FWIW, being an ex-JW, I’ve very rarely heard any other ex-JW suggest banning them outright. Besides moral concerns, nobody really thinks it would work. By all means, come down on them for specific crimes (like hiding pedophiles), but blanket bans are a no.

Anyone can get wrapped up in a cult, because just about everyone goes through a phase in their life when they would be primed for that mindset. Such as loss of a job with nowhere to go, or loss of a loved one.

Realize that you can’t convince someone to leave in the course of a conversation, but that you can make the little crack that opens up years later.

The loss of the guy at the center of a cult of personality can quickly disperse the cult. Very rarely, they’re able to transition into a cult of an idea rather than a personality. That’s a difficult transition to pull off, and there’s usually planning ahead of time.

There’s not a lot of quick solutions otherwise.

The Administration’s idea is that the 2026 election will be rigged in their favor.

Which might not work. Congressional Republicans may not be in on the plan, at least not all of them. Even if they are, they might be getting cold feet. Same with Republicans at the state level, and they’re the ones who have direct control over elections.

Don’t rely on them falling apart on their own, though.

Political lean can be a funny thing. States move together. It could very well be that it doesn’t shift enough to pick up those extra 3 states, but if it does, there will probably be several more.

Truth. The end stage of Half Life 2 is my example of this. It’s not especially difficult, but grabbing a jackbooted thug with the enhanced gravity gun and throwing them at another jackbooted thug is damn good entertainment.

Right, and it’s sort of a historical quirk, as well. You always need to compare your speed to what came before. That logic stretches back to computers that did not use 8 bits per byte, but still communicated over various channels to other computers.

And then there’s just plain marketing. Not just that it makes the number 8 times higher, but that any one ISP that chose to advertise in MBps rather than Mbps would suddenly look like they’re slower. It needs to be mandated for everyone as a regulatory rule or it just won’t work at all.

Salt participates in chemical reactions of cooking beyond just being salty. You do notice in other ways.

I know someone who had to go on a salt-free diet for a while. She said that she once broke down crying because of how bland everything tastes.

My wife also has an aunt who’s doctor told her to cut back on salt. She interpreted that as no salt, ever. You can always tell what dish she brought to dinner.

There are definitely things we can do with more power. Real time ray tracing for the entire scene, no upscaling tricks, at 1440p and 120fps would be amazing.

Outside of games, hardware that can solve protein folding would have massive implications for healthcare. Think of all the new drugs pharmaceutical companies can create and then upcharge 10000%.

It’s most useful because it’s popular. I can travel to the other side of the country, find a local game shop, and sit down at a group and have a shared understanding of the rules.

The history of the field has made important contributions to how modern computing works. Optimizing compilers, multitasking, and virtual machines all directly comes out of work that started with AI. Even if you don’t use all of these directly, you benefit from them just by using a computer built after 1980.

If you’re interested, I’d recommend Steven Levy’s “Hackers”, particularly the first two sections that are about MIT CSAIL. The third section is about the Sierra games studio, which has its own historical interest, but not really relevant here (and for various reasons, that part of the book hasn’t aged as well, IMO).

I don’t like the part of the field that has been weaponized against the working class. Which is almost everything that gets headlines right now. There are still good researchers doing good work who should be praised. They’re just not the ones “publishing papers” on Anthropic’s web site.

Hollerith was American-born to German immigrants. The census in question was also the 1890 US census.

It’s a cool story. With the rise in population, the 1890 census was not predicted to be completed before they had to start the 1900 census. With Hollerith’s machine, it was instead done in record time.

Depends on what you call a “computer”. The first electronic calculating machine sold by the company now known as IBM was for the census, and it was prior to WWI.

Edit: we need to fight back on this idea that the military drives technological innovation. That’s only true because of the shitty values our society has.

Have you seen the heat argument?

In short, the Young Earth Creationist position is that all the plate tectonics and radiological dating issues happened because of the flood. This means the plates would have to have moved very fast, and the resulting friction creates heat. Incredible amounts of heat. Likewise, radioactive decay releases heat, too. To do all the changes necessary to do that in the space of about a year it would generate enough heat to turn the entire planet into a plasma.

This may actually be “checkmate, YEC!”, at least in a sense. Not because they’ll change their mind about God or anything, but because they prefer to have physical solutions if possible. It’s easier to convince other people if you keep reliance on the supernatural to a minimum. But there’s just no way around this one. You have to rely on the supernatural to fix it. There’s just too much heat, otherwise.

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I’ve tried YaCy. Its results are worse than Altavista. Might be OK for searching internal documentation at an organization, but not for the public internet.

Not even a conspiracy theory, really. They hired the head of search over at Yahoo (?!!) and he had the explicit mandate to make search more profitable.

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