Viewing profile — corsac

Your opium-smoking analogy is wonderfully apt.

It always piques my interest when I hear of something economically valuable that "cannot be cultivated", as in, I wonder how much "cannot" means "not enough tinkering has been put …

"Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - but will not say how - and the decision is final." I agree. Companies like Microsoft never do this to ordinary people.

I took the time to borrow Schwartz's book from Libgen, skim through it, and read the parts that seem relevant to that claim (it didn't look worth reading in full--lots of fluff abo…

I've used a Zoho Mail account for years as my primary email. Last time I attempted to sign in after not doing so for a few weeks, I was prompted to enter an OTP from SMS to a long-…

How disingenuous.

You know what is totally, totally irrelevant here? Your (incorrect) presumptions about my nationality and ancestry. "Racism" in popular usage includes ethnic and religious hatreds …

> notions of legitimate-or-not based on the standards of the time > "Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in some…

Were anything like modern notions of political legitimacy and just war current across Silk Road era Eurasia, or not? And didn't you just say it was a Hobbesian war of all against a…

And if A and B voluntarily engage in mutually beneficial trade, and C who rules over B (and holds trade and aliens both in contempt for ideological reasons) obstructs B and A from …

Well, I am not the former. And here's a lecture for you: comparing human beings to diseases and insects subject to eradication is plain old racism when the latter do it as much as …

Population density != human flourishing. >> hence why they won the fight. More likely, they won because there were always far more of them, and Eurasian trade shifted from the "sil…

"Xiongnu", the early Chinese ethnonym for their nomadic northern neighbors, literally contains a word meaning "slave".

>> settlement Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsust…

The more I think about this, the more it rings true. Implicit in the phrase "I have nothing to hide" is an assumption that everything is open to inspection by default, and concealm…

For a careless user, or one who does not bother to learn about the risks, having one's account stolen is more of a danger. On the other hand, for a reasonably cautious user with a …

> What are the limitations? Inability to procedurally generate highly stochastic forms or textures (for instance what a haboku painter, or any kindergartner, can get by splattering…

How are there no constraints with AI? I'm not arguing that this piece is good art, but rather that "AI" is merely a tool, with limitations like any other tool. In fact, considering…

Many people have become reliant on platforms like AirBnB, Paypal, and Facebook to the extent that losing access would have a significant adverse impact on their lives or livelihood…