… “Apples can go bad, but so can oranges” is literally comparison.

the representing of one thing or person as similar to or like another.

You didn’t have to argue about the meaning of the word comparison if you didn’t care. If you’re going to argue at someone, don’t tell them to stop responding. It conveys a weird energy of “I care enough to respond, but not enough to read a response”.

My day is going great. I got the day off and good leftovers for lunch, and now I’m just playing games and relaxing.

Here’s a bewildering product image for the leading brand of rabies vaccine in the US:

A friend woke up to a bat freaking out in their bedroom. We told him to go to the doctor, who said that he almost certainly didn’t have a rabies risk because the bat seemed fine, he had no visible bites, and most bats here don’t bite, buuut the “certainty of a slow and painful death” compared to “low risk moderate discomfort rabies vaccine series” means they recommend it anyway. To cheer him up we shared the terrible website design of the manufacturer. Seems people aren’t looking for the hip new thing when they’re looking for rabies vaccine.

… You directly compared the two of them, but okay.

It’s a really odd product comparison that totally distracted me from the product.

Eeeh, he’s closer to how you want that situation to go than Cosby, by far.

He asked permission to touch himself in front of someone else, and only proceeded when he had their consent.
Turns out that consent between people earlier in their careers and someone more established can be tricky, to say the least.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41950043

What he did wasn’t violent, just ignorant to power dynamics. What he did wasn’t okay, but it’s far from drugging people.

What about when their beliefs are “people you care about should die?”

It’s a reciprocal relationship. I can tolerate them if they can tolerate me. If they base their beliefs on failing to tolerate me… I won’t extend the courtesy either.

Except that with the website example it’s not that they’re ignoring the price or just walking out with the item. It’s that the item was not labeled with a price, nor were they informed of the price. Then, rather than just walking out, they requested the item and it was delivered to them with no attempt to collect payment.

The key part of a website is that the user cannot take something. The site has to give it to them.
A more apt retail analogy might be you go to a website. You see a scooter you like, so you click “I want it!”. The site then asks for your address and a few days later you get a scooter in the mail.
That’s not theft, it’s a free scooter. If the site accused you of theft because you didn’t navigate to an unlinked page they didn’t tell you about to find the prices, or try to figure out payment before requesting, you’d rightly be pretty miffed.

The shoplifting analogy doesn’t work because it’s not shoplifting if the vendor gives it to you knowingly and you never misrepresented the cost or tried to avoid paying. Additionally, taking someone’s property without their permission is explicitly illegal, and we have a subcategory that explicitly spells out how retail fraud works and is illegal.

Under our current system the way to prevent someone from having your thing without paying or meeting some other criteria first is to collect payment or check that criteria before giving it to them.

To allow people to have things on their website freely available to humans but to prevent grabbing and using it for training will require a new law of some sort.

It really does matter if it’s legally binding if you’re talking about content licensing. That’s the whole thing with a licensing agreement: it’s a legal agreement.

The store analogy isn’t quite right. Leaving a store with something you haven’t purchased with the consent of the store is explicitly illegal.
With a website, it’s more like if the “shoplifter” walked in, didn’t request a price sheet, picked up what they wanted and went to the cashier who explicitly gave it to them without payment.

The crux of the issue is that the website is still providing the information even if the requester never agreed or was even presented with the terms.
If your site wants to make access to something conditional then it needs to actually enforce that restriction.

It’s why the current AI training situation is unlikely to be resolved without laws to address it explicitly.

The thing is a robots.txt file doesn’t work as licensing. There’s no legal requirement to fetch the file, and no mechanism to consent or track consent.

This is putting up a sign that says everyone must pay, and then giving it to anyone who asks for free.

Well, the follow up answer is pretty straightforward.
Selling power by the megajoule is silly. You want a unit that puts time in the name and the unit of power that’s on appliances. If I run a 35 watt fan for an hour I know I’ve used 35 watt hours of energy. Or I can say I’ve used 126 kilojoules.

It’s not highschool. You don’t lose points for not reducing your answer all the way. The goal is to describe reality clearly, not to use the most concise units of measurement.

