Right. The country in which officials insist that soldiers should be entirely free to sexually abuse Palestinians can investigate itself.

Israel is a rogue state.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

People on every single relatively small forum ever in the history of the internet have gotten frustrated and angry when other people do that, because it’s spammy.

Do you not know the history of the term “spam?”

It’s from a Monty Python skit

That’s what the front page of a forum (or the inbox of an email account) looks like when someone “spams” it - like “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.”

Just the opposite. I’m the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.

Though it’s not so much that they talk so much as that it’s just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that’s maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she’s told countless times already, because it’s her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.

And what I wouldn’t give to know them less well…

Most similar to Advance Wars:

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis

Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation

Shining Force:Resurrection of the Dark Dragon

Just in general:

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 and 2

Drill Dozer

Golden Sun 1 and 2

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

Guru Logic Champ

Metroid Fusion

Metroid Zero Mission

Medabots RPG

Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

I don’t believe that my approval or anyone else’s is at all relevant.

My position is that there’s only one person who has the right to decide whether or not it’s acceptable to trade sex for money, and that’s the person entering into the trade. Assuming that all other contractual requirements are met - they’re of legal age and acting of their own free will and so on - it’s just as much their right to trade sex for money as to trade ditch digging or code writing or coffee brewing or meeting taking for money.

(edited for clarity)

I would go so far as to say that it’s vital that Biden handles court reform, because it has to be done before the election.

We can already be sure that Trump and his backers are planning legal challenges on whatever grounds might vaguely appear to be something resembling legitimate in the event that he loses, and we can also be sure that at least Thomas and Alito will rule in their favor, no matter how ludicrous their arguments might be, simply because they’re entirely and completely compromised. They’ve already demonstrated that law is irrelevant - that they serve demagoguery, shallow self-interest, bigotry and corruption. And given the chance, they WILL do their parts to destroy democracy in the US.

We can’t afford to give them the chance.

And that could be Biden’s legacy - the president who led the efforts that saved America from a fascist coup.

I’ve seen no evidence that they are.

What little organic commentary I’ve seen has been cautiously optimistic at worst.

The barrage of anti-Harris stuff that all started appearing at essentially the same time reeks of astroturf.

And that’s why, all the way back in the beginning of this, I said that I thought the best solution was to omit information about sex entirely.

Had anyone asked, I could’ve clarified that. But instead they just ignored it and jumped to the comforting for them but loathsome for me conclusion that I’m just some sort of bigot.

My position as far as that goes is that the fundamental problem is that governments demand and record, and thus effectively make official, a designation of sex. Not only is that rather obviously problematic - I don’t see how it can ever be relevant to anything beneficial. I see no way in which it can be said to be necessary for a government to demand and record an individual’s sex unless it’s to determine that they are to be accorded some specific status or treatment based on it, which is axiomatically discriminatory. If, as the law dictates, the sexes are to be treated equally, then sex is not a relevant detail for a government to record.

And for what it’s worth, if I had my way about it, birth certificates wouldn’t include a name either. That’s long been a personal grudge of mine, though admittedly for a reason some might find odd and/or trivial. I think the only good way to name a person (or a pet, which is actually what initially led me to this conclusion) meaningfully is to get to know them first, and let the name come over time. I think that requiring a name up front has led to an inherently problematic approach to the entire concept of naming.

As far as identification goes, I think the best way to handle it, by far, is to assign on the birth certificate whatever number the government uses for its own identification purposes, and record whatever neutrally and actually usefully identifying characteristic(s) technology allows. It’s traditionally been a handprint or similar, but as the technology improves so that it becomes not only possible but trivial, I think it rather obviously should be a DNA profile.

And to again go all the way back to the beginning, as it stands, a birth certificate is a notably poor piece of identification - IMO, a thing that has been made to serve purposes it’s simply not well-equipped to serve, and that is the real heart of the problem (which is exactly why the very first thing I said on this thread was that the whole problem addressed here is, to me, just another argument against using a birth certificate as a form of identification in the first place).

To me, and rather obviously, a birth certificate should serve the one and only purpose of recording the birth of some specific person at some specific point in time, and thus establish a record based on which whatever much more useful and up-to-date form of identification could later be issued as necessary.

