It does more than that. You don't even have to look to Tesla to find cruise control tech that is capable of adjusting speed based on traffic conditions. e.g., Nissan uses tech that can adjust the speed of your vehicle relative to the distance between you and the car in front of you. You can even choose between three different follow distances for the car in front of you. It can go from 75mph to a full stop without intervention, and then back up to 75mph.
I get that there's skepticism related to self-driving vehicles, but let's be genuine here and recognize that this technology is young and is still in a state of development, and not misrepresent what it can and cannot do.
I can understand why you are offended; from your perspective it seems like people are equating your mother to their dogs. But this isn't how attachment works. It's not about who we are connected to, but about how much we are connected to them. We suffer when we lose what we are attached to. Whether that is a family member such as your mother or a family pet such as their dog. It's not about whether the woman who was your mother or the animal who was their dog are equal or greater/less than each other at all. It's about the attachments we have to them and how badly we desire for them to still exist in our lives. That's where the common element of suffering exists between losing a mother and a dog.
Our attachments are defined within us, and not by what we are attached to.
Honestly, aside from issues with the process it's also just embarrassing. IMO, that's what is causing a lot of the issues that are being surfaced these days in oss. No one likes to be told they're ignorant. Add in a smarmy attitude and poor social skills and only the most confident or skilled people will contribute; which isn't a bad thing to be honest.
We've come a long way from the RTFM days but learning something as complicated as programming tends to make people sensitive about what they do and don't know.
It's a delicate balance. On one hand the project and the community benefits from a lot of ideas. On the other hand, a strong ego with poor understanding can not only destroy a project, they can cost a lot of people a lot of time, money, and heartache so some sort of barrier to entry that turns some people away isn't a bad thing.
At the end of the day, it'll all work itself out as long as we keep the projects open and free. Popular projects attract talent which in turn improve those projects.
> Add in a smarmy attitude and poor social skills and only the most confident or skilled people will contribute; which isn't a bad thing to be honest.
Personally I'm playing with computers since Commodore64 days. I'm occasionally publishing papers about algorithms that solve real problems that I develop (just submitted one yesterday). I'm confident about my skills, and generally know about my stuff, however I don't like uncivilized brawl.
So to be able to be a developer whose patches to be accepted, I need to be a person who can put up with snarky comments, and be able to return them with the same level of abusiveness?
Theoretically, rude gatekeeping can destroy confidence, but it can't really destroy skill. Of course, the rude gatekeepers typically don't recognize skill either...
"...and only the most confident or skilled people will contribute; which isn't a bad thing to be honest...some sort of barrier to entry that turns some people away isn't a bad thing"
Confidence (or as I look at it, social pain threshold) is unrelated to skill.
IMO, it's because understanding someone else's code and introducing your own changes is something that requires a considerable amount of experience and knowledge which many new developers have not acquired yet. Instead of trying to take the time to understand how to integrate the changes they're trying to make with an existing project, they create something new practically centered around this new feature and a lot of stuff gets lost along the way.
At the end of the day, it's fine though. It'll either satisfy the needs of people and become a new standard or it will be satisfy edge cases and become the new thing that needs to be deprecated because no-one contributes to the project and the original maintainer has lost interest.
> It is unlikely that Congress wished to confer a right to class or collective actions in §7, since those procedures were hardly known when the NLRA was adopted in 1935.
Kind of funny they use this as justification considering everything else they've upheld that was adopted decades prior to this without knowledge of modern custom or technology. Convenient argument when it's serving their purpose.
In these cases, the correct SCOTUS answer is "we can't decide". The proper response is some sort of forced decision in Congress -- In a criminal case, a higher court can "remand" -- order a lower court to review and decide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remand_(court_procedure)
We need the same for bitrotted legislation.
In effect, we do -- When SCOTUS says "We don't think past Congress made a decision about this, so we'll pick a default ruling", current Congress has every right and opportnity to hold a vote to make a decision. If they don't, that means they agree with the court, and just as well would have repealed the law if SCOTUS ruled the other way.
Now, in practice Congress doesn't do its job (to busy campaigning for reelection), so inertia wields as much power as any considered deliberation....
Neither your nor the GP's point seems relevant to the quoted text, which seems pulled specifically to paint the SCOTUS decision in a bad light. I read it as a direct response to the claim of the employees in this case, which is that the NLRA intended to displace parts of the Arbitrage Act. They are just saying that, among other reasons, this was not a common policy and unlikely to have been meant even in spirit.
They further explain their approach to resolving claimed conflict between two pieces of legislation:
> And in approaching a claimed conflict, we come armed with the “stron[g] presum[ption]” that repeals by implication are “disfavored” and that “Congress will specifically address” preexisting law when it wishes to suspend its normal operations in a later statute.
