While I also doubt the twins ability to calculate unknown primes, I do think that the article falls prey to many of the same trappings that they are calling out Oliver Sacks for.
While Oliver didn't know math enough to talk about known prime number tricks, the author of the article also clearly didn't know books well enough to include ruling that aspect of the story as false since a commenter found at least a contender for the book, which also opens up the theory that the twins memorized the numbers from a book. To take it a step into theorizing, since it's been shown at least one book existed, maybe others that have been lost to age also existed.
Also, with no proof the article talks about how the twins perceived the numbers, saying "More likely is that they called out the numbers figure by figure" instead of in the extended format. A 25 digit number is only in the septillion area, and numbers follow a latin naming scheme so it's not even that hard to remember. This is comparable to Oliver assuming further numbers were prime with no proof.
Plus there's the fact that this is all in hindsight, I think it'll be fun to look back in 40 years from now and see how the article stands the test of time. Maybe we discover an easy way to calculate arbitrary primes in our head and the original story becomes believable.
I mean at some point arguments like this become more akin to Russell's Teapot. If you're making an almost unfalsifiable claim, then the burden of proof is on you to prove it and not others to disprove it.
From a political standpoint, the statement "from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote" is a weird way to put it, since if you framed it in a positive light it would sound more similar to "the state population falls on both sides of the issue and thus either vote could make sense from their legislator depending on exigent circumstances and other factors" or any number of other explanations depending on the vote and populations.
I just verified. You can install Python 2.7 on an up to date Windows install as well as an up to date Linux install. Python 2.7 hasn't received security updates (or really any updates) in years, but that does not mean it can't still work on an up to date OS.
Yeah, it's been 5 years (almost 6) since python 2.7 stopped receiving security updates, but it does still run on modern OS's.
Looking at the list, I'm actually kind of surprised there aren't more CVEs for python 2.7, but if you're only running it locally or on an intranet I could see letting it ride.
And what is the surefire way to stop AI scrapers from accessing your website? If there is no way, how can this be an acceptable ask?
It already sounds like you're using several IPs to access sites, which seems like a work around to someone somewhere trying to limit the use of one IP (or just lack of desire to host and distribute the data yourself to your various hosts).
Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone must accept and like that you are doing that thing.
The answer is right there: use authentication with cost per load, or an IP whitelist.
GP is absolutely right. If your server is just going to send me traffic when I ask I’m just going to ask and do what I want with the response.
Your server will respond fine if I click through with different IPs and it’s just a menial task to have this distribution of requests to IPs, which is what we made computers for.
Yeah, you’re right of course that no one has to like the “piracy” or “scraping” or whatever other name you’re giving to a completely normal request-response interaction between machines. They can complain. And I can say they’re silly for complaining. No one has to like anything. Heck you could hate ice cream.
As long as we all understand that this mentality is advocating for the end of an open internet. This is the tragedy of the commons in action, the removal of a common good because the few that would take advantage of it do. Just because something is programmed to be a request and response interaction (although the use of blocklists and robots.txt and etc should reveal that it's not a simple request and response interaction), does not mean we should have to go all or nothing in ensuring it's not abused. We are still the operators of programs, it's still a social contract. If I block an IP and the same operator shows up with a different IP, it's like if I got kicked out of a bar and then came back with a fake mustache on and got confused why they think it's wrong because they don't have a members list.
A personal website is like a community cupboard or an open access water tap, people put it out there for others to enjoy but when the reseller shows up and takes it all it's no longer sustainable to provide the service.
Of course, it's all a spectrum: from monster corporations that build in the loss to their projections and participate in wholesale data collection and selling to open websites with no ads or limited ads as a sort of donation box; from a person using css/js to block ads or software to pirate for cheaper entertainment to an AI scrapper using swathes of IPs and servers to non-stop request all the data you're hosting for their own monetary gain. I have different opinions depending on where on the spectrum you are. But I do think piracy and ad blocking are on the same spectrum, and much closer to acceptable than mass AI scraping.
These responses were more about your comments about AI scraping then the piracy vs ad blocking conversation, but in my opinion the gap between them and scraping is quite large.
Everyone thinks that their specific pet thing is the precious commons and the other guy is the abuser. But in any case, one should be able to follow the reasoning.
If blocking ads is permissible because the server cannot control the client but can control itself; then so is “scraping”. Both services ask of their clients something they cannot enforce. And both find that the clients refuse.
If you find the justification valid but decide that the conclusion is nonetheless absurd, you must find which step in the reasoning has a failure. The temptation is epicyclic: corporations vs humans or something of the sort; commercial vs non-commercial.
But on its own there is no justification. It’s just that your principles lead you to absurdity but you refuse to revisit them because you like taking from others but you don’t like when others take from you. A fairly simple answer. Nothing for Occam’s Razor to divide.
Particularly believable because the arrival of AI models trained on the world seems to have coincided with some kind of copyright maximalism that this forum has never seen before. Were the advocates of the RIAA simply not users yet?
