The problem is, I think, abundance of quality - or the lack thereof. For all the research based prizes, there is enough stuff floating around the ether that you can pick something interesting and worth the prize to be awarded. Old Phil Physicist, not by accident a man, will get the prize for fundamental research into clockwise spinning protons and that helps us today with welding or something. Nobody but the experts understands this and we’re okay with that.

And then Literature and Peace. They seem more subjective. Us non-labcoats have opinions on these ones. And thus the controversy likelihood is much higher.

Since they get awarded every year, it’s become a fixture in media coverage. Like the New Year’s ball drop, Carnival in Rio, the Pope urbi’ing et orbi’ing, Black Friday, etc. It’s predictable news coverage.

I don’t think they should stop it. Even the institutionalized reminder once a year that it’s worth it working towards peace is not a bad thing. I think the prize has the most gravitas when it’s awarded for long time services to peace on the books. Like giving it to the chemical weapons disposers, the red crescent/cross or even the EU, which has probably prevented more deaths from wars within than it has tolerated refugees drowning in the Med. They have done more good stuff for peace. It’s tricky when they give it to people for more current achievements. Kissinger wasn’t the peacemaker it looked like he was. Aung San Su Kyi was a great figurehead while under house arrest 1.0 - and arguably not great enough for the Rohingya when she was let out. Obama got it because they thought he wasn’t Bush, and then he sent the drones. We want our laureates to be saints and it hurts when we find out they are just flawed humans.

Can? Sure. Should? No.

It’s worthwhile remembering though that the people who get it aren’t all saints. Although rape and sexual assault are particularly distasteful items to have on the resume, if the person repented and then contributed meaningfully to lasting world peace, they shouldn’t automatically be stricken off the list.

So those admittedly distastefully liberal guidelines should exclude any current resident of the White House then.

I think they should ignore any person who is so publicly thirsty for it. It’s a prize you get, not one you ask for.

It’s unnerving having to read that the US ally Norway feels like they need to prepare for retaliatory tariff action if the independent committee for the award, that only ended up in Oslo by a quirk of Scandinavian history, doesn’t award the prize to 47. Sad.

“Free healthcare” doesn’t exist. You can spread the cost differently. Either you pay what you need - which could be a lot - or you pay less but consistently into a big pool along with other people and then that pool money gets distributed to health care providers. That smaller but regular contribution will go up if everybody goes to see their family doctor unnecessarily so there is a bit of a feedback gauge. It isn’t all milk and honey in socialized health care.

No matter what system your country uses, you will have heard about the same problems. Not enough staff, lacking qualifications, people being overworked and underpaid - in particular on the lower rungs of the ladder. That leads me to think that the staffing levels are about the same. Maybe one system has more work hours invested in preventative care while the other needs more in mop-up crews for those who fall through the cracks.

The dipshit could’ve been using services under their actual name. I sadly don’t remember which shooting it was but the shooter streamed it on Facebook live. So that’s easy for a journalist.

If you posted a deranged manifesto anonymously on 4chan or similar but mention the gruesome deed before it happens that’s a good link to your dipshit’s online history.

There is a show on German TV that is a rough copy of Last Week Tonight. Every once in a while they surprise their audience with a show that’s about the audience. You need to register for tickets with your name and email and then the researchers mercilessly dig through all the stuff people have been posting online or stuff posted about them by others. And then they gently rib them or surprise them on the show and to compensate for the public embarrassment they get a prize. It’s a concept inspired by the Snowden leaks. It’s unreal how easy it is to link people to their digital footprints. Even anonymous accounts on reddit or whatever. Armed with face recognition and syntax analysis it’s almost trivial to uncover these links. This is the sort of digging modern journalists need to do. So it is not surprising that they quickly find any dipshit’s profiles after they shot innocent people.

