OK, but there are barriers of entry to piracy. You have to be tech literate enough to know what to do, and you have to be on top of the latest developments to know where to even go to get the files… and you must have heard about the book from somewhere, presumably some people had to buy and read it first.

There will never be a text published with 100% piracy rate. It’s a fantastical scenario.

uh, I’m a total quantum layman, but I’m pretty sure its the detector.

#4 is on the bleeding edge of fashion, while #6 doesn’t give a damn.

My example is more in regards to wave/particle duality as it shows up in variations of the double slit experiment. Putting a detector at one of the slits is an active interaction, giving you the particle-like behavior rather than the interference pattern.

wooo! comp-sci dropout! I heard way too many of you describe the kind of code that gets written under deadlines and client demands. Programming is fun, why would I want to ruin it by turning it into work?

skittering around on your fingertips

what a vile existence, I cannot stop imaging it

When researchers say “observe” they actually mean “measure”. And when you’re working with sub-atomic particles, “measure” isn’t some passive activity. It’s an active thing. When you measure small particles you are applying some force upon them, changing them in some way from how they would otherwise act.

Imagine if you were tasked with measuring traffic on the other side of the planet, but you had no cameras. The only tool you had was a gigantic 30 ton, satellite-networked pendulum swinging across the highway. The only way you know if there are cars on the highway is if the pendulum thwacks into one of them. That’s quantum particle physics… I think.

Damn Christians, they ruined Christianity!

Cheerful Baptist, really. I think its on accounta all the soda.

the sports gambling is getting out of hand, yeah

Yeah, there’s some aspect of “they’re different so they’re bad” in LDS history (not without reason, the church did and justified many fucked up things), but the modern polygamous Mormon splinter groups are kinda overlooked for the most part. They’re pretty embedded in a lot of smaller towns and cities across southern Utah and northern Arizona (there may be more, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at the topic), and they get very little national attention.

Contrast that with stuff like this tweet that just so happens to play to a lot conservative notions about how “backwards” Islam is.

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery 1818, in Maryland. He escaped at age twenty, and went on to became a prolific author, public speaker, and political activist, in the fight to abolish slavery.

Slightly yeah, but I’m still overall pretty skeptical. We still don’t really understand consciousness. It’d certainly be convenient if the calculating machines we understand and have everywhere could also “do” whatever it is that causes consciousness… but it doesn’t seem particularly likely.

whats that thing they say, “It’s dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but it’s deadly to be an ally.”

If modern computers can reproduce sentience, then so can older computers. Thats just how general computing is. You really gonna claim magnetic tape can think? That punch-cards and piston transistors can produce the same phenomenon as tens of billions of living brain cells?

i’m just kinda skeptical of suggesting we live in a computer simulation

tens of thousands of years ago, people looked up into the night sky or a raging tempest and projected human-like traits onto it.

Now instead of seeing an angry father figure in the stars, we’re surrounded by computers so we look up (or down, in quantum cases), and see a desktop environment. It’s… awful convenient.

imagine how many more rockets we could reuse if the NASA subdivision formerly known as SpaceX did literally any of the standard, rigorous fault-checks.

sure, if you say so

When the Maori invade england and start forcing their customs on the people there, then maybe you might come somewhere close to pointing out a double standard. (also, berserker brits, lol what a concept)

We don’t have Trump because people started behaving poorly, we have Trump because there’s been half a century of constricting living standards and a wealthy political duopoly that just doesn’t care. Obama bailing out the banks rather than the people that lost their homes did more to kill civility than anything Trump has done.

experienced wizards can get a lot out of arcaneGPT, but its leading apprenticed mages to make mistakes that would have been unthinkable to sorcerer and conjurors just a few centuries ago.

Demons are now altering the pronunciation of their unknowable true names to match some of the most frequent nonsense runes that have been generated by arcane statistical models.