To do it based on intent would create some difficult grey areas - for example, video game creators would have to try to make their games as compelling as possible without passing a more or less vague threshold and breaking the law. The second approach of working on the ways different types of data can be used sounds more promising.

How would you identify the kinds of algorithms that should be banned, as opposed to all the other kinds of algorithms? I have a feeling that would be tricky.

“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

The message I get from that is this is one dumb motherfucker who shouldn’t be anywhere near power.

The timing though, the way all these companies are scrambling to enable bigotry before Trump even takes office, shows that they are now afraid of the consequences of being seen not to discriminate. They believe they cannot continue to do business in Trump’s USA while being seen to stand up in even the smallest way for anyone but cishet white men. The preemptive compliance has set in even faster than we thought it would.

The decline of interest in C++ and the rise of Rust may be correlated and may not have much to do with AI tools. C++ is complicated, messy and easy to make trouble for yourself with. Rust promises to be suitable for many of the same purposes, while more modern and more performant than most other high-level alternatives, and protecting you from many memory management bugs. That in itself will be moving some people over to Rust.

Investigations of Trump reliably conclude just after it becomes impossible for them to have any effect on him. It feels a little deliberate on the part of both Republicans and Democrats.

At the same time, any good they do does not erase or counterbalance the harm. Jimmy Savile, the UK’s worst celebrity paedophile who abused hundreds of children, conspicuously did a lot for charities throughout his career. He said that he knew God would look at all the good he had done and it would make up for the bad things. There was a calculus in which he only had to do more good each time he did bad, and it would cancel it out. It’s a twisted view. Harm is harm and is not changed by any independent “good” act a person does. But apparent goodness can change its significance in the light of the harm that accompanies it.

Savile’s apparent selfless good acts were actually a calculated attempt to win license to do harm, and a psychological coping mechanism to allow him to believe in his own basic goodness before God. Plus the reputation for selfless goodness served as a smokescreen to prevent people seeing clearly what was really going on, and to win the support and protection of powerful people. Seen this way, while the charitable works may have had some helpful effects, these were not genuinely good actions but in large part self-serving and an integral part of the dynamics of this man’s abuse.

I think the same applies to men like Cosby and Gaiman: the overt charity or the overt feminism changes its meaning when you see how it serves them psychologically and reputationally, amd how it may be a functional part of the whole abusive operation.

Matt Bernstein in a recent video (it’s long) discusses men who act as outspoken self-avowed feminists but then abuse their power to treat women terribly. The feminism may be genuine, but it may also be their smokescreen, or a mix of each, and when a man is very loud about being a feminist you have to look carefully to see which is the case. Some are genuine, but you have to ask. Maybe Gaiman was doing the feminist smokescreen, or maybe he’s just so messed up that these two sides of his life - the feminism and the abuse - just didn’t really encounter each other.

Sorry about that, I misread the thread.

Events never have just one cause. We often talk about them as if they do, but that isn’t how things actually work in an interconnected world. Climate change is one of the significant exacerbating factors in these forest fires. Other factors are fuel and forest management practices. It’s fair to call all of these causes of the fires. But you will never find a fire where you can say that only one thing caused it, particularly if that thing manifests in statistical trends in the likelihood and characteristics of these fires. We can only say that climate change made them more likely to happen and more likely to be severe.

Now check the claims made in what we’re discussing.

OK. The article says:

Climate change doesn’t cause any of these factors. But climate change can affect them. For example, we are confident that climate change is making rainfall more variable, with bigger swings from wet to dry extremes. This promotes vegetation growth and then drying it out. Additionally, humans are also causing a warming of the climate system, which accelerates the drying of vegetation by increasing evaporation rates and extending drought periods.

In this way, climate change is turbocharging the wildfire just like it turbocharges heat waves and hurricanes.

Of course, other factors also play a role, such as the amount and arrangement of available fuel. Forest management practices over the past century have led to accumulations of understory vegetation and dead organic material in many forests. The expansion of cities into wildland areas introduces more potential ignition sources, adds structures and infrastructure that can fuel fires, and creates zones where preventive measures like prescribed burning are challenging to implement.s claim of yours seems to be what we’re discussing:

We all seem to agree about all of this. Climate change is a significant contributing factor, and so are the quantity of fuel available and forest management practices. But then you argued CORRECTION: I attributed this comment to the wrong person:

yes it contributed to these fires, but to use these fires as a debate point in the realm of climate change is cheap and stupid

This seems to be the point on which we disagree. So I have checked the article and checked your claims and I still don’t understand, when climate change is a significant cause of these fires, why you think it is “cheap and stupid” to discuss how climate change contributes to them. The article itself admits that there are other causes. Why do you think we should talk about those but not climate change? Why is one contributing factor “cheap and stupid” to discuss but not the others? CORRECTION: I was arguing with the wrong person.

Over a human lifespan, the modeled impacts of the suppression bias exceed those from fuel accumulation or climate change alone, suggesting that suppression may exert a significant and underappreciated influence on patterns of fire globally. Managing wildfires to safely burn under low and moderate conditions is thus a critical tool to address the growing wildfire crisis.

The paper says that management techniques are a significant factor, alongside fuel accumulation and climate change. As the person you’re responding to says, there are several contributing factors, a significant one of which is climate change. The paper you point to doesn’t disagree with this.

We can’t approach these events with a black-and-white question, “Is it due to climate change or not?” We know that climate change increases the likelihood and severity of some extreme weather events, floods and forest fires. We know that other factors also influence these things. Usually all you can conclude about a particular fire, storm or flood is that climate change made such events more likely and raised the chances of them being severe. Other factors are always at work too. It’s not realistic, for the most part, to look for particular incidents that are caused by climate change only.

to use these fires as a debate point in the realm of climate change is cheap and stupid.

Last year and the year before there were extreme fires all over North America. How many do we have to see before it becomes reasonable to refer to them in a debate about climate change? The way a general trend manifests is in particular events. There isn’t really a way to draw attention to it except by referring to those particular events.

Sorry, I meant that in the course of human history it’s not new, though this attitude has always been present in the relatively young history of the USA. I was trying to be optimistic that it can be changed, even if it’s hard to see how right now.

Thing is, we are now seeing where that approach will always lead. The ideology of “you need to fight everyone else for your piece of the pie, and theirs too if you can get it” has created immense suffering in American society. It has only been like this for the relatively short time that the American ideology has been teaching people this. It can be changed, and in my more optimistic moments I’d see we’re seeing early signs of a change even now.

The same foot again.

That was the aim of DEI. Otherwise the usual groups get de facto preferential treatment. It’s not so simple as just “do nothing and everyone gets a fair shot.”

“The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”

Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be? It has only become “charged” by being unpopular with the new fascist regime.

He has thrown in his lot with the Party of Personal Responsibility, with its proud tradition of denying responsibility for everything and blaming someone else.

The idiocy of people like RFK Jr. looking at avian flu, polio, measles, whooping cough and COVID, and deciding that vaccines are dangerous so should be banned, is quite incredible. And now he’s in charge of US health policy.

The Supreme Court, who are corrupt and take bribes, ruled that bribes are legal. Also that even if they weren’t, the law doesn’t apply to the President.