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Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying
  • Punch cards? Stored correctly there's no reason they couldn't last many human lifetimes. But... Yeah it'll take a while to encode everything.

    I would have thought that with modern technology we could come up with something like punch cards but more space/time efficient. Physical storage of data - only one write cycle of course, but extremely durable. Even just the same system as punch cards but using tiny, tiny holes very close together on a roll of paper. Could be punched or read by a machine at high speed (compared to a regular punch card, presumably still Ber slow compared to flash media).

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    Everyone became animal rights enthusiasts real fast...
  • You can moral relativism your way out of the ethical problem if you want, but believing killing animals is wrong is not a religious position any more than believing murder, or rape, or theft is wrong. It's cool that for you the opposite is a religion, but it seems like you have just found a convenient way to hand-wave away arguments against your position as "someone else's beliefs" which can't possibly have any bearing on your own.

    I'm not trying to convince you of anything - you're right that, among all of those who eat meat, you're extremely low impact. Absolutely do whatever you want. But I'd consider the fact that in this thread you are claiming vegans are the religious ones while writing short essays on your own self described "religion" of hunting animals. The only one preaching here is you, man.

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    Everyone became animal rights enthusiasts real fast...
  • There are many different vegans with many different viewpoints. I am not vegan, but I come pretty close - I do still consume a limited amount of dairy, but otherwise I don't buy animal products. This is for the reasons you say - I don't want to support factory farming. I also have a limited amount of time in my life for investigating everything I eat, however - I don't honestly have the stamina to check every egg-containing product to see if it used battery eggs or not. I really don't have the time to check if the "free range" eggs I'm buying are really free range or if they have sneaked around the regulations and it's battery farming in disguise. It's just easier not to buy any eggs.

    I will accept eggs from people I know who keep chickens - no problem from me there. I think that humans having relationships with domestic animals is fine, generally we both benefit - the animals because they are protected from predators, they get fed, etc, and us because we gets eggs.

    Some vegans would not agree with me. Some vegans don't believe humans should keep any animals, including pets. I don't believe there's an issue with keeping some pets though. Domesticated animals wouldn't even exist without us... Like it or not their "natural" habitat is living with humans. You couldn't release all the dogs and expect that to be better for us or them.

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    Kondo rule
  • Do people hoard food? I suppose preppers, but they aren't likely to want any kind of method to decide what to get rid of. Plus, if you do decide to you can just stop buying food and eat your hoard.

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    Kondo rule
  • Your model is lacking in one area - poopy() has an inverse poopwash() where for some set of poopy objects Y, poopwash maps Y to a subset of the set of real world objects, but there exists a set of poopy objects Z for which poopwash maps Z to a subset of poopy objects.

    My initial instinct was to suggest that for all z in Z, keep(z) = false, however I believe your million dollar example runs counter to this. Nonetheless, I suspect there is a useful subset of Z, let's say S, for which we can say, for all s in S, keep(s) = false.

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    E, W & F
  • Fantasy interpretations often miss out that fact that if we really had a 'four element' system governing the world then everything would be made up of those four elements in differing amounts. So any liquid is presumably going to be mostly water. Perhaps oil is a mix of water and earth, or water with fire trapped in it (makes sense, right?), trees are mostly earth but clearly some water, and so on.

    True manipulation of a single element would be insanely powerful because it would give you some degree of control over everything. Which, I suppose, is why we don't get that interpretation - we get a quite literal one. Water gives you control over pure water and not much else.

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    Deep thoughts.
  • A fair point - here's a generalisation. W denotes windows, M the ability to move, a and b are two objects for which their possession of windows and ability to move (or otherwise) is known, and x is some other object.

    (W(a) ^ W(b)) ^ (M(a) ^ ¬M(b)) -> ¬(W(x) -> M(x))

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    Deep thoughts.
  • An appropriate deduction might be "Cars have windows and can move, houses have windows and cannot move. The presence of windows alone is not what allows the car to move."

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    "What is a woman?"
  • Personally I think the "woke" definition of a woman (if there even is one) is much more straightforward than the alternative. This idea that the left "can't define a woman" is absurd projection - the very people who ask this question are the ones who can't define it without having to make 100s of exceptions.

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    Generative AI hype is ending – and now the technology might actually become useful
  • It's an interesting point. If I need to confirm that I'm right about something I will usually go to the internet, but I'm still at the behest of my reading comprehension skills. These are perfectly good, but the more arcane the topic, and the more obtuse the language used in whatever resource I consult, the more likely I am to make a mistake. The resource I choose also has a dramatic impact - e.g. if it's the Daily Mail vs the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I might be able to identify bias, but I also might not, especially if it conforms to my own. We expect a lot of LLMs that we cannot reliably do ourselves.

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    Generative AI hype is ending – and now the technology might actually become useful
  • LLMs are just that - Ms, that is to say, models. And trite as it is to say - "all models are wrong, some models are useful". We certainly shouldn't expect LLMs to do things that they cannot do (i.e. possess knowledge), but it's clear that they can do other things surprisingly effectively, particularly providing coding support to developers. Whether they do enough to warrant their energy/other costs remains to be seen.

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  • As is, once a post is solved it's revealed in the name, but this means you can't then try to guess already solved posts - only new ones. If we reveal the answer in a spoiler in the post body instead, the sub's historical posts will remain playable for new players to practice.

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    Tricky to explain exactly. Sometimes the comment button goes straight to adding a new comment rather than the post's comments. To reach the comments I have to press it again. But because it's not consistent sometimes I have to press it several times to reach the actual comments.

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