Now I’m picturing a cop trying to walk all confidently out of his squad car during a traffic stop while wearing a frilly maid outfit.

I just buy 50 lbs of all-purpose flour, throw it in a big, wheeled food-safe container marketed for dog food, and use it for nearly everything that calls for flour. I’ve never had a problem with my breads or cakes while using all-purpose flour. I still need gluten-free flour and some specialty stuff like corn flour and almond flour for some recipes, but those come in nice, resealable bags.

I have a leaf collection from when I was a kid - this kid very well might grow up and still have that cool leaf. People assume kids will just throw them away, but it’s not necessarily true. That leaf is probably even more than just a cool leaf to her now, because now she’ll also have the memory of nearly losing it to an ice cream man.

I mean, the bleak thing is that the world works through people making deals with murderers to not be murdered, instead allowing other people to be murdered. I don’t give a shit about her gender, I just want a story about a good person winning in spite of corruption, not a bad person winning because of it.

As bleak as it is, given the high amount of other political opponents that died, the fact that she didn’t is likely an indication of how nice she plays with the people doing the murdering. I’m hopeful that she’s just good at dodging assassins, though!

Makes sense. I’ve always been disappointed that instead of using better processing power to make bigger, more complex games, we used it to make the same games with more complex animations and details. I don’t want a game that only differs from its predecessors through use of graphical upgrades like individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, or the character starting to sweat in relation to their exertion; I want games with PS1-PS2 graphics and animation quality, but with complex gameplay that the consoles of that era could only dream of being able to handle.

This looks really cool - I put in my beta tester registration!

You’re right, it is. But who has the power to do that? It’s not usually the people who would benefit from it; violence is the last resort of people whose other forms of control over their own lives have been stripped from them.

A rat backed into a corner lashes out in desperation. You might give the alternative solution to simply move its pursuer, but that only serves to show that you don’t understand how the rat has no such power.

Well, yes, but that’s kinda my point. If you don’t patent, you get exploited, like how the discoverers of insulin synthesis decided not to patent, so companies patented similar, but not exact methods, and now it’s incredibly expensive. But, as you said, if you do patent, there is still a risk of exploitation if the patent holder sells to an exploitative company. However, that exploitation is still less likely than when not patenting, so I support the practice so long as patenting is still possible.

I worked at a small nonprofit back when genes were still able to be patented; we mostly studied the condition Pseudoxanthoma Elasticum, and held the patents to a few of the genes associated with it. However, we still allowed people to research them freely - we only patented them to prevent a company like Myriad Genetics, who had been patenting genes so that they could sell expensive genetic tests, from patenting it instead. We celebrated when genes were no longer able to be patented; I imagine that the researchers working with golden rice will do the same if we’re ever lucky enough for GMO’s to no longer be able to be patented.

I wholeheartedly agree. I was working for a small genetics nonprofit when they removed the ability to patent genes, and the whole office had a party to celebrate. It was mostly a celebration about freedom to research and test, but we were also very excited to no longer have to deal with having a bunch of patents. Even though we let people research the genes freely, we still had a bunch of paperwork that needed to be done any time someone wanted to do so.

Selection technically isn’t modification, since the modification had to have already occurred for it to be selected for. However, modification certainly did occur, and all crops are genetically modified. Indeed, all living creatures are genetically modified, as without modification, evolution can’t occur.

The public fear of GMO’s is largely due to Monsanto, who aggressively protect their GMO crop patents to the point where farmers who just happened to have some seeds blow into their fields have been sued.

The issue with GMO’s isn’t the modification, it’s the lax patent laws that allow companies like Monsanto to exploit people for profit, giving a bad name to the field as a whole, in spite of the immense potential good it can do, for which Golden Rice is a prime example.

The huge difference is who holds the patent. The example you gave involves Monsanto, the patent holder for several GMO crops, and a terrible company that does everything in its power to make money by exploiting people. Golden Rice, however, is patented by the scientists who designed it, who likely only patented it so that a company like Monsanto couldn’t just make some similar GMO and patent it instead, using it to exploit people even more.

This same thing happened back when genes themselves were able to be patented; some companies like Myriad Genetics would patent genes like the BRCA gene, a common source of inherited breast cancer predisposition, so that they could charge an arm and a leg for testing. So, researchers and non-profits would patent genes that they found just ensure they could be fairly studied and tested for.

Yeah, I nearly drowned at 7 when another kid at the wading pool asked if I wanted to go down a water slide into the deeper pool with her. I was aware that I didn’t know how to swim, but I didn’t really understand why that was important. Kids are dumb, especially when interacting with other kids.

You’d think so, right?

Negative change worms it’s way in through small defeats. The first DLC’s were a small price for a lot of content, the first YouTube ads were only a single ad that was just a few seconds long, the first video game preorders came with amazing rewards, etc. When you allow for 2 seconds, then what’s 3 seconds? What’s 4, 5, 6? What’s 30 seconds? What’s 2 minutes? We’ve seen examples of this all throughout capitalism’s history; to ignore them is, well, ignorant.

They’ve never needed pictures before, and they don’t need pictures now. Hell, even the iconic meme picture is taken from a video of a woman speaking normally - they just used an unflattering frame to discredit her. This isn’t a ploy to get a photo op of the left being mad, it’s another small push of the republican boundaries. Enough “joke” bills about overbearing punishments for minor offenses made by people their party doesn’t like, and they’ll be primed enough to fully support the real thing. We’re already there for a large portion of the republican base.

This is a great point. The results of an IQ test aren’t really measuring a person, they’re measuring a byproduct of that person, which is significantly less informative.

It’s important to define was “equal” is in this context. Some people hear “equal” and think they must measure exactly the same in every test, but that’s not how the word is being used in this context. It’s more that people are so varied from one person to another that no test can truly judge them well enough to differentiate them when it comes to inherent worth.

One person might measure above another in one test, but there are surely many others where the results would be flipped. There are so many different things you could test a person on that in the end none of them really matter; any one measurement is like trying to figure out what an extinct animal looked like from a single tiny piece of a fossil.

That’s what the IQ test is doing - it’s taking one tiny piece of human intelligence, which itself is one tiny piece of what might be said to make up a person’s value, and trying to use that to extrapolate information about them that simply can’t be taken from such a 1-dimensional test. It’s not worthless, but it needs to be paired with a bunch of other tests before it can really say anything, and even then it wouldn’t say much.

Oh, I’m sure they’ll patch anything that gets exposed, absolutely. But that’s just it - there are already several examples of people using AI to do non-brand-friendly stuff, but all the developers have to do is go “whoops, patched” and everyone’s fine. They have no need to go out of their way to pay people to catch these issues early; they can just wait until a PR issue happens, patch whatever caused it, and move on.

Ah, I see. It’s true that these issues cast a negative light on AI, but I doubt most people will even hear about most of them, or even really understand them if they do. Even when talking about brand security, there’s little incentive for these companies to actually address the issues - the AI train is already full-steam ahead.

I work with construction plans in my job, and just a few weeks ago I had to talk the CEO of the company I work for out of spending thousands on a program that “adds AI to blueprints.” It literally just added a chatgpt interface to a pdf viewer. The chat wasn’t even able to actually interact with the PDF in any way. He was enthralled by the “demo” that a rep had shown him at an expo, that I’m sure was set up to make it look way more useful than it really was. After that whole fiasco, I lost faith that the people in charge of whether or not AI programs are adopted will actually do their due diligence to ensure they’re actually helpful.

Having a good brand image only matters if people are willing to look.