enkers

That’s wild. Did you need a special program to parse stuff out of the data stream? I guess it would mostly come in as http reaponses, so it wouldn’t be too hard, but still an interesting problem.

Backblaze regularly releases failure rate statistics of their drives, and it’s often a big enough dataset to be quite meaningful. I haven’t been keeping up with it lately, but there certainly was a period of time where there were substantial differences in the failure rates of different manufacturers.

So while you do still need to have drive failure mitigation strategies, buying more reliable devices can definitely save you time and headache in the future by having to deal with failures less frequently.

One minor caveat where CPU could matter is AVX support. I couldn’t get ollama to run well on my system, despite having a decent GPU, because I’m using an ancient processor.

I didn’t even realize where we were until I read your comment.

Haha, yeah, that’s why I said it’s my diplomatic answer, as it doesn’t utterly reject a capitalist framework.

Here’s my mildly diplomatic answer that’d probably get tossed:

Piracy has become a plague on our society, but there’s a more sinister cause to it. The average labourer can hardly afford to pay the same fee to access culture that the wealthy person can, and this has caused a significant and justified uptick in piracy.

This situation can be averted by increasing minimum wages and supporting universal basic income. If everyone knew they could at least make ends meet, they’d have some left over to pay for the culture that mattered to them.

I wouldn’t worry about it. Nobody is going to read an essay in a single paragraph.

If you can’t separate your thoughts into comprehensible, logical blocks, nobody is going to bother to parse them.

As a vegan, you’re absolutely right. A lot of people think the hard part is giving up meat or dairy or eggs, but it’s not. The hard part is dealing with the social implications. Explaining to your friends you aren’t willing to eat with them when they’re doing something you find thoroughly wrong. Having your mom disappointed you won’t eat her cooking.

You have to be willing, at least somewhat, to pay the cost of maintaining your convictions, and nobody ever tells you that when you start.

Social change is hard, and it takes time. But so many have already blazed a much harder path than I’ve had to endure, and every time someone else gets on board it makes it easier.

Doing the right thing is rarely the easiest thing.

What a strange mentality. When I pay for things I want, I’m generally happy to support the creator. If others can’t, why would I be upset if they get the product for free? It means more people can also enjoy the thing I like.

It’s such a crab bucket mentality, I couldn’t imagine living life being constantly bitter.

I think the inverse problem is more troubling. If you accept that nothing has inherent value, then isn’t everything morally permissible? Maybe it is an emotional decision, or perhaps a leap of faith, but I find that idea so repugnant, I couldn’t believe it and continue functioning as a person.

I think in terms of consciousnes, Occam’s razor leads me to suspect that it’s tied to brain function, and when that ceases, so does it. Of course, once again, things like this are very hard to prove. I do think, though, that science and philosophy will eventually unravel it. (Incidentally, there’s actually a book by Dan Dennett I’ve been meaning to read about this topic which was suggesting we’re quite a bit closer to figuring it out than most people think.)

One of the problems with philosophy is that there’s never any smallest part, beyond perhaps Descartes’s “cogito, ergo sum”. You can reduce any argument more and more and they all start to not make sense and eventually crumble. You can pick at their semantic foundation or the thousands of years of preceding thought until they unravel, then that nice sweater is now just a bunch of fibres. If you refuse to view philosophical arguments as a whole, then there’s nothing there to view.

It’s like an actual sweater. Does it even exist in the first place? After all, it’s just a bunch of stuff arranged in a particular way, and it’s called a sweater because it has some sort of human utility and we decided to give it a name. You could go about your life and believe that sweaters don’t exist, and it’d be quite hard to prove you wrong.

Or you can accept that it’s a useful human construct, so they do. Maybe you could even go further, and believe there’s some idealised concept of sweaterness that exists in some meta-reality, which all sweaters share a property of.

I think this is essentially the realist viewpoint.

And you could be right, maybe all our current moral theories do run into contradictions, so perhaps they’re all wrong.

Heck, we’re running into similar problems in astrophysics. When we learn more about our universe, and things stop adding up. But that just means we go back to the drawing board and find a better model until they make sense.

Same for philosophy. When you reach a contradiction, you go back and come up with better ideas. It’s a process of slowly uncovering the truth.

I think it’s rather self evident, but I’ll share a logical outline which resonates with me. To be sussinct: Most sentient beings kinda like being alive. Where possible, it’s morally preferable to let them continue in that state.

It’s basically an application of the golden rule. You can get in to game theory or utilitarianism for more thorough arguments to show that killing is generally wrong, but it then still has to come back to life having value which is quite hard, if not impossible, to logically prove.

So then you need to refer back to philosophy to find arguments that life has intrinsic value. I personally prefer using Camus’ acceptance of the absurd as a basis for intrinsic value, but there are lots of other potential arguments that lead to the same conclusion.

Ultimately, though, it’s impossible to even prove that other beings simply exist (e.g. solipsism) or have experiences, but at some point we mostly all look at the evidence and accept that they do.

I don’t know the laws that well, but there is a distinction in Canadian law between uploading and downloading. I’m not entirely sure how applicable to torrenting that is, but I think there’s a reasonable argument that if you are the original uploader, you must have uploaded the content in it’s entirety, whereas that’s not necessarily true for anyone else downloading the torrent, and certainly not provably so.

I think that’s not necessarily true. There’s certainly some good reasons to have a distinction between the original uploader and all the rest of the additional seeders. It’s going to come down to local law.

An analogy is if you buy some illicit substance and split it up with a few friends who pay you their share. Whether or not your local authorities considers you an illegal drug dealer could be highly dependent on scale, profitability, frequency, clientele, etc. Those details could be the difference between a slap on the wrist and some hard time.

GReader was so good, now it’s just another ghost in Google’s graveyard. :( My guess is that they killed it because it was kinda in the same sphere as Google News.

Would that not depend on your inertial frame? Like isn’t the entire concept of being stationary relative to spacetime not an actual thing? I’m not trying to be pedantic, BTW, I literally don’t know the answer to my question.

I’d imagine it’s quite a bit fewer tire micro-plastics too.

free [?] market leads to one big monopoly

Unregulated market ≠ free market. That’s what I just explained. If you’d like a better understanding I’d highly recommend auditing econ 101 online through MIT: https://youtu.be/_OkTw766oCs?si=twyynoEzf-bi5k3m

It’s not a tough course, and it’s probably one that everybody should take anyways, TBH.

That’s an unregulated market. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but an idealized free market would need to be free of price fixing and monopolization, and therefore requires regulation.

That’s what all these invisible hand folk always get wrong.

I’ve never heard the term before, but my first guess would be someone who has a castle on wheels. So an SUV owner, or pickup owner who doesn’t actually use it for its intended purpose.

Yeah, my list would end up being longer than some novels. Also, software churn makes it an ever evolving process, so having a list where half of it is wrong by the next time I need it seems less than ideal.