There is no need for an apology. Let’s just blame the French and move on;)

I think it is possible to develop a sense for the language. Knowing not to pronounce the third person plural present tense indicative ending, as it is pretty much always in company of an “ils” or “elles” is one of those senses you can develop. It just isn’t the same as read as written. And I have a suspicion your teacher told you that white lie not to break your spirit. If you have endured the absolute mockery that English spelling makes of the alphabet, then it would be soul crushing to say: and here is how the French language takes the mockery to new (silent) heights. And we throw in a œ just for shits and giggles.

… French is at least consistent in what is pronounced and what is not. …

I would say you’re moving your own goalposts here.

Ils mangent - intelligent

Same four letters at the end, not the same pronunciation.

Danish has entered the chat. They don’t pronounce anything the way it’s written either. And French consists of 80 percent silent letters or thereabouts. It’s not just English in Europe.

Consider the needlessly complicated to be applied on top of a general baseline of needlessly complicated that applies to any language.

While they don’t have gendered nouns, they have something equally unnerving for the beginner learner. Their noun classes evolve mostly around the nature of shapes and sizes, which becomes an issue the moment you need to count anything. For which there are two systems, one of which stops at ten, and the other is highly irregular in its forms. And don’t get me started on the calendar. English is relatively unsophisticated by comparison.

It’s not an easy language to master even if you lived full-time in Japan. Everything about the language is needlessly complicated. The grammar, the writing system, the social conventions that influence word choices. Anime Japanese is its own kettle of fish. Overly colloquial or stylized samurai talk - neither of which you’ll get taught in most language courses.

Now, you could be a savant who picks it up in no time. More likely you’ll be in it for a couple of weeks and give up - or life. It’s not a bad hobby. Even beyond Duolingo you’ll find plenty of resources online and lots of it free.

Back pay is not helping that much when your mortgage is on the line today/next month after you have exhausted all your savings. Of which I’m gonna guess post covid there aren’t that much. Your soldiers are going to suffer bad. Your go fund me idea is honorable; I don’t see it making enough of a dent. That would presuppose a level of knowledge among the general public, an awareness of these issues, and I don’t see that either. In a way, it’s that lack of awareness that gave the world Orange 2.0.

The Republicans have the stronger arm in this arm wrestle. I don’t like it either. Their people don’t care if you chop off their fingers if at the end they can say they owned the Dems. If education works here, go for it. I don’t think the time frame is long enough for this to work. They’ve already swallowed veterans getting less health care and that their favorite valet José has been sent to El Salvador. Are grocery price increases not outpacing inflation? They aren’t issue-based, they are vibe-based and the vibe is own the Dems.

In theory I agree with you. I’m not parroting anyone, I’m trying to look at this realistically. This is not the first shutdown rodeo. And it sucks if your team feels a certain level of responsibility to the country and all its people, which is more than I can see coming from the clown car load of people currently in charge. At some point the leadership of the Democrats will feel the damage to continue is going to hurt them more at the ballot box than to package a turd of a compromise in shiny wrapping paper. I want your vision of the Democrats but I think we’ll get mine unfortunately.

I don’t doubt that. My crystal ball tells me they will compromise at some point for the good of the workers, for the good of the country - whichever line works best at that moment. I wouldn’t want them to do that but I’m pretty sure it will pan out that way eventually.

There is a process called reconciliation that gets triggered in the senate in a budget impasse situation. I would say it typically involves a whole lot of horse trading but at the end is a bill that can pass with a simple majority. So I don’t think either party will be able to drag this out indefinitely or just to the midterms.

Dragging this out generally is a bad idea for Democrats. The cult following of stable genius is going to accept the negative consequences longer as long as they get fed a narrative along the lines of “we prevent immigrants from getting health care and drain the swamp of lizard people.” Or whatever. The Democrats will feel their feeble support dwindle when unpaid government workers are done with their savings, which will happen before the cult runs out of patience. The whole battle is mainly fought on the backs of people whose only fault was choosing a career in government. The Democrats will take pity on them and eventually agree to the least dehumanizing compromise you can negotiate at the “12th” hour.