Or, more believably, is it just that taking feels good but being taken from feels bad?
I don't say this lightly, but I don't think you read my reply or at least didn't understand the implications, especially because you don't actually argue against anything I say. You only say generic statements about justifications and logical conclusions and conclude with assumptions about RIAA.
I stated that the open internet as a whole is the commons, not any specific person's pet project, and thus, that AI scraping (or any bulk scraping done commonly and wholesale) makes it untenable for most people to keep participating. Twitter for example has gone your preferred way, mostly requiring authentication to access. There are many arguments on HN about whether that's a good move, or even a move that others could take and expect success. And that's a huge platform. Just recently there have been front page posts on HN about bringing back personal blogs, and also posts about how personal blogs not behind the great wall of Cloudflare led to TBs of "false" traffic because of scrapers, which costs real money.
I stated I think piracy, ad block, and AI scraping to be part of the same spectrum. I think the justification for ad blocking has a much lower level of burden than the justification for AI scraping to the point you need multiple IPs and argue for whitelisting as the only option to stop it, because of the amount of effect you are having.
Much like how bandwidth has different levels of payment if you use less than 100 MB or more than 1 TB, or how delivering a package that weighs 10 lbs is way cheaper than a package that weighs 1000 lbs, or how at some level of effort times repetition it makes sense to automate something programmatically vs just doing it manually. There are of course situations where each makes sense, but the expectations can vary, and the results are not always linear depending on the inputs. This all completely ignores the social aspect of it that can add a whole new layer of complexity that has it's own logic.
Scraping (or access without ads eg ad blockiing, or outside sharing of data eg piracy) has always been complained about by those that have data that people want to scrape, eg airlines or hbo or disney, it's just that now all data is data that is being scraped absolutely non-stop to the detriment of many and the gain of few that everyone has a reason to complain. It also explains why people have differing opinions.
I think everyone is fine scraping for what is already public. But there’s a lot of scrapers that just do denial of service. Of I have a 1TB of bandwidth from my provider and only 10% of it is consumed usually, it’s really difficult to not blame someone that slurps it up in 1 hour and prevent anyone else from accessing the content.
A slight non-sequitur, but I always hate when people talk about the increase in a "chance". It's extremely not useful contextually. A "4x more likely statement" can mean it changes something from a 1/1000 chance to a 4/1000 chance, or it can mean it's now a certainty if the beginning rate was a 1/4 chance. The absolute measures need to be included if you're going to use relative measures.
Sorry for not answering the question, I find it hard because there are so many differences it's hard to choose where to start and how to put it into words. To begin with one is the actions of someone in the relationship, the other is the actions of a corporation that owns one half of the relationship. There's differing expectations of behavior and power and etc.
This all started with someone asking for their sources, and the person hasn't given any except to say to Google... which means for all we know the person who then googled ended up in a situation with lots of conspiracy theories. Google famously gives personalized results to an extreme degree especially when you add in differences in search terms.
I will say if you search for "chemical imbalance debunked" as discussed, the first result for me is a paper that also says dyslexia cannot be proved to be a disorder. Which just from vibes feels really conspiratorial, even without making comments on the veracity of the academic paper.
The person who was asked for sources was a different person than the one who quipped that finding said sources yourself is trivial.
> Google... which means for all we know the person who then googled ended up in a situation with lots of conspiracy theories.
If people have low enough media literacy that they cannot distinguish between scientific research published in refereed journals and conspiracy theories, then I cannot help them and it is not my responsibility to pander to their lack of competence.
> just from vibes feels really conspiratorial
Just from vibes? Clearly you are a scientific luminary.
Yeah, the person making the claim never responded. But I was more responding to your comments, specifically:
"Just searching 'chemical imbalance debunked' yields a wide array of sources. So why ask?", and "One of the first search results for me was a paper published in Nature. Other top results were from respected institutions like the NIH and Harvard University. Hardly grifters or crazies."
Those both trivialize the process of finding sources and interpreting them. I picked my top result which was from nih.gov and gave an example of why it's hard for a lay-person to interpret journal entries because it uses field specific terms that come across as wrong or conspiratorial. Heck the paper itself references other papers on other journals that appear legitimate that argue for the chemical imbalance theory, eg an article from JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) from 1993. Just because the source has NIH in it or is in a journal does not guarantee correctness or reliability because time passes and new science is done. The link in question was of a paper from 2006, which we are now further from than the 2006 paper was from the 1993 paper.
I am not claiming to be a scientific luminary and even agree that the chemical imbalance theory that was espoused for years was probably incorrect for many issues. I was just arguing against thinking it's easy to investigate and source claims. It's much easier for the person who is making the claim to provide their sources, and preferably they have a large body of evidence behind them and are recent or even better a source that has done that leg work of reviewing it and distilling it down.
I think this girl has a better understanding of lunch time dynamics than you. It's almost an objective, base point that any food is better than no food, which is why she would advocate for serving more and also improving it. A huge emphasis on improving it.
