dleary

When has this ever occurred?

Which specific culture/country does America hate and consider the villain?

It seems to me like the conservatives change the targets of their culture wars often enough that I’m honestly not sure what your answer is going to be.

> has basically always been true at every point in time across history.

The Late Bronze Age collapse in 1200 BC.

The Dark Ages, 500-1500 AD. Ended with the Renaissance (literally, “Rebirth”).

Both of these times saw significant ‘backward motion’ in the amount of technical capability people could wield.

It doesn't seem difficult at all to me.

First of all, the target is not 'below the maintenance cost of the human body'.

The target is 'below the minimum wage that we can pay a human to work for', and that is a very different metric.

Also, as for uptime... The average human performs work at roughly 60% duty cycle. (8 hours sleep, plus meals, bathroom breaks, etc). That is a pitiful number compared to robotics.

Also, when you pay humans at bottom-of-the-barrel prices, they don't have high morale. They are rude to customers. They steal from their employer if they can get away with it. None of these apply to robots.

> but the original joke circa 1999 was this.

No, the original joke, which GP is referring to, is “There are only two hard things in computer science. Naming things and cache invalidation.”

It predates 1999 and the Y2K bug by a fair amount. I first saw it on Usenet in the early 90s, around 1994 I think.

>> Due to her experience as a man during the making of Self-Made Man she ultimately had a depressive breakdown

> That sounds very different from "being a man was so difficult that it caused a breakdown."

It doesn’t sound very different to me…

> [I Love Lucy, Bewitched]

These are good examples of TV pushing the envelope on societal norms, but if you are discussing "pushing a political view", they rank far below "Trek's first interracial kiss".

> A key difference here is you are citing one episode.

That's true, but...

> These shows we are discussing are entirely centered around modern IDPol issues. It's rammed down our throats through every episode.

I have not seen the new shows. I liked reconnecting with old characters in the first few episodes of Picard S1, but didn't even finish the first season.

So I can't comment on those specifically.

But, I can comment on this:

> I know when I can no longer enjoy a show because it's creators are ripping me out of the experience and away from the fictional setting

This is the EXACT SAME COMPLAINT that the people who were upset about Star Trek in the 60s had.

And it extended a lot farther than the interracial kiss. That's just a very easy and obvious landmark example to point out.

Star Trek first aired in 1966. Less than 10 years after crowds of people were held back by the National Guard, but still managed to throw rocks at and spit on little girls because of forced integration in schools.

Star Trek had a multiracial and flamboyant cast, and was frequently communicating messaging about being non-prejudiced, when the Civil Rights Act had just passed.

Trek also frequently communicated messaging about being non-interventionist and only using violence as a last resort, while the Vietnam War was ongoing and a hot-button political issue.

These were ABSOLUTELY complained about as "woke propaganda" (though not in those terms) by the conservatives of the time.

> Again, I never said anything about race or gender.

I never said that you did. But you did propose, and you continue to double down on, the idea that the original Star Trek was not very political.

> They had politics, yes. But not anywhere to the point to breaking the audience out of escapism and mapping their politics to the politics of the time.

Yes, the interracial kiss was VERY MUCH the politics of the time. That's why it was the FIRST interracial kiss on network television, nearly 40 years after TV networks came about. That's why it was protested/banned and the episode not shown in Southern markets.

Can you give any examples of network TV that were more political than Trek?

> Current Earth politics do not belong in shows

You’re really displaying some ignorance here. Star Trek has always has a political slant.

The basic premise is about a bunch of people living in a progressive sci-fi utopia with UBI. The show is constantly preaching unity and openness. It is explicitly anti-Fascist in many episodes.

It has a multiracial cast with a flamboyant “closeted” gay actor.

And most importantly, it famously had the first interracial kiss on television. The show was banned (or, more minorly, the specific episode was banned) in several places in the South because of that.

> Virtual dispatch absolutely has an overhead, but absolutely nobody in their right mind should be using COM interfaces in a critical section of code.

I could definitely be wrong, but I think C++ style "virtual dispatch" (ie, following two pointers instead of one to get to your function) doesn't really cost anything anymore, except for the extra pointers taking up cache space.

Don't all of the Windows DirectX gaming interfaces use COM? And isn't AAA gaming performance critical?

Everyone gets to choose which language they use for their personal projects.

Where are all the Racket personal projects?

N.B. I say this as someone who personally contributed small fixes to Racket in the 90s (when it was called mzscheme) and 00s (when it was called PLT-Scheme).

> Opinion

The single word "opinion" is not an answer to the question I asked.

> Another example: ... "Yanny or Laurel"

This is not remotely the same thing.

> I can understand how someone hears "Yanny">

So can everybody else. Everyone I have heard speak on this topic has the same exact experience. Everyone "hears" one of the words 'naturally', but can easily understand how someone else could hear the other word, because the audio clip is so ambiguous.

An ambiguous audio recording, which basically everyone agrees can be interpreted multiple ways, which wikipedia explicitly documents as being ambiguous, is very different from meanings of the words "yes", "no", and "believe".

These words have concrete meanings.

You wouldn't say that "you believe the recording says Laurel". You say "I hear Laurel, but I can understand how someone else hears Yanny".

> Is AI conscious? I believe "yes" [...] and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong.

What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong?

Do "believe", "yes", and "no" have definitions?

...

This rhetorical device sucks and gets used WAY too often.

"Does Foo have the Bar quality?"

"Yes, but first understand that when everyone else talks about Bar, I am actually talking about Baz, or maybe I'm talking about something else entirely that even I can't nail down. Oh, and also, when I say Yes, it does not mean the opposite of No. So, good luck figuring out whatever I'm trying to say."