If you care about things beyond the operations, the Proton boss came out in support of 47’s adminstration with regards to regulating big tech IIRC. I’m not aware the Mullvad chief did something similar.

Proton works well. But it’s designed to be the basket for all your eggs (VPN, office suite, email, etc.). They want you to use all their services and push for upgrades to the highest tier. I found their customer support you be … very … slow.

If you need port forwarding, AirVPN is another option. I think they’re cheaper than Mullvad but it’s held together by dedication and duct tape. It works okay but read their website first to see if you’re okay with how it’s set up.

Neither of us are legal scholars, are we. If I pretended to be one, I would say the government acting as a user on somebody else’s platform or the government running its own platform are different enough circumstances not to derive comparisons from.

In summary: you have the cooperation of the parents, you cannot exclude the existence of a mental issues, and you are allowed to spray the item then. These are conditions I put ahead of any other suggestion.

No, I would not want to join such an instance but I wouldn’t mind its existence. Nobody could really federate with it. So you create a niche server in an already niche environment.

I am not convinced the conclusion “if the government runs it, the first amendment has to apply” is apt. Even if the server was run from under the house majority leader’s desk - which I don’t think it would, this smells more like an outsourced undertaking - moderation on the platform is not “making a law.” And proprietors of platforms are legally compelled to moderate in certain cases, e.g. when illegal stuff like child sexual abuse is involved.

There are at least two discussions going on here simultaneously. Is the process of a beefed up spell checker sucking up all the data the same as an artist looking at what had come before, before either of them churn out new art? I’m inclined to agree with you; the process does seem similar enough. The difference remains that one is a statistical model and the other is a human being. So even if the process appears similar enough, they are two different types of player and I can also agree that we should not treat them the same. One is able to throw constant massive amounts of spaghetti at the wall as long as there are chips and power and the other is limited by their health and more limited processing power. So where the compromise lands in this discussion simply isn’t clear yet. And while you and I can discuss this, I can say for myself at least I’m not smart enough to see where this goes eventually.

The other discussion is how all of it collides with existing copyright/trademark law, which is essentially different in every country. Constitutional rights, like freedoms of expression and the arts, are given to real people, not computers. But at least one supreme court in this planet has made corporate money a form of free speech. So eff knows where LLMs end up.

This is new territory we’re in. And I fear that’s why it will take another decade until we get a legal landmark decision or a political compromise that will be similar enough all around the world.

The law mostly disagrees with the memes = theft. A lot of it is covered through freedom of speech and fair use. If you have taken a bit of content, changed it a bit, recontextualized, and reposted it, you are most likely in the clear. Especially if the original content was publicly posted. This gets less clear if you are using the likeness of a private person but this will also depend on context. Where in the world you are, if this content was captured in a public space or from something published - the list goes on, like some stuff can be trademarked as well, and I’m no lawyer. A lot of these things run under the legal doctrine of “no plaintiff, no judge.” I feel artists in general have accepted that anything they post online is just potentially gone. And if no one steals their content to make money off it, they’re not going to hire a lawyer, whom they cannot afford.

And I’m not saying any of this is great but that’s an established status quo.

The reason why so-called AI generated art gets decried is twofold. It’s new and we don’t like new things. And in order for it to be created, the models have to suck in all the training data they can. And they don’t tend to pay for it. So that’s where some people see theft happening. But that’s not settled law yet because it’s fairly new, there are plaintiffs but not enough judges have passed judgement yet. Do they have to pay for stuff that’s publicly available? Where is the line, if any? Is imitation of a style okay if there is more to the work than just copying something from Studio Ghibli or Disney? These questions are going to keep a lot of legal professionals in bacon for a long time still.

This shit is hard. It’s more gray than black and white.

When they use idioms and expressions incorrectly.