gazebo64

Good talk!

> is it a net benefit to the population to add fluoride to the water supply and at a suitable price point or is there a more effective method to achieve the desired outcome

What if I don't care about that outcome if it means my water supply is tainted with a chemical I have no desire to ingest? Is it incomprehensible to you that somebody may not be particularly concerned with a statistical decrease in cavities for people that can't be bothered to brush their teeth if it means being force-fed a potential neurotoxin?

Just pointing out something I recently learned that others may not be aware of -- most bottled water also has fluoride added. iirc water labeled as "distilled" cannot contain additives (or at least fluoride), but most of the "spring water" and other variants you'll find at the store do have those additives.

>Presumably, not everyone is good at brushing their teeth

Is it fair that everyone is forced to ingest this chemical for the benefit of people who can't or won't engage in their own basic hygiene?

>Hold up, all that stuff is completely unattested (and would have to be facts tried before a jury anyway).

I mean, it was going to be attested until the judge decided to adjourn his proceedings and push him out the back door to avoid ICE. He's charged with domestic abuse.

>But more: What if the suspect was in court on an immigration concern?

Based on my limited understanding of immigration law I'd agree that there's probably a valid mechanism for the judge to legally intervene in the deportation to let the immigration concern be addressed -- but that isn't what happened here. The defendant was there for a criminal charge of domestic abuse and the judge essentially canceled his hearing and snuck him out the back to prevent ICE from executing a legal order to deport someone who is here illegally and has already been deported once before.

>The point of the Rule of Law is that you don't empower individuals to make decisions about justice, ever.

That's why the judge is being arrested, because she as an individual skirted legal process to interrupt a lawful deportation (allegedly).

> They found a technicality on which they could arrest her, so they arrested her because they wanted to arrest her

If by technicality you mean correctly identifying that the judge intentionally adjourned the suspect's court proceedings and directed them through a non-public exit in order to evade a lawful deportation of a domestic abuser who had already been deported once, yes, it was a "technicality". The short form would be to acknowledge the judge intentionally interfered with a lawful deportation, which is a crime, thus the arrest.

>For this administration specifically, the thing that has always existed wasn't an issue that demanded these actions the last time they were in office, just 4 short years ago

Immigration and border security were maybe the #1 policy front for Trump in 2016 -- am I missing something here?

>Why is this an issue now when it has always existed?

Because it's a relatively new phenomenon that the ruling administration enables and advocates for the import of 10 million illegal immigrant laborers.

>An economically viable solution to this problem would be simply force companies to pay all laborers, foreign or domestic, legal or illegal, a living wage

Do you think that the law has a cut-out to allow for paying illegal immigrants less than minimum wage? This is like solving the murder rate by making murder illegal -- it's already illegal to employ these people and pay them below minimum wage.

I fail to see how the lack of a perfect quantifiable metric of merit logically flows down to "stop admitting Asians because we have too many"? Whatever the university's method of determining merit is, it should be applied to everyone equally, and racially discriminating because one group historically performs well is indefensible imo

I know this comment is totally innocent but it does kind of bum me out to be at a point in time where instead of addressing our impact on the environment directly, we're trying to make computers that can talk to dolphins so we can tell them to stay out of the way lol

>I have songs I'd love to compose in my head, but it would be totally impractical for me to go through the hundreds/thousands of hours of training that would be needed to realize these songs in reality. Nor am I particularly motivated to pay someone else to sit there for hours trying to compose what I am telling them.

So the alternative is that you'll pay a tech company instead -- to use their model trained on unlicensed and uncredited human works to generate a mishmash of plagiarized songs, the end result of which nobody will ever want to listen to?

>Yet no one with all his mind can deny that ai makes writing code faster, not necessarily better but faster, and games at the end are mostly codes.

It's actually quite easy, and not uncommon, to deny all of those things. Game code is complex and massively interwoven and relying on generative code that you didn't write and don't fully understand will certainly break down as game systems increase in complexity, and you will struggle to maintain it or make effective modifications -- so ignoring the fact that the quality is lower, there's an argument to be made that it will be "slower" to write in the long term.

I think it's also flat wrong to say games are "mostly codes" -- games are a visual medium and people remember the visual/audio experience they had playing a game. Textures, animations, models, effects, lighting, etc. all define what a game is just as much if not more than the actual gameplay systems. Art is the main differentiating factor between games when you consider that most gameplay systems are derivative of one another.

I think the most salient point the artists make in the article is that the process of ideating and iterating on art is just as valuable, if not moreso, than the end result. You can get a good looking image from an AI generator but miss out on the ideas and discoveries you would otherwise make by actually working on that art.

I think it's also unfortunate how the advocates for AI replacing artists in gamedev clearly think of art as a chore or a barrier to launch rather than being the whole point of what they're making. If games are art, then it stands to reason the.. art.. that goes into it is just as important as anything else. A game isn't defined just by the logic of the main loop.

What exactly am I getting wrong? You insisting that nobody hires studio musicians or orchestras, and claiming that "usually you hire one electronic musician" are both demonstrably false opinions that have almost no relation to my point that background music is obtainable through on-demand licensed libraries.