I’m sure someone already made a graph plotting the hours wasted learning vs the seconds gained not moving your mouse.

It’s just a tighter grouping of (biased) data that can be searched and retrieved a bit quicker.

How is your intelligence different from being “biased data that can be accessed”?

The fact that something can reason about what it presents to you as information is a form of intelligence. And while this discussion is impossible without defining “reason”, I think we should at least agree that when a machine can explain to you what and why it did what it did, it is a form of reason.

Should we also not define what it means when a person answers a question through reasoning? It’s easy to overestimate the complexity of it because of our personal bias and our ability to fantasize about endless possibilities, but if you break our abilities down, they might be the result of nothing but a large dataset combined with a simple algorithm.

It’s easy to handwave the intelligence of an AI, not because it isn’t intelligent, but because it has no desires, and therefore doesn’t act unless acted upon. It is not easy to jive that concept with the idea that something is alive, which is what we generally require before calling it intelligent.

Do you mean malware?

Am I the only one who fails to see anything seriously wrong with what you list there? I’m purposefully ignoring “misinformation spreading conspiracy theorist”, because that’s a pretty meaningless accusation and is often added as an easy character assassination rather than something substantial, but I’d like to see you elaborate.

I mean, we’re talking jail time and extradition, and nothing you’ve mentioned is even against the law in the slightest. Yes, there was piracy on his file sharing site, but that’s true for practically any service on the internet, from Google drive to Amazon S3 and anything in-between and vaguely related.

Characters like him are targeted because they are both successful and anti establishment, the eccentricity just tops it off. But why should that result in a lack of sympathy? The world doesn’t have enough of these people who rock the boat if you ask me.

Oh right, so you were talking about the content, that’s not what I understood under “frontend”. Thanks for clearing it up.

I don’t have any experience with the platform, so I’m not in a position to judge their decisions, but it’s always tricky when you present yourself as censor free. There’s things you obviously don’t want on your service, but if it falls within the legal realm, it is no longer a matter of “will we block Nazi material” but whether from that point onward you start taking a moral and political stance.

Things get incredibly tricky and cumbersome if you choose that route, not just from an administrative perspective but also technically. I can understand why the people who operate the platform would prefer to primarily use legality as a deciding factor, as not every ideological issue that you open yourself up to if you take the other route is as straightforward as fascism.

Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.

I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Did you mean can be modified? Or what does this have to do with Nazi rhetoric? Maybe you have a different idea about the word “frontend”?

Iraq was not about revenge, it was about hegemony, just like it was outlined in “rebuilding America’s defenses”, also known as the PNAC document.

It’s comments like these that show that people don’t actually research anything, they just regurgitate “sound bites” that give off the impression of being science but are actually misdirection. It makes us feel smart without having to put in any effort. So we parrot ourselves into ignorance and all it takes is complacent media that asks no real questions.

Yes it sounds plausible that fires weaken a building. But it doesn’t matter how plausible something sounds, if the evidence contradicts it, you don’t reject the evidence, you reject the theory.

NIST, who investigated the WTC disaster, said in its report “no steel was recovered that reached temperatures hot enough to weaken”. And no, the issue is not simply the failure to recover it.

I think the point is to look past the idea of having to work just for the sake of an income.

I really find this a bit alarmist and exaggerated. Consider the motive and the alternative. You really think companies like that have any other options than to deal with those things?

What is silly is the idea that that is in any way relevant to what we were discussing here. And I use the word discussing lightly. There’s a big difference between the insinuation that a foreigner is at risk for tunneling into the Russia and the Russian government eavesdropping on its population.

Nothing is going to happen when your traffic moves through Russia. In fact, you have more chance that something will happen to you if you don’t.

Please do tell what could go wrong. Is the internet sheriff going to turn up?