If I’m running a powerplant I need to know how many joules I get from my fuel and what my customers need and what my generators can deliver. The customer needs to know the efficiency of their appliances, and how how much that costs them. These are the same thing, but life isn’t made simpler by having them be the same unit.

Oh, certainly. I just enjoyed that, in a thread about the vagueness and oddness of the imperial system, the suggestion came up to use a casual approximation for the inch instead of the word “inch”.

Take heart. You can easily remember that a stride is 5’ 3 9/25” because that’s the height of the typical Roman soldier after adjustment for 15th century English agricultural tax methodology.

Nah, highly composite number. A product of multiple primes. 10 is 2 and 5. A power of 2 is just multiple 2s. 12 gets you 2, 2, and 3. 60 adds a 5.

In traditional carpentry inches and feet make sense because of the high divisibility. We don’t get as much benefit from that now though.

We still use hex with computers because that’s what they’re made using (rather binary, but hex is just a natural group of binary digits). The usage of binary is ultimately more grounded in the objective than the usage of base 10 in the SI system. Nature dictates the relationships between the units, but we pick the quantities so it works out to a nice base 10 set of ratios.
Base 2 naturally arises when dealing with information theory that underpins a lot of digital computing.

Say what you will about the imperial system, but you can pry binary, octal, and hex from my cold dead hands.

Do you want to develop imperial measurements? Because that’s how you invent imperial measurements. Next thing you know you’ve got a cup that’s really good for measuring liquids and a couple spoons you like to scoop with…

2.2 pounds per kilogram. For a rough conversion just multiply or divide by two. For a more precise conversation do the same thing, then wiggle a decimal and do it again.

That gets you base 11, which is what we count on our fingers in now.

They counted, at least for tallying, by putting their thumb on the three finger bones if the other four fingers on the hand. One hand can count to 12, and then you lift a finger in the other when starting over. That method gives you a count of 60’on your fingers. That’s why 12 and 60 still crop up all the time.

It’s not nonsense, just old and focused on priorities that don’t matter anymore. A mile was initially a thousand paces. So you send a group of people out, one counts each time their right foot takes a step and after a thousand times they build a mile marker. Bam, roman road system. 1000 strides per mile, 5 feet per stride.

Later the English used the unit as part of their system of measurement, and built the furlong around it, which is the distance a man with an ox team and plow can plow before the ox need to rest. A mile is eight furlong. This got tied into surveying units, since plots of land were broken up into acres, or the amount of land an ox team can plow a day.
When some unit reconciliation needed to be done, they couldn’t change the vitality of oxen, and changing the survey unit would cause tax havock, so they changed the size of a foot.

All the units and their relationships were defined deliberately and intentionally. They just factored in priorities that we don’t care about anymore.

I just remember that a mile has 1000 strides in it.

Because your power is billed in kWh. Figuring out the kWh cost of a 77 watt TV is straight forward, but a lot of consumer labeling standards are about quick and easy side by side comparisons as opposed to perfect application of units. Easiest way to give a comparison that’s accurate enough and doesn’t involve odd numbers is to convert that way.

Seems lacking in details. DARPA is only connected to a few rather inconsequential things, ARPANET is mentioned for some reason but not “the Internet”. In-q-tel is entirely absent and their entire purpose is to direct funds to tech companies that have possible security, defense or military applications. They’re “legally not the CIA”. Just founded by them to be an unaccountable organization for directing US funds to potentially valuable startups. (Not conspiracy stuff, it’s from their about page.)

I feel like if your goal is to tie stuff together more meaningfully, you’re going to be better served by saying that there’s no company not connected to military interests by a shockingly short chain.
Like, chances are high that any random person has a home appliance produced by non-trivial defense contractor. As in there are multiple companies that make kitchen appliances and heavy munitions, and openly work on AI weapons platforms.

I prefer to keep it technically correct yet evil and confusing. 6% being a fancy way to write 0.06 or 6 * 1/100 means we can take 6 * 50 * 1/100 and simplify to 300 * 1/100 and then represent that as 300%.