the US federal government historically banned books under the Comstock Act of 1873 which is still on the books and is still active federal law. it only currently isn't being enforced following some cultural changes in the 1960s. another change in the cultural winds could bring it back unfortunately
don't you have lots of those dormant old timey laws that would be promptly invalidated as unconstitutional if an attempt to enforce them was made these days, like sodomy laws were?
the Comstock act was unconstitutional at the time that it was actually enforced. i don't want to get into politics but there are many dynamic factors at work here
If you read about Islamic conquests, you would see that in the vast overwhelming cases, no such events took place, if ever. Demographics changed because people entered Islam. Islam is against genocide.
Not at all. I'm asking you to refrain from religious flamewar (or any flamewar) on HN, and to stick to the rules when commenting.
If you expect moderators to adjudicate complex questions of religious scholarship, we can't: we're unqualified, and it's not our job. We prefer to stick to things that (a) are our job, which (b) we're qualified for. Those tasks are altogether more mundane, such as telling HN users they're not allowed to put down entire religions or each other.
Engineers design a road for 55. Police say make it 40 for $$ and pretext. Public says make it 60. Karen says make it 30. Politician says they don't care as long as Karen stops screeching, the public doesn't hate them and the police doesn't hate them. End result ->45
Refactoring the humans out would only change a couple of the less influential inputs to that equation. It might actually make it way worse if the public loses interest.
I think a lot of time, speed limits are set based on the expected amount of traffic, not the curvature or the road. For example, I-5 in the Portland area south of the OR-217 interchange has extremely gentle curves. You could take them at 100 mph and not risk losing grip.
Yet the limit is 55 mph anyways because that area is expected to have considerable traffic, with traffic merging on and off. The limit is kept low to keep collision speeds low.
But if every car was autonomous, that wouldn't be necessary. Autonomous cars can be far more cooperative than human drivers, even without inter-car communication. It's 4 lanes wide. We could let that left lane go 90 mph for the cars that don't need to be exiting any time soon, while the right lane travels slower because cars are either merging on or off. Human drivers suck at this kind of arrangement because we have slow-pokes that think "The limit is just a limit, I don't have to go that fast" and go 5 under the limit in whatever lane they feel like, combined with others that think being overtaken is a personal insult, people that think their lane is a birthright and don't let people merge ("I have to tailgate or else people get in front of me!"), and other toxic human behaviors.
Take the human out of the equation, and we can easily go faster than 55.
> I-5 in the Portland area south of the OR-217 interchange has extremely gentle curves.
Not even that, there is one curve on I-5 south of 217, it is otherwise a straight line until you get to Wilsonville (and before then it goes up to 65 mph at the intersection with 205).
Theoretically, fully automated driving doesn't require traffic signals, as much lighting, guard rails, lane width, rumble strips, reflectors, signage, etc.
it's a dynamic system where we feel less able to see ourselves as adults each time we gain therapy language to articulate trauma. something is gained with this language, but something is lost too
it could be fun to make a toy compiler that takes an arbitrary literate prompt as input and uses an LLM to output a machine code executable (no intermediate structured language). could call it llmllvm. perhaps it would be tremendously dangerous
intelligence is an abstract concept, and sure, iq is a lossy way to measure it. but the idea that you could quantify intelligence into a scalar is absurd on its face and impossible to take seriously
there's a really interesting book called "When Prophecy Fails" that documents a doomesday cult. the cult had predicted a huge flood sometime in the 1950s and some sociologists infiltrated the group posing as believers to document their psychological response to the calamity not occuring
one of the core theses of the book is that adherents to a prophecy paradoxically believe in it much more strongly AFTER it's been disproven
reply