[–] 91 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

There's a straightforward way to resolve the paradox of tolerance, IMO. Treat tolerance as a social contract. An intolerant person has explicitly rejected the contract.

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  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago

    I'm largely pro-AI, so yeah, I've been hit by a couple of pretty big downvote bombs now and then. Even had my very own stalker for a while.

    I haven't wandered into any of the tankie-related battlefields, though, so I'm sure there are much bigger masses of downvotes to be found out there.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago

    Sitting here in Canada, watching Trump randomly threaten tariffs every other day whenever it strikes his fancy to demand some new concession from us despite decades of free trade agreements and frameworks in place to supposedly prevent this, thinking this isn't actually an Iran problem.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago

    The Lagrange points are only stable as long as the object in them is much, much smaller than the planet is. Once it becomes large enough to be exerting gravitational influence of its own the Lagrange points become unstable and it drifts out.

    I don't think it's widely accepted as plausible any more, but I recall reading a theory that Theia (the planetoid that impacted Earth very early in the solar system's formation to cause the formation of the Moon) formed in one of the L4/L5 points in exactly the manner you're proposing but then collided with Earth once it got too big to remain stable there. IIRC more recent simulations suggest Theia had to hit at a higher velocity than this scenario was capable of producing, so that's why it's been deprecated, but the formation-then-instability bit is still valid.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago

    Perhaps, but then it'd need a big oil reservoir to store the oil when the cuff is deflated.

    I ran this question by an AI (I know, boo hiss AI, but it gives references for the stuff it said). It said there actually are some quiet and discreet pneumatic compression stockings that came on the market recently (the Venowave VW5 was mentioned specifically), but they go down on the calves rather than having anything mounted on the waist. It said it couldn't find any hydraulic equivalents available anywhere. It also says that Trump's diagnosed chronic venous insufficiency isn't something that would normally need pneumatic compression stockings like this, it would be overkill. These sorts of things are more often for post-operative situations when a person is bedridden.

    Other suggestions the AI gave me were a very large phone in a back pocket (we of course know how addicted Trump is to social media on his phone) or a poorly-tailored bullet proof vest plate (for some reason Trump, despite being worth billions, dresses in ill-fitting off-the-shelf suits. Maybe a result of some kind of weird witch's curse that affects his bulletproof vest too). It also dug up news articles about other weird rectangular bulges under his clothing going back September of last year so this may not be anything new.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (1 child)

    Could well be, I'm sure there were lots of poisonings and whatnot that earlier forensic science misattributed to natural causes.

    But it could also be that murderers are getting more savvy too. There have been so many CSI-style shows, police procedurals, and so forth that it doesn't take a great genius to know how to make it a lot harder for police to identify you. Like, if you made an untraceable "ghost gun" to shoot someone with, don't carry it around in your backpack for days after shooting the guy. Sheesh, basic stuff.

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  • [–] 36 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    They were never designed for routine "cycling" to begin with, it was originally meant as an emergency thing that wouldn't routinely be tapped just to keep market prices even. It was there so that the military could continue operating in the event of an extreme shortage.

    It's basically just some old salt mines that a bunch of oil got pumped into.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago

    AIs benefit from negative examples too. As long as the inputs are accurately labelled then it enhances what it knows.

    For example, if I go to ChatGPT I can ask it to produce a wild parody of a far-right rant about something and it'll be able to do so. I could feed it an existing far-right rant and ask it to analyze what it's actually talking about and it'll have a better ability to figure out what's going on if it knows that style from its training. I could tell it "write an article about this subject that specifically avoids the tropes and pitfalls of far-right media."

    We've seen frequently the pitfalls of trying to censor a model's training data to exclude something that's part of the common world around it, the model either "fills in the gaps" itself or just ends up insane. When the nude human form was excluded from training data for early image AIs it wound up making weird Cronenbergs because it had no idea what was really going on underneath the clothing, for example.

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