Yeah, you are right.

I think it’s the Ge’ez script used in Ethiopian.

At home I can deal with it (and have done). Hotels are a different story and they don’t all have shower heads you can reposition. I’ve even been in ones where the gap between my head and the ceiling would not fit a showerhead between.

Same with sinks and work surfaces. If I control the space you can bet it’s all comfortable for me, but I don’t always had that luxury.

That isn’t even the worst thing. Sinks are. Especially those big, deep professional ones where the bottom is somewhere south of your knees. But even ordinary sinks are almost always too low to be comfortable and you have to do this little half stoop/lean to use them properly.

Also showers in hotels. The controls are low, and sometimes the showerhead is at or bellow shoulder height.

Squeezing into an airline seat is comparatively fine, and I tend not to have to worry about the guy in front reclining because they physically can’t. And the look of fury dying in the eyes of the chap who just turned round to complain about it is a memory that warms me to this day.

The persistent thing I get from right wing folk is that they can not, on a fundamental level get their head round the idea that some people think differently to them. They fear the loss of their power because they know what they do with it, and fear someone else having it. They say other people are triggered because of the unreasoning fury they respond to cognitive dissonance with. They are worried about people ‘making children gay’ because they will happily imprison and torture people until they present cis/hetero. They make women cover up because they know that any excuse to rape would be enough for them. They support the police because the threat of the police is the only thing keeping their neighbours safe from them. They are scared of the feds because they know what they have used the feds to do.

Don’t trust them. Especially when they think no one is watching.

Maybe they want to be tied up and have a train run on them.

Eh, I prefer their more avant-garde conceptual stuff, like “that password is already in use by another user”. It really made you think you know?

IANAL, of course.

My understanding is that there is no such thing as an assumed licence for copyrighted work. The default is that there is no license and the owner reserves all rights. A license is a way to assign some or all of those rights to another entity.

The downside to copyleft is that you are giving up some of the ability to control the work, and it becomes harder to monetize as some people will question why they should pay for something they can have for free.

As far as I know, you can’t use copyright to prevent someone from reading something that has been legally distributed to them. There are also some exceptions your government includes in copyright, like you can be quoted for the purposes of commentary and criticism, there may be exceptions for copies made for educational purposes or an exception that allows the government to make a copy for their archives, or if someone has legal access they might be able to make copies for personal use.

In all cases check your local laws. Copy left is a way to exploit these laws to allow humans to more easily benefit from your work but keep exploitative entities away. All of these only work within a legal framework however.

That wrist angle looks uncomfortable as all hell.

So you are at about an A1 and want to get up to around a B1? I don’t like saying impossible but a month is not long at all. If you can already read it you might do better, just focus on the reading and writing skills, get some sample papers if you can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages?wprov=sfla1

You are probably going to want a tutor that offers an intensive class, that can be done in a month, but you are still going to be looking at 50+ hours.

Do you know what level the exam is expecting?

Aged like milk has a lot less impact if you are good at it.

Good on you for checking in with all those people, it must have taken a while.

Lifting the whole world off of fossil fuels is going to be hard, especially if we want to do it quickly. This isn’t however a problem the capitalist and nation-state models are well equipped to solve. It should not be a question of can a given people afford the technology or if someone can turn a profit on it.

We need to do this as a species, for the species. It should be given not as charity, not because wealthy countries owe it to poor ones, but because it is right that everyone should benefit from this.

The difficulty is how to convince the politicians and their masters of this, and I don’t think throwing paint on things is going to be sufficient.

Generally I find the wait times aren’t really longer. The perceived time maybe, as I can ring ahead and then go pick it up, but for me it’s just the usual calculus of what could I alternatively spend the time doing and is it worth the added cost. It’s the same as do I call a tradesperson or fix something myself. Replace a washer on a tap? Sure I will do that. Install a new toilet? Nah, get a plumber.

If money is tight and I’ve got the time then I’m going to cook myself. If both are tight then there’s always ramen.

A plastic ice scraper will help get the bulk off, then you can get a variety of solvents for removing any residue. If it is metal then it should be fine with most solvents but check the instructions and do a test patch somewhere discreet to be sure.

The specifics can be argued, (and have been, and will be). The Buddha said that evil action is rooted in greed, hatred, and delusion. He said he understood this when he saw the true nature of reality.

Kant said “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” And says this is evident if you reason through things.

Moses had a great big list of rules that he said the creator of the universe told to him.

Governments establish laws based on the interests of those in power, they say to obey the law is right and to disobey is wrong and they will use violence to punish those that disobey.

These are just some examples, there are loads more including utilitarianism, virtue ethics, various other religions and customary systems.

If it’s sending information to Microsoft then it has clearly been hacked. Likely by Microsoft. It was very nice of that young man to break protocol and blow the whistle on this whole thing. You should send him an itunes gift card as a thank you.

I think I the difference is that I find ‘human’ to be too narrow a term, I want to extend basic rights to all things that can experience suffering. I worry that such an experience is part and parcel with general intelligence and that we will end up hurting something that can feel because we consider it a tool rather than a being. Furthermore I think the onus must be on the creators to show that their AGI is actually a p-zombie. I appreciate that this might be an impossible standard, after all, you can only really take it on faith that I am not one myself, but I think I’d rather see a p-zombie go free than accidently cause undue suffering to something that can feel it.

Hypotheticals are pretty important right now I think. This kind of tech is very rapidly going from science fiction to real and I think we should try and stay ahead of it conceptually.

I’m not sure that AGI is necessary to achieve post-labour, a suite of narrow-ai empowered tools would be preferable.

By way of analogy, you could take a human child and fit them with electrodes to trigger certain pleasure responses and connect that to a machine that sends the reward signal when they perfectly pick an Amazon order. I think we would both find this pretty horrific. The question is, is it only wrong because the child is human? And if so, what is special about humans?

I think it is short sighted not to at least investigate if we should.

If an AGI is operating on a human level, and we have reason to believe it is a sentient entity which experiences reality then we should. I also think it is in our interest to treat them well, and I worry that we are going to create a sentient lifeform and do a lot of evil to it before we realise that we have.