I recall a joke thought experiment me and some friends in high school had when discussing how answer keys for final exams were created. Multiple choice answer keys are easy to imagine: just lists of letters A through E. However, when we considered the essay portion of final exams, we joked that perhaps we could just be presented with five entire completed essays and be tasked with identifying, A through E, the essay that best answered the prompt. All without having to write a single word of prose.

It seems that that joke situation is upon us.

Throw the book at them.

Saunters meandering path downward

Enforcing anti-trust laws is low-hanging fruit. Then, Article 5 the Constitution to explicitly require civil law (law by legislation) over common law (law by precedent); it’s slower, but France and Germany get by.

Do you have a license to multiply those prime numbers together?

deleted by creator

Could have been an assassin.

But, would NPR approve of my desire for a harem more than my space opera novels? I think not.

See Hitler’s American Model (2017) which talks about how Nazi lawyers were attracted to how the US built itself on the tradition of common law as opposed to the more European and relatively inflexible tradition of civil law. Government under common law may change rapidly as judges overturn precedent, opening a window for demagogues such as Trump a way to quickly reform government in their favor before a majority of the populace, with their often passive consequence-centered de facto method of understanding political decisions, can oppose the changes.

checks atmospheric carbon dioxide

No progress.

Historically, I think with queer/unusual behavior were simply exiled/forced into suicide if they couldn’t mask. I’m glad I live in a part of the US that isn’t a monoculture as political originalists would have it revert to. Witchburning and lynchings are for losers.

Personally, I think a definition of life can be boiled down to whether something can record and then selectively rebroadcast information patterns in a different medium. Intelligence is a function of how long a delay there can be between recording and rebroadcast in addition to how much information is transcribed.

Transcribing DNA/RNA into peptide chains obviously meets the criteria.

Wildfires are ruled out since, although wildfires can propagate themselves, information in fuel is almost immediately lost during combustion; if wildfires are alive, it is only in combination with other life forms that can selectively preserve and sacrifice parts of themselves through fire, such as pine cones requiring fire to clear away undergrowth for new sprouts.

A computer meets the criteria, but the selectivity of information storage has historically been tightly controlled by humans. It’s more accurate to say humans and computers form an augmented hybrid lifeform.

He’d sooner take the oligarch route and privatize the FAA, fill it with his own loyalists, then give his flights priority wherever he goes, including whatever private aviation business (e.g. FedEx clone) he wants to push.

Even if it is in jest, that’s a block.

=3

It’s not a death threat if you’re supporting their death wish.

POV: ESL programmers

Fast lane to parasite town.

It’s like useful information grows as fruit from trees in a digital forest we call the Internet. However, the fruit spoils over time (becomes less relevant) and requires fertile soil (educated people being online) that can be eroded away (not investing in education or infrastructure) or paved over (intellectual property law). LLMs are like processed food created in factories that lack key characteristics of more nutritious fresh ingredients you can find at a farmer’s market. Sure, you can feed more people (provide faster answers to questions) by growing a monocrop (training your LLM on a handful of generous people who publish under Creative Commons licenses like CC BY-SA on Stack Overflow), but you also risk a plague destroying your industry like how the Panama disease fungus destroyed nearly all Gros Michel banana farming (companies firing those generous software developers who “waste time” by volunteering to communities like Stack Overflow and replacing them with LLMs).

There’s some solar punk ethical fusion of LLMs and sustainable cultivation of high quality information, but we’re definitely not there yet.

Hard to execute your Machiavellian overnight decapitation conquest when so many people believe in the checks and balances designed to inhibit takeover by a King.

The relevant section of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) that Trump, despite having four years to have his loyalists prepare a government takeover, has failed to do over the past few weeks:

… on seizing a state, the usurper should make haste to inflict what injuries he must, at a stroke, that he may not have to renew them daily, but be enabled by their discontinuance to reassure men’s minds, and afterwards win them over by benefits. Whosoever, either through timidity or from following bad counsels, adopts a contrary course, must keep the sword always drawn, and can put no trust in his subjects, who suffering from continued and constantly renewed severities, will never yield him their confidence. Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savour being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred little by little, so that they may be more fully relished.