There hasn't been a debate. The headline is not reflective of the facts. There hasn't been any agreement to fast track this bill, but the politician sponsoring it has said in a radio interview that (surprise!) he thinks it should be fast tracked.

The Dáil record can be found here, but there's nothing of interest in it:

https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/search/?searchType=debates&deba...

Oh for fuck's sake.

HN: "Ireland fast tracks Bill to criminalise harmful voice or image misuse"

TFA: "Calls to fast track Bill to criminalise harmful misuse of someone’s voice or image"

Call to action. Not action. And the call is coming from the bill's proposer! He would say that, wouldn't he? But what matters is if the actual government takes that bill further. If they don't, we don't need to care about what this guy thinks.

HN headline (possibly an earlier headline of TFA) is fundamentally misrepresenting the situation.

You can email the mod team with this explanation and get them to change the title.

But that doesn't explain things if it's true that they hadn't discovered the wheel!

The pi ratio is strong evidence that a wheel is used somewhere in their surveying tools.

When I was a boy, I asked my mom how the Egyptians made their pyramid foundations straight. Without looking up from her book, she replied "pull a string tight". Then I thought I'd trip her up with how they made the foundation level. Without hesitation she said "dig a trench and fill it with water."

She shoulda been an engineer!

It is as far as I understand only wheeled transportation that was late in Ancient Egypt. They used wheels for pottery before they had wagons.

I was asked in an interview to explain the difference between TCP and UDP.

I knew about enough to fill an index card: enough for an adequate interview answer, but not enough that I would relish getting follow-up questions.

While deciding what to say I started with this joke. The interviewer laughed and moved on to the next question. I got the job offer.

1 GW in nameplate capacity of solar panels powers fewer data centres than 1 GW of nuclear. So it needs to be "this time next month".

"Solvers" normally means algorithms which aim to produce some mathematically optimal (given certain assumptions) behaviour.

There are other poker playing programs [0] - what we called AI before large language models were a thing - which achieve superhuman performance in real time in this format. They would crush the LLMs here. I don't know what's publicly available though.

[0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)

Solvers, in a poker context, are a category of programs. They run a simulation after you enter the known information.

Like piosolver, as an example.

The best poker-playing AI is not beatable by anyone, so yes, it would crush the LLMs.

None of those are generally made mandatory. It's a reasonable position to say the government shouldn't be able to compel you to put any particular drugs in your body, even if it would benefit the population at large.

The opposite position is also reasonable: the government should be able to compel you to take certain medical treatments in the name of improving public health. Reasonable people not blinded by ideology can accept both of those positions and handle individual cases on their merits. In the modern liberal world we've reached a consensus something like: measles vaccine OK, sterilising people with hereditary defects not OK. But people in other times and places settle on other compromises.

Note: I'm aware that this decision isn't about forcing anyone to have the vaccine, it's just "advice". But it's only one step removed from that. Public schools already withhold services from kids who don't have CDC-recommended vaccines, and we've seen various governments willing to go much further during the COVID-19 pandemic.

gsera's point was that the suspicious part was the business side of it not the government.

Now that the original thread is flagged and hidden, we can discuss without fear.

In capitalism, the incentive of the manufactures to maintain product quality is that people won't buy the thing if it is bad, or does not appear to work.

This cannot be cheated. You cannot "bribe" a population.

But when government mandates a product, then it changes the equation greatly against the population. Manufacture is no longer incentivized to maintain quality. If the quality is not easy to identify then it becomes much more easy.

Now, they are outside capitalism. Now they can bribe the government, and enjoy perpetual sales.

So to answer your question, if it was not mandated, there would be no push against it. Such businesses will run out of business as capitalism run its course.

That's not how it works.

Governments have regulatory powers. They can stipulate prices, control quality, etc and so forth. Companies can be fined for breaching regulation.

Ultimately, the government itself can even establish vaccine production to distribute among the population if necessary.

> Governments have regulatory powers.

Which part of "bribe the government" didn't you understand, assuming you read my whole message?

> The government itself can even establish vaccine production to distribute among the population if necessary.

Right. Let that be done.

> Which part of "bribe the government"

I read it.

I just interpreted as "government icky" rhetoric that is very common around here.

Corruption is a tool of any power structure. Gesturing vaguely towards it to invalidate any societal initiative is not an argument, it is just bad-faith whinging.

"Why build roads? The government can be bribed"

"Why trust the courts? The government can be bribed"

"Wefare? The government can be bribed"

>is not an argument

Can you clarify which argument of mine are you referring to here?

Not OP but I’d say that your argument sounds like the libertarian one whereby all government and all regulation is bad.

If that is your position, point me towards a place where libertarianism has worked.

> if it was not mandated, there would be no push against it.

Do you really think that? You can’t think of any other health choice that has zealots protesting other people’s choices?

You get anti-vax people wanting to avoid the vaccinated, removing masks from those wearing them, claiming not to hear the voice of people wearing masks.

The author describes that as "the nuclear option" but is it really more nuclear than Corroded? Many of the things Corroded allows would not be allowed in Rust--, if I understand right.

It is, because it disables checks in the whole code base. With Corroded, you still have to manually corrode it in selected places.

> The idea is a possible realization of LANGUAGE 18 from "FORTY-FOUR ESOLANGS":

    a sculptural language

    it subtracts from potential algorithms,
    making them more specific

    a program only states what it doesn't do

This made me want to read the other forty-three proposals for esolangs! Some of them are here [0], buy the book for more.

I'm a bit unclear about how much the book specifies Language 18 (is it really just the three-line prose poem above? Other languages seem to have more detail) and how much came from the author of this post.

[0] https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs/

I thought it played worse than random moves and couldn't understand how it could beat anyone (no offence to OP).

But if you intentionally hang your pieces, it tends to take them. And it will try to promote pawns in the endgame. So it is possible for it to stumble upon a checkmate, though in my effort where I gave away all my pieces, it instead found the only move to stalemate once it had K+Q+R vs K.

It tries to promote pawns in the opening and mid-game too.

I'm sure they've done the maths and determined that it's not economically feasible at all.

But if it works as a proof of concept, in three or four generations time perhaps they'll have a scalable process which pays for itself.

This exactly. At scale there are a lot of things that are profitable that are idiotic when done Ad Hoc. To get to scale though you need a particular kind of bullshitter who can hold on to the idea that what they say is true and also on some level understand that they have to idea how to do the bullshit they're promoting.