I’ve always wondered, isn’t that painful?

“Liberal media”? They’re all owned by billionaires. It’s billionaire media.

This IS Christianity. Hypocrisy, corruption, and shallow virtue signaling have defined the religion since it became dominant in ancient Rome.

Returns are not a right, no retailer is required to accept them. Most do it for a better shopping experience, people are more likely to spend if they know they can return.

You are protected from defective or dangerous products, but that’s through the manufacturer’s warranty. You are also protected from products that do not work as advertised. I think that’s a law in most countries.

But returns for other reasons like bad clothing fits or you just don’t like it are not legally protected for the most part. There are some exceptions but they’re specific.

So to say restocking fees are greedy is silly.

They are not popular. Like 30% of the voting eligible public voted for him.

No it’s more of a technical discussion. Many people might believe that in order to avoid toxicity, you just train a model on “good” non-toxic data and then apply toxicity removal techniques to address emergent toxicity that the model might spit out. This paper is saying they found it more effective to train the model on a small percentage of “bad” toxic data on purpose, then apply those same toxicity removal techniques. For some reason, that actually generated less total toxicity. It’s an interesting result. A wild guess on my part, but I’m thinking training the model with toxic content “sharpened” the toxicity when it was generated, making it easier for those removal tools to identify it.

This concept is very often misinterpreted by these tech CEOs because they’re terrified of becoming the next Yahoo or Kodak or cab company or AskJeeves or name any other company that was replaced by something with more “innovation” (aka venture capital). It’s all great they’ll lose wealth.

The underlying concepts are sound though. Think of a small business like a barber shop or restaurant. Even a very good owner/operator will eventually get old and retire and if they haven’t expanded to train their successor before they do, the business will close. Which is fine, the business served the purpose of making a living for that person. Compare with McDonalds, they expanded and grew so the business could continue past the natural lifetime of a single restaurant.

A different example of stagnation is Kodak. They famously had the chance to grow their business into digital cameras early on, their researchers and engineers were on the cutting edge of that technology. But the executives rejected expansion in favor of sticking with the higher profit margins (at the time) of film cameras. And now they’re basically irrelevant. Expanding on this example, even digital cameras are irrelevant, within 20 years of Kodak’s fall. The market around low- to mid-end stand-alone cameras had disappeared in favor of phones.

So the real lesson is not so much infinite growth like these tech CEOs believe in, the lesson is adaptability to a changing world and changing technology, which costs money in the form of research, development, and risk taking trying to set up production on products you’re not sure will sell, but might replace your current offerings.

I think it actually is interesting if you’re going to call out humans as a species of animal!

All across species from unicellular to megafauna, from plants to fungus, you can find mechanisms used to defend an individual’s physical territory. Ants and bees from the same species will fight and kill others colony members of they stray into their territory. Bears will fight and kill other bears. Our closest relatives, chimps, will go to war with neighboring chimp bands.

Artificial borders are humans way of saying “this is my territory enter at your own risk”. The REALLY interesting thing is that we have established systematic exceptions to the behaviors we see in nature. “Ask us before you come and you can visit and be safe here from those that enforce our territory.”

The temporary nature is unique, many social animals will permanently adopt an outsider into their group on occasion, equivalent to immigration, but I’m not aware of any that have pre-agreed temporary violations of group territory.

Americans are not a hive mind. The ones who mourn his loss are not the ones in power happily sending aid to Israel. Just like not every Palestinian participated in Oct 7.