And specifically for the Arbitrage Act, because this is apparently a tactic that people keep trying:
> In many cases over many years, this Court has heard and rejected efforts to conjure conflicts between the Arbitration Act and other federal statutes. In fact, this Court has rejected every such effort to date […] Throughout, we have made clear that even a statute’s express provision for collective legal actions does not necessarily mean that it precludes “‘individual attempts at conciliation’” through arbitration […] And we’ve stressed that the absence of any specific statutory discussion of arbitration or class actions is an important and telling clue that Congress has not displaced the Arbitration Act.
So they're not saying "we can't decide," they're stating (I think): Congress can give employees more protection in this arena, but the laws as written are (1) not unconstitutional and (2) are not being interpreted incorrectly by lower courts.
You're mixing up two different things: does the new thing fall within the old language, and would the drafters have used different language had they known about the new thing.
Is a semi-automatic rifle an "arm" as the term was understood in 1789? Yes, almost certainly, in the same way an aircraft carrier is a "ship" as the term was understood in 1789. If semi-automatic rifles had existed in 1789, would the framers still have used "arms" as they did? Maybe, maybe not, but that's irrelevant. We don't care about what they thought, just what they wrote.
Likewise, is a class action "concerted action" as the term was used in 1935? Probably not. Would the drafters of the NLRA have wanted class actions to be protected had those been common in 1935? Probably yes, but that's again irrelevant.
True, but these theories have become popular in the US because within the parameters of the American republic, they're the theories that allow you to step back and say "OK, what did this law mean?". Other theories involve much more individual interpolation and personal judicial bias/opinion/whatever, which is what is usually meant when people say "legislating from the bench".
The people of the Great State of $YOUR_STATE are reading the bills as they're written and electing, instructing, and/or recalling their representatives according to the contemporary mainline meaning of the actual recorded text of the bill. The people of $YOUR_STATE don't know that $YOUR_SENATOR meant X when he said Y. Or even if they do, there's no way to know that the people of $BORDERING_STATE, who also supported the bill, had the same implicit caveat.
Thus, the only way to understand the meaning of laws enacted by "the People" is to interpret the recorded text as an average person contemporary to its passage would have understood it.
It's not that odd. Section 7 is about the right to form unions and carry out collective bargaining: "Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all of such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 8(a)(3) [section 158(a)(3) of this title]."
It would require an awful lot of creative reinterpretation to decide that class action lawsuits are a form of collective bargaining and this section granted some kind of right to them, especially since they didn't exist at the time and wouldn't be invented for several decades.
I think the opposite; I think it would take a lot to decide that class action lawsuits are not a concerted activity for the purpose of mutual aid or protection.
Maybe there's a transitive relationship between the environment before and during transcription and the resulting RNA that in turn can affect its environment. It would be difficult to identify in vivo because the environment is already synchronized with the changes that may have been introduced from the RNA, but in vitro maybe the effects of the altered RNA would become apparent in an unmodified environment. Vice versa, if you could measure enough samples of RNA from the same organism and source DNA I wonder if there'd be a quantifiable difference when the environment was subject to the same sort of changes that occur when memories are formed and an unmodified environment.
Perhaps I'm just getting old and cynical but it seems like a lot of people consider it a badge of honor to be diagnosed with some sort of neuro/psycho disability. Granted, that's not a terrible thing per se, because if nothing else, it means there's a significant shift away from the stigmatizing perception of the past. I just have a hard time accepting the celebratory nature of things like this. Similar to the body positivity movement, which itself is a healthy shift towards acceptance and responsibility, there's always a fringe element who seem to romanticize and glorify something. I personally believe it's because many people want to feel included in "something", and that's fine, I don't have a problem with that. I just get grumpy when the initial context goes from understanding the way a disorder can impact your life and raising awareness to "let's make an exclusive group to carve out a little island only me and other special people like me can hang out on". It feels a lot like the reason and purpose are hijacked and unfortunately the message gets lost and tainted, creating more of a backlash than anything else. I don't have a problem with exclusionary groups at all either; my issue is when they use the growing awareness of something else to piggyback off of. I dunno, that's my $0.02 that no one asked for lol.
I do not fear non-existence. For most of the history of the universe, I did not exist. I have considerable experience with that. Dying appears to be unpleasant, though.
In the context of your existing self, non-existing before and after existing are quite different thoughts.
The first one is like you don’t remember it, like you don’t remember a lot in your life that you know happened. With the second one you’ll never have the experience of feeling you don’t remember it and you know that.
It’s akin to the difference between one day you realising you forgot most of your life, and you now discovering you have Alzheimer’s and will never again hold a moment in memory. To your present self the former is not scary, but the latter is.
> For most of the history of the universe, I did not exist. I have considerable experience with that.
On the contrary, you have zero experience with not existing because experience implies an impression was made, even if you don’t consciously realise it. Not existing has made (and will make) no difference to you whatsoever, and as such provides no experience, preparation, or comfort.
