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You're missing GP's point. They are very clearly, explicitly stating that they do not feel emotionally comfortable, nor morally justified, with killing animals for food. It does not have to be a "context-free universal truth," it's the truth for them.


Practically speaking, 99% of advertising is covered by a dozen or two primary channels which are obnoxious and ubiquitous. The goal should be to regulate platform-ads, e.g. print, billboards, TV, radio, web, streaming, social media. Ads are all already clearly regulated within the limits of freedom of speech, such as criminalizing false advertising, as another comment has pointed out. These platforms are also generally regulated for obscenity, harassment, etc., which if anything are much more subjective than commercial activity.

> What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?

That is (or should be) prevented by laws against disturbing the peace or similar. Which is more along the lines of reasonable solutions in general. Banning advertising wholesale seems impossible, yes, but regulating the actual most common mechanisms of selling ad spots is much easier.

> Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.

You're paying somebody for the distribution of the ad embedded within/alongside content (websites) you don't own.

> How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?

Posting on Facebook is clearly distinct from paying Facebook to promote your ads.


More likely the cost of building the structure needs to be adjusted for depreciation and/or cost of bringing it up to code. If a building costs more to fix up than starting from scratch, or effectively just needs to be demolished, clearly it's the building's value that's negative.

Although, there's no reason unimproved land value can't be negative, the land just needs to be burdensome.


The issue is that we're sorta back on the same issue as before where we need to estimate the value of the unimproved land except now it's (in my opinion) even more complicated. In this case, the structure doesn't need adjustment due to anything physically wrong it's just that no one is willing pay the theoretical value for it in that location. Think of an expensive anime wrap on a car, the wrap cost 2k or whatever but I don't care I really only want the car.

Good point on the value of unimproved land being negative, I was thinking of a different edge case. In the situation of "burdensome" land, maybe it does make sense for there to be negative value land with an associated tax credit if the owner is compelled to do something to remediate?


> Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.

In my personal experience, "edutainment" can certainly be addictive, and more often than not, consuming it is "unproductive" because (1) consuming content aimlessly is intrinsically mostly passive, (2) passive consumption is ineffective for retaininig knowledge or building understanding, (3) content is often superficially interesting because of a spectacular and/or highly simplified presentation.

This is only a counterpoint to the idea that educational content is limited in its potential to be addictive/unproductive; there is still, obviously, a great positive potential to high-quality educational content.


Right, just like every law is automatically just. /s


If it's not just then change the law!


> The world is changing before our eyes. The coding LLMs we have already are good but the ones in the pipeline are better. The ones coming next year are likely to be even better. It is time to revisit our long held opinions.

Making technical decisions based on hypothetical technologies that may solve your problems in "a year or so" is a gamble.

> And in the case of "reads data from a OS socket/file-descriptor and writes data to a OS socket/file-descriptor", which is the case for a significant number of applications including web servers, I'm starting to doubt that choosing a scripting language for that task, as I once advocated, is a good plan given what I am seeing.

Arguably Go is a scripting language designed for exactly that purpose.


I wouldn't think choosing a native language over a scripting language is a "gamble" but I suppose that all depends on ability and risk tolerance. I think it would be relatively easy to develop using Rust, Go, Zig, etc.

I would not call Go a scripting language. Go programs are statically linked single binaries, not a textual representation that is loaded into an interpreter or VM. It has more in common with C than Bash. But to make sure we are clear (in case you want to dig in on calling Go a scripting language) I am talking about dynamic programming languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, etc. which generally do not compile to static binaries and instead load text files into an interpreter/VM. These dynamic scripted languages tend to have performance below static binaries (like Go, Rust, C/C++) and usually below byte code interpreted languages (like C# and Java).


> or if you managed to get permission from every single person who contributed

This makes it sound more difficult than it actually is (logistically); it's not uncommon for major projects to require contributors to sign a CLA before accepting PRs.


That depends on how old and big is the project. For example Linux is "stuck" on GPL2 and even if they wanted to move to something else it wouldn't be feasible to get permission from all the people involved. Some contributors passed away making it even more difficult.


Not exactly “stuck” since they very explicitly do not want to move to GPL 3.


Even if they wanted to move to another license (which they don't), they wouldn't be able to do. So sounds exactly like they're "stuck", regardless of what they want.


How is the problem of "you signed a CLA without authorization by your employer to do so" solved? I'm mostly asking because I saw the following:

"I will not expose people taping out Hazard3 to the possibility of your employer chasing you for your contribution by harassing them legally. A contribution agreement does not solve this, because you may sign it without the legal capability to do so (...)"

https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3/blob/stable/Contributing... (this is I believe the repo with design for riscv cores running on RPi Pico 2)


These are the ones I refuse to contribute to.


You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.

As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.


> You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.

No. Recording an experiment does not constitute scientific repeatability of an experiment. (Not to mention Quantum Mechanics explicitly rejects your claim as a universal principle at the micro level.)

> As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.

No, it is not a strawman at all. It clearly illustrates via an example of something we have known to be false for about a century, yet not only we do not censor it on social media, we teach it to kids, and almost no one would object to it.

So, where do you draw the line?

I posit there exists facts that are unknowable by the scientific method. The GP claimed science as the end-all-be-all method to fact-check. My statement is that it's not sound, nor complete, in its ability to fact-check.


Your example is a false equivalence. Economics does not define "good ideas" and "bad ideas," it only attempts to model resource dynamics. Whereas the spread of infectious disease is clearly quantifiable regardless of value assignment.


Economics is inherently a political venture. Organizing markets is political and obviously impacts politics.


Partly true, but besides the point. Making a blanket statement like "economics says rent control is bad," is only marginally better than saying "physics says nuclear weapons are bad." There is a critical assumption of values which is totally outside the objective of study.


The presumed goal of rent control is to prevent rents from rising. If they actually cause rents to rise even more quickly then they are indeed "bad" (at achieving this goal).


The goal of rent control, as I infer from the mechanism, is to prevent existing tenants from being priced out of their current homes (eventually leading to eviction) - at least as I have seen in the US.

If the goal were to prevent rents from rising, the mechanism would do so directly, ie. regulate all rent, rather than limiting to continued rentals on certain types of property. Which would by definition prevent rents from rising, presumably along with other undesirable effects.

Anyways, the whole issue with conflating "bad" with objective consequences is the "presumed goal," which is of course totally subjective.


Yeah, it's more about preempting competitors from attracting any ecosystem development than the revenue itself.


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