Remember that you don’t feel temperatures the way you think you do, you feel the rate of heat transfer between your body and the thing you’re touching. As the top commenter said, most likely the handle is made of a material with a different heat conductivity.

Relevant old Veritasium video

there is no such thing as a perfect way to draw districts and at the end of the day just choosing which algorithm is used will benefit some people over others

This is the nature of all science. All science is wrong, it’s just a matter of how far off it is. The goal is always to approximate the correct solution, always getting incrementally closer, knowing we will never hit it exactly.

But to argue “science can never be perfectly accurate, therefore we should throw out any attempt to and go with some other method instead” represents the core problem with democracy in the US.

And what say you of peer reviewed district drawing algorithms that are literally designed to minimize all provided sources of bias?

Something tells me when you hear the word “algorithm” you don’t think “math proof”, you think “recommendation”.

redraw all districts, regions, and precincts in simple squares and rectangles…Once you hit either a certain number of people or a certain amount of land mass then that’s it. Make another zone.

If only it were a problem so simple a 5th grader could solve it. But people aren’t evenly distributed, and land doesn’t vote.

In reality, it is a very hard problem, but there has been a ton of scientific research on fairness algorithms in this space. We don’t need a solution from a 5th grader, we need a solution from all the experts on the subject that humans have to offer. The only reason we don’t is the same reason we still use FPTP voting: so that politicians can game them.

Keepass has always been great. If you aren’t regularly sharing account logins with other people, you just have a file you can sync using whatever method you want. For clients, I recommend KeepassDX on android, and KeePassXC on PC.

I also had to look it up

Exactly, they are going whichever way the wind blows, whatever looks like profit. They’re not pro-fascism, they’re not pro-liberalism, they’re not even pro-capitalism if it means competition hurts their bottom line. AI companies are currently openly trying to get the US to own a stake in their companies, because that means it’s in the US’ interest to write laws that favor them, and to bail them out later when the bubble pops. And though that looks to the layperson like the state owning the means of production, they are also not pro-communism. They are pro-profit, and everything else is left undefined.

while an LLM has no living parts and is not able to think, companies are made up of living, thinking human beings with their own ideals

Yes, I made this point above. I assume you aren’t suggesting a majority of the individuals working for Google, meta, Twitter, OpenAI, etc. are pro fascist. Yet without them, they would not achieve any of their fascist goals. So how is that possible?

the result is the same

And my point is that it’s not always the same. In the near future, Google or some other corporation, will do something notably anti-fascist. And you’ll be in a thread about it surrounded by commenters saying “I’m buying from this company now, because they get it!” And you’ll be trying to explain why that’s not how it works using functionally the same points I’m making here.

You bringing intention into this is exactly the excuse they will use

We don’t have to imagine, there are tons of companies who helped the Nazis who are still household brands today. Are those fascist corporations? All the individuals from back then are dead. Are they still fascist? If not, when did they change? I contend that none of them have ever changed, because none of them hold any ideology.

Ascribing personalities to corporations is a phenomenon our primitive brains are fooled into, because we didn’t evolve to understand what a corporation is. It’s the same phenomenon as when people form relationships with LLMs.

Good luck in that next thread.

Imagery is figurative by definition. I understand the expression.

Bend the knee is almost never used to describe someone literally bending their knee for someone else.

It is used to describe intention. A person bends the knee when they intend to serve some other party’s interests.

To continue the LLM comparison: you prompt it a question, it’s response is not accurate, you say “that’s made up”, it says “I’m sorry, you’re right, I made that up”. Did something actually just apologize to you? No, of course not. There is no intention behind the words “I’m sorry”, it’s just an algorithm minimizing an error term, and the characters [I, m, s, o, r, r, y] were the solution. Importantly, if you ask the same question again, there’s no telling whether it will give the wrong answer or right answer, and either way, it wasn’t because of some intent to be more or less accurate.

In the same way, there is no intention behind Google’s actions regarding this renaming other than to maximize a profit term. There is no intention to serve or resist a fascist state. Tomorrow their actions will not be correlated with today’s actions except to the degree that they maximize profit, and they should not be confused for the intentions of some intangible sentient entity called “Google”.

You say you’re not personifying them, while also invoking the imagery of them as a person kneeling. Do you see my point yet?

A corporation is not a person. It doesn’t “bend its knee”. It is a system of cause and effect without any intentionality other than “maximizing profits”. Saying a corporation is bending the knee is like saying an LLM is apologetic for gas lighting you.

Google didn’t change the name of the lake because “it likes fascism”, it happened because it was profitable.

I don’t think there’s any disagreement on this point, I just want people to keep it in mind, because otherwise the next action Google takes isn’t going to make any sense. It might be something broadly perceived as anti-fascist, and all the commenters are going to say, “well, I guess Google had a change of heart. They must want to be on the right side of history.” And my point is: no, it’s always the same machine with the same goal.

