If 10% of drivers lacked car insurance, would your solution be to remove the legal requirement to possess a valid insurance policy to operate a motor vehicle because it discriminates against the poor?
The poor have a right to vote, while they don't have a right to operate a motor vehicle. We can debate over how disenfranchising it is to be unable to drive in the US (very), but the law makes a pretty clear distinction between these two activities.
As a Strix Halo owner, I've been eagerly awaiting Nemotron 3 Super since it was announced for H1'26 when Nemotron 3 Nano dropped. It's humbling to watch the industry move so fast that Qwen 3.5 122B A10B ends up being competitive with this on benchmarks, though, which isn't a dig at Nemotron 3 Super as much as it a testament to Qwen 3.5's phenomenonal achievements.
Still, the NVFP4 benchmark numbers also look fantastic, which is enticing to me as I'm considering supplementig my Strix Halo rig with a GB10 rig as well, not to mention the YaRN-less 1M native context window and that gorgeous hybrid mamba architecture that scales exceptionally well into the deep context lengths that are unlocked with that 1M context window.
It's fascinating how far Nvidia has been able to push models trained entirely on synthetic data, though it makes me curious to see what the hallucination rate turns out to be - this is exactly what I thought we we're not supposed to be doing to avoid model collapse.
You think that's bad? Imagine being unironically held accountable to the unenumerated terms of a "social contract" that you never even signed or had a right to refuse in the first place.
The difference is that a social contract is a concept and not literal contract.
The actual reality behind "the social contract" is simply that people have the capability to act in ways that can and do affect other people. Because of this, most people find that it's beneficial to moderate our actions in relation to other people based on their preferences.
I'm referring to very real obligations that we are all held to under the justification of "the social contract" such as taxation and being drafted into military service, not social niceties.
We are held to these obligations as seriously and as legally as we are held to real contracts, but unlike the bedrock that constitutes the basis for the legitimacy of all real contracts, these obligations are imposed upon us with no opportunity for consideration, consent, or rejection.
That’s not the social contract, that’s the dual contracts of residency (protection from fellow residents) and citizenship (protection from foreign elements). You have the opportunity of consent; on your majority you can leave the country for another that’ll have you. There’s a cost to it, but it’s fairly minimal in most places.
That there costs and requirements imposed by a refusal to consent means that your consent or lack thereof is subject to coercion, rendering the arrangement non-consensual.
This argument would be valid if you could renounce US citizenship without first producing another citizenship. But it's not, and you can't. I never asked for a US citizenship, I don't want a US citizenship, and yet I'm bound by it and not free to revoke it.
This citizenship situation is more analogous to a slaveholder telling one of their slaves that they are technically free, because they are welcome to leave once they produce documented proof of ownership by another, different slaveholder. The slave is no sense actually free, despite the misleading, bad-faith assertions of the slaveholder and those who recognize the slaveholder's framework as inherently legitimate.
Imagine waking up at a car dealership that tells you that you MUST pay interest on a car whether you take possession of it or not, despite you never having signed any kind of contract with them, but they tell you that you are still free and nothing is wrong with the arrangement because they will let you off the hook for paying them as long as you can provide proof that you're bound to pay interest on another dealership's car instead. If you try to refuse paying the interest on the car you don't want and never agreed to buy, they will send a team of gunmen to your house in the middle of the night, throw a flashbang through your window, chain you up, and drag you to a cage they lock you in. They insist that the whole arrangement is perfectly fine because the people in the car dealership took a vote where they agreed to force you to be bound by those terms, and that's all the justification they feel they need.
Now imagine the same thing, but in addition to paying interest on the car you didn't want and never agreed to buy, you're also bound to help murder people at other car dealerships, too, at the discretion and whim of the car dealership you're currently being extorted by.
FYI you can absolutely renounce citizenship without having another one handy. the us will simply extract extreme punishments on you for doing so—for most people it's simply not worth it.
This is factually incorrect in the United States. You cannot renounce your citizenship without producing evidence of another citizenship - that is a statutory requirement, alongside exit taxes, to renounce your US citizenship.