I mean really - the whole idea of a birth certificate serving as identification in and of itself is farcical, and I’ve thought that since the very first time I used mine for that. What in the world are they supposedly checking to verify that that’s me? “Yep - 17 inches long and 7 pounds, 2 ounces - that’s right!”

Pshew. Sorry I threw all that at you, but I really needed that vent. This whole experience of desperately trying and failing to actually communicate my view instead of just being condemned for whatever other people self-servingly assumed my view to be has been extremely unpleasant, and hopefully this will serve as enough clarification to finally put that hurtful bullshit to rest.

And that’s it. No matter how many times and in how many different ways I explain my point, you insist on dishonestly assigning sinister motives to me, and there’s absolutely no reason I need to take that sort of abuse from anyone.

Blocked.

The ideal in question isn’t “at birth”, it’s whatever it is that drives folk to think “at birth” somehow matters more than “now”

If that’s the point you want to argue, you’ll have to go find somebody who holds that ideal, which means someone other than me.

My point is and always has been very simple - a birth certificate is a just that - a record that on some specific date at some specific time, a baby was born to some specific person. That’s it. That’s all it is.

That doesn’t mean or even imply that “‘at birth’ matters more than ‘now’.” It means that a birth certificate has one and only one job - to record a birth - and anything and everything after that is some other document’s job.

And in fact, I would say it’s undeniable that “now” is more important than “at birth,” which, again, is exactly why the very first thing I said was that, to me, the whole issue is an argument against using, or requiring, a birth certificate for ID.

To me, it’s as if you’re arguing that a doorbell should also be a microwave oven, and when I point out that a doorbell’s job is to be a doorbell, you accuse me of holding the “ideal” that doorbells are more important than microwave ovens.

“At birth” isn’t an ideal - it’s a fact. FFS - it’s in the actual name of the certificate.

The exact and only point of a birth certificate is to record that on such-and-such date at such-and-such time, a baby was born to [this] person, and it possessed [these] distinguishing characteristics. That’s it. Who or what that baby became later in life isn’t relevant. At all.

In literally any circumstance where a birth certificate is needed, “now” is going to be more useful than information that is decades out of date.

Which is in fact exactly why I said that “that’s an argument against using, or requiring, a birth certificate as ID” - because a birth certificate, of necessity, is a record of information that’s significantly out-of-date.

From my post:

Possibly the best solution would be to omit information about sex from birth certificates entirely.

And that is in fact exactly why I said that - because a birth certificate really is “a certificate to show that you were born on the day and that is it.”

My first thought then though is that that’s an argument against using, or requiring, a birth certificate as ID.

Problematic as it certainly could be, it seems to me that this ruling is fundamentally correct, since a birth certificate is not a record of a person’s identity over time, but of their identity at one and only one point in time - at birth. Not just in this case but in all cases, it would seem that the idea of updating a birth certificate is inherently flawed.

Possibly the best solution would be to omit information about sex from birth certificates entirely.

I’m often reminded of a bit on Top Gear years ago, when they were talking about “turbo” as a marketing tool in the 80s, when you could buy “turbo” sunglasses or “turbo” watches or “turbo” after-shave.

The Song That Doesn’t End

Fight the urge to immediately get off the train.

Even with as many episodes of Star Trek as I’ve seen, I’m sure I’d want to rush right out and start exploring.

Neither really. Sort of.

There are certainly inherently repugnant beliefs, but beliefs in and of themselves are harmless - they’re just a particular pattern of firing neurons in a brain. They literally cannot bring harm to others just in and of themselves.

The thing that makes some beliefs horrible is not the mere holding of them, but the things one who holds them is likely to do. It’s those acts that are the real evil - the beliefs are just a foundation, or a trigger.

Now, all that said, I would hazard that it’s exceedingly rare at best (and arguably impossible) for anyone to hold noxious beliefs without them in some way affecting their behavior, so the mere holding of noxious beliefs can certainly serve as a justification for the conclusion that the person in question is in fact horrible. Still though, to be (perhaps overly) precise, I’d say that it’s not the belief itself that makes them a horrible person, but merely that the belief makes it quite likely that they’ll act in ways that make them (or reveal them to be) horrible people.