I think what I don’t like is this implicit personification of corporations. Behaving as though they’re a single being, like they have a nationality, and they decide things as a single, shitty person. But corporations are not people, they are hiveminds. Google is an American company because they incorporated in America and no other reason, any American pride is held by individuals working at the company, not by any entity called “Google” and certainly not by the executives at the helm who can live anywhere they want on a whim.

People say things like “Google did this because it likes fascism”, but that’s our stupid monkey brain assigning intention to an observed cause and effect. In reality, there is a thoughtless system in place for handling this routine situation. The paperwork came across someone’s desk, they changed the string for a geofenced region like they always do, and then they clocked out and stopped thinking about it.

There is no “American pride” built into the system, and any special treatment of a situation you see isn’t “Google making the right decision”, it’s their PR system doing its job.

Look, I’m not going to tell anyone to not stop using google maps, but the US isn’t the first country to insist on their own name for something, and google maps just has a routine policy for dealing with that situation. The country is flagged as “sensitive” and they make it say whatever that country insists on calling it. Virtually everything has multiple names depending on the country you’re in.

It would be so funny if their official response was “let’s just give it a sec…”

The first time a child is caught using Linux to circumvent this law, they’ll update the law.

I think they were assuming that people would use linux to dodge these restrictions. Ex. a teen who can’t use a site on windows/ios might boot linux in an attempt to make it work. But as others have pointed out, it’s more likely that sites will just blanket-flag a linux useragent as being used by a child to be safe. And then a linux user changing their useragent to get around this will then be hw attestation challenged like any other OS. So yeah, it’s just going to make it more inconvenient to use an open system.

I agree, it is a fine line. Another relevant inconvenient truth is that there are pedophiles who have never acted on their urges, never harmed a child, and have even sought appropriate therapy to manage their mental state. Yet at the end of the day, they are still literally pedophiles.

Japan seems to be the canary in the coal mine for this issue. They have long made it legal to draw manga “pornography” featuring apparently underage characters, as long as it doesn’t depict an actual child in any way. This is a vice mini-doc on the subject from a few years ago.

People in that culture try to make the argument that it gives pedophiles a way to manage their feelings without harming any children. But in reality, it’s seeming more like giving suicidal patients access to guns. The challenge seems to be that: philosophically we want universal free speech, but biologically the human brain isn’t evolved to control itself in that environment. You’re not staving off a pedophiles’ urges, you end up nurturing them. You create a subculture that embraces this mental state as acceptable and normalized. It would be like…building Westworld robots for serial killers to abuse. Surely nothing good will come from creating a safe space in society for people with these urges.

I personally do not agree with any laws against speech, and also I don’t think anyone should ever create “artificial” CSAM in any capacity. But I don’t know how to square that circle. Because if you try to just make a blanket law against it, on the one hand people will find ways to skirt the line, slowly developing arguably even more depraved genres; and on the other hand you’ll have rulings against perfectly above-board, consensual pornography/speech, just because a politician doesn’t like it (as have been attempted many times throughout history, and remains a concerted goal of the right to this day).

I have to assume this is what it feels like to be an old-fashioned puritan, seeing a clear line between pornographic content and the erosion of society. But in this case, I think that’s where I am. I just don’t think it’s ok for the future of society to normalize artificial CSAM.

Same as it ever was.

Is there an easy to browse website that just lists all the companies that did/didn’t pay back the tariffs? That would be handy.

I don’t know how much IT experience you have, but at the end of the day when an organization pays for license, they’re paying for a fall-guy. They want to have someone to go to when there’s a problem with the software, because that’s cheaper than everyone needing to hire an expert at whatever issues pop up to be certain it’s solved.

They don’t want to have a bunch of PCs running whatever distro and domain software the last IT guy felt like going with. And when the next heartbleed/shell shock/spectre happens, they don’t want to have to figure out how to get the fix for the flavors of software they went with. They want to be able to say “hey company, this is what we pay you for” and the company to say “all good, we got you”.

Of course, it is possible to have both open software, and corporate support. This is why redhat exists. Just understand that your IT dept may have a preference based purely on how easy/hard it makes their job. When my PC has some bug or hw incompatibility, I’m willing to take the time to solve it. But someone who doesn’t have that time is going to prefer to just tell the company that made it to solve it.

I’m also on-board with no computers in schools, as someone else brought up. Phones should not be allowed in classrooms. Before we had LLMs running on calculators, my idea was to have a series of optional classes where you build your own calculator starting from logic gates, and that’s the only computer you’re allowed to use.

I mean, scumbag licensing terms, yeah, but also why did he agree to them?! It’s like someone advertising a free kick in the nuts, saying “sure, lemme get that”, and then calling them a scumbag for kicking you in the nuts.