LLMs are a muse, not a fucking oracle you absolute strawberry plant

I don’t have a good answer to your question, but to me “white” as an ethnicity makes about as much sense as “Christian” does as a religious description - they both cover such a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs to be essentially useless. Do a Catholic, a baptist and a modern evangelical actually believe the same things beyond how they frame those beliefs?

To my mind, same goes for ethnicity - “white” can mean anything from the baltics to western Europe to north America, and to my mind, is kinda racist. It lumps people from as diverse places as Ireland and Russia together purely based on appearances. I get “black” as a self-selected descriptor of people who do have a big cultural touch-point in common - our ancestors were enslaved, brought here against our will, and we still feel the impacts of that even if our ancestors themselves were from a wide background.

I guess “white” is an easy antonym to “black”, but then that still comes back to a racist tint - “we are white because we aren’t Them” - and lumps in people who have nothing to do with the lasting impact of slavery in the US into this “oppressor vs oppressed” false dichotomy.

The MAD doctrine aims to make the intentional use of nukes in war unworkable, but in doing so makes their accidental use due to mishap, misunderstanding or miscommunication much more likely, and the more people that are party to the MAD doctrine the more likely accidents are.

You don’t need to look very hard to find examples of cases where billions of people would have been killed if not for people choosing to ignore doctrine even when the information they had at hand said that they should use their weapons

Pretty sure that counts as a hate crime against the English

Being on the hill must have been rough. Have a friend who moved to the city a few years ago and was super excited to find a bit of bare land up on the hill with a great view into the estuary to build a house on - explained why it was bare, didn’t seem to deter him.

It’s interesting how the geography affected things - another friend had a batch in Akaroa on the other side of the peninsula that barely felt the quakes - theory being the peninsula is a dead volcano, so it’s mostly really spongy basalt that effectively acted as a dampener and absorbed most of the energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_earthquake_(disambiguation)

One in 2010 that did a bunch of damage but only killed 2 people, but then triggered a significant aftershock in February 2011 that was much more destructive - partly because it was shallower and closer to the city, but also because lots of buildings had been damaged but not fully repaired.

I was in Christchurch for the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes that killed 185 people and critically damaged essentially every building within the city centre.

The whole thing was pretty surreal. My family were pretty lucky, our house was lightly damaged (old timber frame, moved ~2cm off its piles but was livable while that was fixed) and we had a few things break (including a 60L fishtank that nearly landed on me as I tried to get to a doorway), I know a few people who were without electricity and clean water for a week, or whose houses were damaged beyond repair then had to spend years fighting insurance companies to get what they were due.

I still live in the city, and it’s pretty much unrecognisable as to how it was before. Basically every major building in the central city had to either be torn down or significantly renovated to repair it. Basically every brick building built before the 1950s was damaged beyond repair. Huge chunks of residential land in the east of the city was so badly damaged that there is no way it could be safely built on again - the government brought all the houses, tore them down and fenced the area off.

Idk, if you are at the point where law enforcement is going to a cell provider with a location request warrant you are pretty much already fucked. They know who you are, they know your phone number, they probably know where you live and work

Idk, I wouldn’t carry one across the border any more than I’d take one with me to a drug deal

He can’t be prosecuted as president, but he isn’t being prosecuted. He was prosecuted and convicted before he was re-elected

Right up until we have an Arch Duke situation

This is a weirdly body-positive message for a gym; you can be fat and beautiful or skinny and ugly

28 megawatts at peak. Enough power for 21,000 homes.

bUt iTS soLaR!

Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn’t be a cap on the penalty they could impose.

In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them

Yeah, pretty much. The way the rest of the world deals with it is by splitting the infrastructure maintenance and retail sides to eliminate the profit incentive to not do maintenance.

You have a company who owns a/the fibre network in an area and is obligated by anti-monopoly rules to sell access to the network at the same rate and terms to anyone who wants it. They have a profit incentive to maintain the network to a reasonable standard because having a functioning network is how they make money. In a lot of places this wholesale provider will be at least part government owned given that the government usually pays a good chunk of the cost to build out large national infrastructure projects like fibre networks.

Separately, you have retail ISPs who buy access to the fibre network (or 4g, satellite, …) and sell it to the public along with value adds like tech support, IP addresses, peering agreement etc.

It’s never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something.

That’s probably an impossible task - getting enough people who are experts in every possible field enough to judge novelty and innovativeness wouldn’t be feasible.

An alternative is the way the Dutch assess patents - they don’t, and grant them automatically on filing, but that means you remove the assumption that they are valid on their face if they get challenged

Unfortunately, the way patent suits work it could be enormously expensive to defend something like this, even when the patent is clearly bad.

You’d be arguing that the patent is invalid to start with, but the court would probably start from the position that you are actually infringing a valid patent (it was granted after all), and grant an injunction to prevent further harm (“stop giving people the software until we can work out if there is any merit to your claim that you aren’t infringing”). You then need to put together a case to show the prior art, and you can bet that they’d contest every single point. This whole process could take years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that you won’t get back even if you win - there isn’t really a provision to recover costs in patent cases because there is the assumption that every claim is made in good faith

Not in the US; in NZ most houses will have a “wash tub” - essentially a sink in a metal cabinet specifically for doing “dirty” jobs like laundry. That will have water hookups for the washer, so that goes next to it where there is space, then the dryer will do next to that or on top of the washer.

The last few places I’ve lived in have all had the tub in a corner with space on its left, so it’s been dryer, washer, tub. Annoying, my dryer door opens to the right and the washer to the left, so it’s harder than it should be to move clothes between them

Planes rarely reverse into mountains.

And the survival statistics have a lot to do with the amount of work that has been put into making the worst case “controlled descent into terrain” scenario exceptionally rare.

Something like

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