In many localities voters have used initiative powers to ban red light cameras and in some jurisdictions red-light camera fines are deemed constitutional violations because the US Constitution requires those accused of crimes to be able to “confront their accuser” in court which is not possible if the accuser is a machine.

While it is rude to honk immediately when the light turns green, it is also true that taking too long to accelerate when the light changes severely reduces traffic flow and causes congestion. And this is commonly caused by distracted drivers. You are supposed to release your brake and begin moving at roughly the same time as the car in front of you, i.e. when the car in front of you turns off their brake lights or when the traffic signal turns green if you’re in the front.

Edit: “Too long” realistically means anything more than half a second. If everyone’s reaction time was one second it would reduce the number of cars per green light probably by half. That doesn’t mean it’s polite to honk after half a second but if your reaction time is that bad you should not be driving.

So what did you mean when you began your comment with “actually it’s the inverse”? Inverse of what?

I’m a bit confused by what you’re trying to say here. It seems non sequitur if you are trying to say “borrowers of higher interest rate benefit less from inflation”.

Your maths is not right. Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.

Let’s consider the scenario where inflation is 10% for simplicity, and two borrowers who each borrow $100, but Borrower A at 5% annual simple interest and Borrower B at 25% annual simple interest. Both borrowers borrow the money at the beginning of Year 0.

Borrower A owes $105 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $95.45 in Year 0 dollars.

Borrower B owes $125 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $113.64 in Year 0 dollars.

Compared to a 0% inflation rate, Borrower A saved 9.55 Year 0 dollars and Borrower B saved 11.36 Year 0 dollars. Borrower B saved 1.81 more Year 0 dollars than Borrower B due to inflation (but paid 17.55 Year 0 dollars more overall because of interest).

Inflation reduces the real buying power of the money used to repay the loan by the inflation rate each year, regardless of your loan interest.

In absolute terms, inflation is better the higher your interest rate is, because the number of dollars it saves you goes up.

Someone tried this with a dating app for right-wingers only called “The Right Stuff”, which has faced significant criticism for lacking female users.

This meme reminded me to turn on my alarm. I turned it off last Wednesday for Juneteenth and the Monday and Friday alarms are separate (less road congestion, can wake up later). So if not for this, I would have overslept tomorrow morning

No, I go online and just order another one for same-day pickup from a local electronics retailer. Then I restore my files from my backup.

It would be cringe if you were using a shared server and set this as a default for everyone or if it was interfering with something. But if you’re just minding your own business I could not care less what customisations you put on your terminal as long as it isn’t using excessive resources

There are some languages that use strictly phonetic writing systems. Cherokee (indigenous American language) and Esperanto (constructed international auxiliary language) come to mind, but I’m sure there are others. None of the major world languages (English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Standard Chinese) are perfectly phonetic.

French people will see a 10-letter word and pronounce it as a single syllable. No language is particularly good in this respect, English is just the most common target of criticism for this

It’s not an LLM, but Stockfish does use AI under the hood and has been since 2020. Stockfish uses a classical alpha-beta search strategy (if I recall correctly) combined with a neural network for smarter pruning.

There are some engines of comparable strength that are primarily neural-network based. lc0 comes to mind. lc0 placed 2nd in the Top Chess Engine Championships in 9 out of the past 10 seasons. By comparison, Stockfish is currently on a 10-season win streak in the TCEC.

One of my mates generated an entire website using Gemini. It was a React web app that tracks inventory for trading card dealers. It actually did come out functional and well-polished. That being said, the AI really struggled with several aspects of the project that humans would not:

• It left database secrets in the code
• The design of the website meant that it was impossible to operate securely
• The quality of the code itself was hot garbage—unreadable and undocumented nonsense that somehow still worked
• It did not break the code into multiple files. It piled everything into a single file

I think one other factor that people have not considered is the monitor. To run all games at 4K maximum settings, yes, this type of PC might be required. But at lower resolutions, such as 1080p or 1440p, this is overkill and one would be able to run any game as maximum settings even with a computer costing a third as much.

And for those who don’t: Plato, a Greek philosopher, was putatively asked by a student while teaching at the Academy what the definition of a man (human) was. Plato responded that a man is a “featherless biped”.

Diogenes, another Greek philosopher and infamous quick-wit, caught wind of this and thought that was the dumbest thing ever, so he gate-crashed one of Plato’s lectures and pulled out a chicken which had all of its feathers plucked out and said “Behold, a man!”.

Euclid’s first postulate: Give two points, there exists exactly one straight line that includes both of them.

I am not the parent commenter, but the argument for and against wealth taxes is a lot more nuanced than many people would originally think.

For one, a great deal of wealth in this country (the overwhelming majority, actually) is not money but takes the form of illiquid capital goods like real property and shares in companies. There is a real concern that people subject to tax just won’t have enough dollars in a bank account to pay for it, and forcing the sale of that many goods could render the markets illiquid as it wipes out the red side of the order book every April.

A potential way around this is if the tax can be paid in kind, similar to how wealth taxes were collected historically, such as in the Roman Empire. This could be stupid easy to administrate—a 1% wealth tax against companies can be enforced by just minting 1% of every registered company’s outstanding shares in new stock and then transferring it to the control of the Government. Though the downside is that this sort of tax is very indiscriminate and difficult to target towards certain demographic groups. While shareholders are largely wealthy individuals who would be the target demographic for a wealth tax, they aren’t exclusively so. Effectively that becomes a tax on holding shares in companies, which is a good, but not perfect, proxy for wealth. The drawback to collecting shares in kind is that the stuff that is raised is not really “revenue” for the state, in that it is not money that can be spent, and to liquidate it would incur significant loss for the state as well. Which is basically throwing wealth away. This wasn’t a problem when “in-kind” meant grain and barley that could be used to feed the army, but soldiers can’t survive on a diet of stock certificates.

I am in favour of large-scale wealth redistribution from the billionaire class to the working class, but doing so isn’t as easy as saying “You, billionaire, give me 1% of everything you got, cash.” I think a policy of combined high income tax, high capital gains tax, and taxing loans for personal expenses secured against shares as income is more likely to be effective.

You’re being downvoted because your assertion that hosts are responsible for what users upload is generally false.

(1) Treatment of Publisher or Speaker.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil Liability.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in [subparagraph (A)].

47 USC § 230c, a.k.a. Communications Decency Act 1996 § 230

Hash matching is really easy to get around. Literally modify 1 bit of the image or just re-encode the video and you’ve gotten around it.