Absolutely. I’ve gotten myself spun up about determinism before and eventually decided that I’m going to believe in free will for the time being. Much like theism is for many, the idea of free will is kinda comforting for me and it helps me cope with reality to feel like I (and everyone else) has agency. Plus, if I’m wrong it doesn’t really matter and I never could have been right at this point in my life anyway.

But we never could have designed it any other way (assuming no free will)

Ok, how about 141 members of the UN general assembly? I know we’ve only given Russia 27 months to comply since that vote, but I feel that’s long enough.

https://press.un.org/en/2022/ga12407.doc.htm#:~:text=Member States today overwhelmingly adopted,emergency session on the crisis.

Not for several decades, no.

Guess that would be a good reason for the rest of the world to get involved, right? Stopping a country from trying to use military supremacy to impose their will on another nation? Like Russia is doing right now in Ukraine?

Guns don’t protect children. They’re the leading cause of death in children.

I have no idea what you’re talking about with protecting food…hunting? Not how most people get their food. Most people get food from a grocery store…where they’re increasingly likely to get shot.

If the freedom line was in reference to the military, there’s hardly a vet alive who’s done that… they’re all dead from old age. The only wars we’ve been fighting were for revenge or resources. I say that as a vet.

If you’re talking about protecting us from our government…as far as I know, nobody has even won an armed confrontation with the police or feds over freedoms. Guns made Waco worse. Guns made Ruby Ridge worse. I guess the Bundy’s protected their “right” to steal from taxpayers by grazing their cattle on public land without paying for it like they should have. That feels like a less important right than “life” to me personally.

Captain Insano shows no mercy

Won’t someone think of the shareholders!?!?

Man, this headline reminds me of those articles that used to scare parents who didn’t know current slang.

Is your child talking about ‘vaping’? They could mean ‘giving hand jobs in a public theater’! More at 7.

Bullshit. Conservatives don’t want people living in tents. I’m tired of all this propaganda. They clearly want anyone who can’t afford a house in a prison, not a tent.

Those people’s own business is usually so fucked they have to get into others’ to avoid dealing with their own.

Seems like the sort of thing people should know about a central tenet of a pillar of their identity…

That means something totally different in Louisiana than you intended…

There is absolutely reason to pursue second, third, and fourth solutions to medical problems. There is 0 reason to assume that if treatment A is effective in 70% of patients and treatment B is effective in 70% that it’s the same 70%.

Braindead take.

High humidity can cause them to go off as well. Used to use a cool air humidifier in our kids’ room at night and had to stop because it would eventually set the alarm off.

That’s my biggest problem with the whole “burn it all down” mindset so many people espouse on this platform. If we burn down society, we aren’t gonna magically have a utopia. We’re still, at best, the same as folks during the so-called dark ages. Likely, we still basically tribal hunter-gatherers, and the only reason we have any semblance of modern life is because we put so much work into maintaining and improving it generation by generation.

And “Free speech absolutist”

Less good than helping the shooter before they went over the Rubicon…I think that’s the point.

LLMs are not general AI. They are not intelligent. They aren’t sentient. They don’t even really understand what they’re spitting out. They can’t even reliably do the 1 thing computers are typically very good at (computational math) because they are just putting sequences of nonsense (to them) characters together in the most likely order based on their training model.

When LLMs feel sentient or intelligent, that’s your brain playing a trick on you. We’re hard-wired to look for patterns and group things together based on those patterns. LLMs are human-speech prediction engines, so it’s tempting and natural to group them with the thing they’re emulating.

Yeah, I didn’t take it as you trying to bash, just expanding the convo a bit. I think the outcomes are very dependent on why the decision to homeschool was made and how prepared the parents are to actually educate their children. If you’re doing it because you don’t feel public schools are safe enough, I could get on board with that…my kids are in public school, and it’s scary as shit sometimes. Our 7th grader had to deal with multiple lockdowns last year, and we live in a pretty safe area. If you’re homeschooling because you don’t want your kid’s mind “poisoned” by basic science like geology or biology, or don’t want them exposed to different races or religions, you’re probably gonna end up with a young adult who isn’t prepared to exist on their own in the world when the time comes and that transition into adulthood is going to even harder than it already is.