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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzLinguistics
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    3 hours ago

    “Divorced from the context that brought them about” Ahh, so you’re complaining about all the Germanic words in English, or the Latin words? The whole point of their diatribe is that the “brain rot” words you hate are little different from most words. It’s just that for some words the “in group” is Latin speakers, and for some words it’s some group nerding out about their own topic that spread their word to the rest of us… actually, I’m still talking about Latin speakers.


  • Reasoning is obviously useful, not convinced it’s required to be a good driver. In fact most driving decisions must be done rapidly, I doubt humans can be described as “reasoning” when we’re just reacting to events. Decisions that take long enough could be handed to a human (“should we rush for the ferry, or divert for the bridge?”). It’s only the middling bit between where we will maintain this big advantage (“that truck ahead is bouncing around, I don’t like how the load is secured so I’m going to back off”). that’s a big advantage, but how much of our time is spent with our minds fully focused and engaged anyway? Once we’re on autopilot, is there much reasoning going on?

    Not that I think this will be quick, I expect at least another couple of decades before self driving cars can even start to compete with us outside of specific curated situations. And once they do they’ll continue to fuck up royally whenever the situation is weird and outside their training, causing big news stories. The key question will be whether they can compete with humans on average by outperforming us in quick responses and in consistently not getting distracted/tired/drunk.







  • So because there’s moral limits to when it would “ever be performed”, there should be no legal limits to when it would ever be performed? Surely by that logic we don’t need laws against murder either, after all, that would be immoral and sometimes you have to kill people in self defence, so murder laws just get in the way.

    This coming from a pro choice person, I do think there’s a good justification for allowing later abortions, but as the previous poster said, it’s not helpful to pretend there’s no complexity or that there should be no limits at all.








  • They might not have made it impossible, but most of this book banning crap has been political point scoring rather than actual attempts to change the literary record for its own sake. Now they’d have to loudly proclaim their book bans without admitting what they’re doing, which sounds a lot harder to pull off.

    Anything that underlines the offensive nature of censorship like this is a good thing in my opinion.

    I’d guess the requirement that experienced librarians make the decisions is just another way to exclude politicians and random mums with opinions from the process, I imagine most who go through a library sciences degree have already got a healthy respect for libraries which limits their willingness to play these stupid games.


  • But obviously they can’t force the potential victim to pay for an investigation when they’re the ones who need the report. Do you think instead that anyone accused in this way is literally incapable of countering the claims for themselves? There has to be an avenue for them to defend themselves, and this feels like the best thing they realistically could have done.

    Clearly a more thorough final report would help here, but I don’t see the point in attacking the money trail when that isn’t something that can be avoided.


  • I don’t disagree with your views on Boeing, but this incident is quite likely not related to Boeings problems, (other than their hard-earned public perception problem). Plane engines shouldn’t catch fire, but they do, whether that is rare bad luck or somebody screwed up is yet to be decided, but it sounds like this is not a newly minted plane, Boeing probably hasn’t touched it in years.

    Not that Boeing hasn’t earned their public perception problem, but accidents happened before Boeing lost their mojo, and will continue to happen even if Boeing regain it. This incident may well turn out to have lessons once the investigation is done, and some might be directed at Boeing, but that’s not where I’d put my money this time around, it sounds unlikely that they caused this particular incident.



  • Well that sucks. My favourite moment in a hidden role game was when a player won by misreading their card and convincing both of us that we were allies at the start. They ended up the only evil player for most of the game and then in the last round after we’d worked together to systematically kill everyone else (all weirdly innocents, we were both feeling guilty by this point), when they finally realised they knew there was no evil player they checked and… killed me. Total madness and a glorious victory for them. How can you be mad at that?!