Ah I see you are well versed in bureaucratic attack strategies on the first amendment! “We’re not violating your rights, there’s a special first amendment zone you can say all that where we can’t hear!”
Can you instead try to see that people who disagree with you may actually not being attempting to subvert the first amendment, but instead are focusing on the necessary business city councils have to achieve? There are clearly limits on what you can say and do in a city council meeting.
I can see that, but that's also exactly the mechanism by which buraucracies attack the first amendment, so people who just reasonably disagree should explain how their disagreement doesn't serve the very agenda they say they're against.
Do you truly believe the mayor and city council were trying to attack the first amendment as a core principle?
We don't live in an free speech absolutist society. People don't get to talk about just anything, at any time during a city council meeting without restrictions. Don't attribute to malice what is more easily attribute to getting business done.
Malice isn't required to destroy the first amendment, city councils arresting people speaking out, in the name of getting business done is enough. I think the "I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it" view of free speech is very much a minority view. Most people, especially mayors and city councils, ascribe to the "free speech for me and not for thee" view.
> We don't live in an free speech absolutist society
I'm not sure what kind of society we live in. Is there even a social contract anymore? Is the Constitution even in effect? I'm not sure exactly what the rules are anymore, we live in a society where a mob violently attacked the US capitol, and got pardons for their trouble. So, why bother talking about anything, when violence is rewarded but speech gets you a record? What's even the point of the first amendment, it's meaningless when they can just write an executive order deeming their political opponents (or anyone) part of a vast but nebulous terrorist network, who obviously don't have a first amendment right. Because terrorists.
You're conveniently omitting the fact it was public comments for a different issue
>Heider explained that she waited until the public comment period for a different issue, filled out a form to talk, and then got up to deliver a written statement about Flock cameras.
I think this is a case where just drawing a "line goes up" extrapolation is incredibly misleading because there is _tremendous_ economic pressure to get costs down, and costs are very tightly tied to energy use. All of these systems are incredibly inefficient right now and have a lot of room to go down in energy use. I'd guess that the absolute _floor_ is burning model weights directly to silicon and that's like a 90+% reduction in energy use.
Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright P'ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to Duke Huan, "This book Your Grace is reading - may I venture to ask whose words are in it?"
"The words of the sages," said the duke.
"Are the sages still alive?"
"Dead long ago," said the duke.
"In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!"
"Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?" said Duke Huan. "If you have some explanation, well and good. If not, it's your life!"
Wheelwright P'ien said, "I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won't take hold. But if they're too hard, it bites in and won't budge. Not too gentle, not too hard - you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can't put it into words, and yet there's a knack to it somehow. I can't teach it to my son, and he can't learn it from me. So I've gone along for seventy years and at my age I'm still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn't be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old."
You should generally but not always read any statement by Socrates in a Plato dialogue as a statement that Plato is putting into the mouth of Socrates, not something Socrates himself said. There is a gradation, though. The Apology was probably very close to what socrates actually said, and some of the later dialogues (The Republic, for example) probably bear little relationship to anything Socrates said.
But, and this is important, Plato almost certainly did not agree with everything he had Socrates say in every dialogue. Sometimes he is just playing with ideas. Personally, I think Plato is just being provocative about books in this dialogue to push an idea as far as he can.
I think when people think about CRTs and NES/Atari, they aren’t thinking about _monitors_ they are thinking about the low quality TVs and hooked up through the antenna adapter, which absolutely did wash pixels out to some extent.
LLMs need a lot of help to get to any kind of complicated proof, really. And yes, they get in moods. I spent 3 weeks trying to prove something and frequently had to try and convince Claude that it wasn't impossible and that it could really do it.
Yeah I think to calibrate you should probably look to Native American words that made it into English — place names, local foods and wildlife, cultural items. Those are going to be your substrate borrowings for most languages.
Also, “not having a known etymology” is weak evidence for borrowing, full stop, let alone for borrowing from a substrate. There are lots of very common words in english (dog, pig, boy, girl) that have no known etymology which are incredibly unlikely to impossible to have come from a substrate language.
Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all the time.
English dog has had an etymology for the last 20 years or so (Gasiorowski's) that many find convincing. But with regard to Greek lexicon, it is not just the lack of etymology that suggests substrate but the non-IE phonology of many of these words.
I sort of have this suspicion that the kinds of phenomena that we can even apprehend are pretty closely related to what we can reason about mathematically, and the reason that math seems to work so well to model behavior that we understand says more about how our brain works than how the universe works.
If a phenomenon isn’t model-able by relatively simple math it doesn’t even look like a phenomenon to us, it looks like a chaotic mess.
Which is to say that unless something has mathematical coherence it is more or less invisible to our experience.
The thesis is that Science is made for efficiency and hence does not include everything (which is infinite). It only looks for a hierarchy of interesting facts and focuses on simple foundational recurring phenomena from nature. It then uses the language of Mathematics to economize and impose order on the complexity to make it tractable.
Finally, our subconscious prefers aesthetic attributes and hence we often find/create harmony/symmetry/beauty in our mathematical products.
Perhaps symmetry is overrated and it is not the beauty that works, but it's economy. If something is symmetric depending on how symmetrical you can remove half or more of the required work during calculation. It is also useful to work in abstractions where it does not related to the system 1:1 but is some transformed representation (e.g. phase space). And it may be useful when you find a way to transform it to some easily solvable (symmetrical?) state, solve it there, and reverse the transform. Think of working in Cartesian and polar coordinates. Just a change in coordinate representations can improve your quality of life immediately on some problems with different symmetry. There's no intrinsic reason other than its much simpler on one than the other. Beauty doesn't have to come in. If it's round it's round. If it's square it's square.
So I think symmetry might just be one of the tricks that keep working and keeps on giving back and so we love it and call it "beautiful".
Well there are counting arguments to say that a higher level intelligence that somehow achieves say, 100000× brain efficiency of humans, still can't do that much more work than humans, if humans found the "best abstraction". Think about computability for example - that means you could feasibly solve problem instances of n+20 relative to what a human can solve.
Of course, I think putting numbers to wishy washy meta-quantities like "how efficiently does a certain conceptual scheme help you" are super loaded and hard to properly talk about (incommensurability). I've been toying with trying to make a repository of all the possible "moves" one can make in this kind of abstract analysis - constrain the problem statement, argue something like "the system is what it does", dissolving, etc. but even that seems hard
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