It is the thought of not existing that makes a difference. It won’t by the time I don’t exist, but it does now.
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As a side note, if someone can recommend some good philosophy books on this, I’d appreciate it. I thought the branch that studies it might’ve been ontology, but I’ve read a bit of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and realised what he’s talking about it not exactly what I’m looking for.
I have a lecture to recommend: Shelly Kagan on Death by Yale. It's amazing and probably the most important course for anyone willing to open up to ideas around the notion of self and existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2J7wSuFRl8&list=PLEA18FAF1A...
For most of the universe’s history you did exist, but were dead, scattered into atoms all across space.
The thing is, after a mere billions of years, you managed to consolidate into a form and became alive. Not a bad deal.
But to be dead, is to wait a trillion years for something to happen, only for it to turn out at the end you have to wait a trillion years more, and then you have to continue this forever.
Are we talking about atoms when we are talking about ourselves? I don't think so. I am not the same collection of atoms from moment to moment. There may not be an atom in my entire body that is original to my body; and there are vastly more atoms in my body now than then. When I say "me" I don't really mean my body or even my brain, even if that's where "me" is. We are really talking about our consciousness.
It's been awhile since I read it, but ... In The Zen of Physics, David J. Darling argues that if some other collection of atoms has a consciousness like our own, that is no different than ourselves. (His idea of consciousness is something like patterns in the brain, which is distinct, if reliant, from a collection of atoms.) We would have no memory of our past experiences, but in a real sense we would be alive again. His arguments are a bit more elegant than I have presented here. And there is some question to whether an identical consciousness with different memories is really you or me, but it would mean that waiting for trillions of years isn't necessarily the case.
This, of course, assumes that consciousness is an emergent phenomena. It is possible that consciousness is not emergent from brain processes, but is a fundamental property of the universe that the brain has somehow harnessed because it is an evolutionary advantage. (Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life by Evan Harris Walker is a fun read on this idea.) In which case, in some form you would exist as long as the universe exists, and always have.
As an aside, for those without consciousness (i.e. the dead and the unborn) time does not exist, so both "to wait" and "forever" are impossible. :)
> Darling argues that if some other collection of atoms has a consciousness like our own, that is no different than ourselves.
So if I cloned you, you would fully consider the other clone as "yourself" and "me"? I doubt it. The metaphysics are really complex here. A better attempt (if any can be made) is that the 'self' is both an evolving bodily mass AND an evolving sense of memories and perceptions. Ultimately there's good rational that self/me is just a non-real tool that allows you to operate in the world. You can not 'not believe' in self as you're human brain requires it, and animals do just fine without thinking of self (driven by nature). A better strategy is to minimize the view of self in order to reduce confusions caused by 'staring too intently in the mirror', but yet it's also useful to evaluate oneself as a separate actor.
Also I think you can have Consciousness without having a notion of defined self though, like a collective consciousness or a dolphin/octopus/crow form of awareness.
Regarding your first paragraph, I don't think that necessarily implies consciousness as an additional thing (not that consciousness doesn't require some explanation that is not forthcoming). You could be talking about a configuration of matter. Not an exact configuration, but one that would be recognizable to a powerful pattern matcher.
This is a common sentiment that fails to take into account the fact that, once you DO exist, you have a desire to continue existing which you did not have prior to your existence.
Legalize everything, and offer the appropriate counter-medication at a discounted cost. Heroine costs someone $20 per use? Methadone is $10.
You'll never keep drugs out of the hands of people who want them, all you're doing is creating artificial scarcity driving up prices and giving people like Mexican drug cartels huge financial incentives to run drugs into the country. Even if only 1/10th of their drugs make it into the US, as long as there's an demand, that supply will be exponentially worth more, and cause more harm than pharmaceutical grade heroine sold just like alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, etc...
Heh, heroin does cost about that much, same for methadone, at least in the UK. I can get 100ml of 1mg/ml methadone for GBP 10 which will keep me stable for a day or two; a GBP 10 (i.e. 'tenner bag' or 0.2g) of heroin is enough for a single IV shot for many users. Of course, depending on your tolerance, that may well not be enough, but my point is that 'legal' heroin would probably be much cheaper than current 'street' prices. I'm not sure how cannabis prices have varied in places where it's legal in the US, though - do taxes bring the price back to parity with the old 'street' level? I'm guessing it's going to be complicated by the fact that it's still illegal in other states?
So, turn the Mexican drug cartels over to america drug cartels? Until we fix the cartel problem in the US legalization will do nothing but bring down prices. Look at how it took 30-50 years for "education" in tobacco products. Yes there are examples of countries that have legalized drugs, but without a much better healthcare system in the US it would turn into a huge money grab.
I get that there's skepticism related to self-driving vehicles, but let's be genuine here and recognize that this technology is young and is still in a state of development, and not misrepresent what it can and cannot do.