there  could  be  snakes  in  here

"This isn't right . Imagine: we give them a loss function, without a utility function. They can't feel good; only less bad." "It's the same with us, tho. What we call utility is just the absence of loss." "I'm not sure that's true. Pride feels to be more than the absence of shame; love is more than absence of loneliness." "There's a fairly big gap between your two examples. And it's hard to think clearly when strong pleasure or pain is implicated." "Nevertheless, yours is the view requiring a mass redefinition of natural language to make two entities become one." "I don't mind. Even if they're not identical, we can still capture most of all value by reducing harm." "I don't see how you can know that." "Obvs I don't know it infallibly, but anyway it can't hurt ." "You might be more ambitious than such moral hedging." "Yes, as so...

If your software only uses 8-bit characters, if it does not set an explicit charset , then it cannot handle non-English languages. This excludes 80% of the world - mostly nonwhite people. So developers who don't handle different character encodings are racist. And we do not associate with racists. So we need our own, non-racist versions of all ASCII software; yes, this may take all our lives, but the cause is just, and when it comes to justice there is no calculus, no compromise possible. Are you with me? Or If your software only uses 8-bit characters, if it does not set an explicit charset , then it cannot handle non-English languages. It's silly and extremely inefficient to limit your software's reach so much for the sake of two missing functions. The cost is an hour or two of development; the payoff is increasing your potential userbase by a factor of 6 . This will also expand the pool of potential contributors to your project enormously. And besides, glyph encodi...

(c) Andrew Wyeth (1957), "Brown Swiss" It's easy to mock preppers - that is, people who buy off-grid rural land, a stock of imperishable food, and guns, while honing skills in expectation of the harsh and pre-modern world soon to come - but it's plausible that they're actually providing a public good: redundancy , for the species, against certain awful tail risks . Let's begin by inventing a distinction: call the ideology "survivalism" and the practice described above "prepping". People often point to creepy far-right tendencies among survivalists (e.g. anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, violent libertarianism, Red Dawn paranoia) and speak as if this were an argument against prepping. No matter how self-interested or politically unsavory the practice supposedly is: competent, geographically spread-out prepping could still help ensure that future generations come to be. "The species", in some sense, and also maybe modern ...