It comes down to the individual agreements that those private-contract cameras have with Flock, which unfortunately means it might be a case by case basis to understand if any one has conditions that allow sharing with law enforcement. IT was recently discovered that local police departments that had Flock contracts that limited the police department's access did not restrict general access, so Flock could still use it how they wanted and let federal agencies (ICE) use it: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-massachus...
I mean it depends on what we are talking about. The case you mention was about the right to peacefully assemble, and that the swastika does not count as "fighting words" and thus not grounds to say the assembly isn't allowed. In the case of Europe, they don't have the same constitution as the USA so I'm not sure how to compare that, and if those extremists are merely being silenced over swastikas or calls for the deaths of people since you didn't specify.
Plus the comparison to Europe and that specific case is especially untenable because if the specific case in Europe was in Germany, then they have a special relationship with the swastika.
People in Europe are also human beings and so they also have a natural right to free speech. They just happen to live in oppressive governments willing to use violence against them for expressing their natural right to speak their opinion.
People in Europe live in actual democracies (for the majority). The laws restricting speech were born through democratic processes.
Who do you think you are to pretend to know better than these citizens? You seem to want to impose some unbridled "free" speech that seem to have pretty disastrous effects in the only country where it supposedly exists... is this your idea if "freedom"?
We have tested the limits of tolerence at the cost of literal tens of millions of deaths during the last World War in Europe, I don't think we need any lesson on how we should run our societies regarding free speech because we have done a lot of painful learning.
Looking at the direction/unstability of the American system currently it's not impossible that its people will do the same kind of learning soon unfortunately, might be better to focus on this rather that trying export ideas that we democratically rejected, with purpose.
Good point. If you let the government silence extremists then they can also do it to the moderates next. Those are subjective definitions after all.
Paradox of of tolerance makes it clear that what can't be tolerated is anyone promoting law that restricts or hinders freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Lest we be left with no reasonable tolerance for any moderate speech at all, and we're left with intolerance toward all speech. Fortunately the first amendment exists and we don't have to worry too much.
Thanks for pointing that out though, it's a great talking point for free speech absolutists.
People in USA live in a constitutional republic based on self-evident natural rights given by god. We just have (somewhat) democratically elected representatives.
In an "actual democracy" with no constitutional rights, the majority can (legally) genocide the minority - and that's happened more than a few times in "actual democracies" in Europe in the very recent past.
You should probably think deeper about what you're advocating for.
That's also bad. But two wrongs don't make a right. Natives should have been afforded citizenship and constitutional rights also. The solution isn't to undo progress and take rights away from people again. I thought you were progressive?
> Our president wants to genocide brown people.
This discredits you quite a lot, since I've never heard even the most left-wing public figures insinuate such a wild unsubstantiated thing. If true, that would be deplorable also.
Whether what you're saying is true or false has no bearing on the truth value of what I said. You're just making unrelated angry hyperbolic claims that lack any nuance at all.
Whenever someone uses "we" to refer to a body politic, and doesn't otherwise specify, it's meant to refer to the collective polity throughout its history.
So, the democratic-republican "we". As compared to the royal "we".
As to why no one was behind bars? Because "we" also made those bars.
Their polities weren't then part of the US polity, so they'd have a separate we. Now they are part of the US polity, so they could include themselves in that we.
But to honestly answer your sarcastic question: There were a bunch of them, and they typically didn't include their fellow natives in their collective understanding of "we" until later years. At the time, and even prior to colonization, various tribes did indeed commit, or participate in, genocide on other tribes. Just like the pseudo-collective "Europeans" did among their tribes.
Exactly. It’s interesting that despite many countries sharing classic liberal political attitudes don’t have constitutional protections for free speech that go as far as the US. In my view free speech is the most fundamental requirement for any free society and democracy can’t work without it. But as we see with the UK right now and others, speech is impeded frequently.
Maybe played up slightly for TV? But the impression is given that -in practice- they could not exercise their free speech in person in the US, but were fine broadcasting it in the UK.
Yeah reality TV is not a good source, but it's embarrassing that guests in America even felt slightly uncomfortable expressing their opinions. They're human beings who have the right to peacefully express any opinion they want.
While Oliver didn't know math enough to talk about known prime number tricks, the author of the article also clearly didn't know books well enough to include ruling that aspect of the story as false since a commenter found at least a contender for the book, which also opens up the theory that the twins memorized the numbers from a book. To take it a step into theorizing, since it's been shown at least one book existed, maybe others that have been lost to age also existed.
Also, with no proof the article talks about how the twins perceived the numbers, saying "More likely is that they called out the numbers figure by figure" instead of in the extended format. A 25 digit number is only in the septillion area, and numbers follow a latin naming scheme so it's not even that hard to remember. This is comparable to Oliver assuming further numbers were prime with no proof.
Plus there's the fact that this is all in hindsight, I think it'll be fun to look back in 40 years from now and see how the article stands the test of time. Maybe we discover an easy way to calculate arbitrary primes in our head and the original story becomes believable.
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