out how Mozilla Firefox makes its money. They are over 80% funded by Google and make all kinds of shitty decision. Not because they are bad people but somebody has to pay development because good software doesn’t just happen because a hand full of junior devs have some free time.

Look at the shitty Ubuntu decisions, also done because somebody needs to pay for development.

Look at audacity, redis, FluentAssertions, OpenOffice, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, MySql, IdentityServer4 and many more OpenSource projects that went commercial or changed their license because it was unsustainable.

You can of course always fork, but the forked project than has the same issues. Development works as long there are skilled people motivated to practically donate their free time in exchange for nothing. That already greatly limits the people that even can work on open source and if their situation changes history repeats.

It’s not even OpenSource only. Look at YouTube creators especially science educators. A lot of them with great content and talent explaining various topics. But also trying to sell you stuff like squarespace, Brilliant and NordVPN because it would be unsustainable otherwise.

So yes great (by that I mean big polished good quality “unenshitified”) FOSS won’t happen under capitalism because writing software is time-consuming.

Why do you think people pirate commercial software like AutoCAD, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, MS Office, SketchUp, SolidWorks, etc.? Because they are polished in a way no open source project could be, because hundreds of engineers worked for decades on those.

All that said, FOSS is great. I use and rely on a tons of OpenSource software, self-host a lot of services, regularly contribute to quite a few projects and also am the maintainer of some libraries other people use (even commercially) and I still stand by what I wrote before:

Open Source can’t be as polished and high quality as big commercial software because it doesn’t have the funds to do that. Five motivated people are not enough to write an After Effects competitor.

Probably won’t happen under capitalism. It’s way too expensive (time consuming) to write good software/make good products.