Violence isn't the answer. Handheld IR/non-visible-wavelength LiDAR systems that permanently fry CMOS image sensors are.
If state laws permit the capture of light, let them capture light. Light has no spectrum allocation laws, no license required to emit, and as long as you're not disturbing anyone (e.g. with deliberately obnoxious use of visible wavelengths), you're not breaking any laws.
LiDAR operators do not have a legal duty to protect image sensors around them.
Just attach a camera to your device and say you where recording in public just like them, no seam to have an issue with that. Your system was just measuring the distance to the target using lidar :)
That's my policy, but there's a sucker born every minute and they are buying these products so anytime you are in or near their homes or anywhere a microphone or camera can see you (even one mounted on some idiot's head) you're at risk. Even worse, both people and corporations typically don't disclose their use of those devices when you enter their homes/businesses either.
I think it's a reasonable ask that when buying a product, it has reasonable levels of safety, security, and privacy. Especially with products that might change over time because of software updates.
Yes, there are ToS, but it's fine for us as a society to say that consumers deserve more protection against big tech so we aren't a TOS update away from having everything shared or be used for something that wasn't promoted.
> You have free will. If you do not like a commercially available product, don't buy it, don't use it.
Caveat emptor. But lemon laws exist, too.
And, a commercially available product now might not be the same a year from now.
There's compelling reasons for all sorts of home devices to be connected to the internet[1] but the rub is that ToS flexibility and software updates make this a backdoor waiting to happen. I feel like our legal system has significantly failed us by not empowering the consume to say "I accept your device with a wifi antenna for the purposes of updating and I reject any exfiltration of personal data from it to your servers". You can have such a contract written - but this is really a place where something like a consumer advocacy board should step in and make sure those rights and sanely guaranteed.
1. It'd be great to ease the method for updating, it'd be nice to be able to easily monitor the device especially if it could become active in some manner while you're absent (I don't want the stove turning on to broil right after I leave on a three month vacation)
> I feel like our legal system has significantly failed us by not empowering the consume to say "I accept your device with a wifi antenna for the purposes of updating and I reject any exfiltration of personal data from it to your servers".
Worse it's allowed for them to remote into your device and disable features that you bought the device to use, by paywalling them off behind a subscription service that didn't exist when you brought the product home or just them entirely. To me that's no different than theft. It doesn't matter if it's amazon logging into you kindle overnight and removing books you already paid for from your virtual bookshelf, or Sony pushing an update to remove the option to use linux on your PS3, or BMW deciding that you should have to pay them every month just to use the heated seats option you already paid for when you bought your car.
If I, as an individual, sold you something than broke into your house to steal it or break it or demand ransom to get parts back that would be a crime, but companies get away with it somehow. What Google, Facebook, and Amazon do are basically just stalking.
Just to clarify, I don't mean what I said in a manner hostile to consumers, I mean what I said in a manner hostile to abusive corporations. Let them either adapt to market demand for better products (which we demonstrate by not continuing to buy their current garbage), or let them (the corporations) starve and die if they refuse to.
Many farm animals aren't bred specifically for killing them. Think egg-laying hens and ducks, milk-producing cows and goats, etc.
Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
Yup exactly. And when animals are bred specifically for milk, they aren't treated well even before they are killed. Dairy cows need to be kept continuously pregnant / in lactation state through artificial insemination. They don't magically produce milk all-year round.
And pregnancy is _hard_ on animals (including humans), it changes your physiology and psychology. Even if we take for granted that a cow isn't as conscious as a human (IMO consciousness is a sliding scale, not a binary), then they are still being primed for giving birth and taking care of offspring which never comes. Imagine doing that to a human - it's a definite form of cruelty.
To be fair you can keep a cow milking for LONG after it gave birth, but yields are a bit lower and baby cows are very valuable in themselves, which is generally the same kind of problem that keeps most bad farming practices going. Dairy farming is already a bottom of the barrel low margin business. And running a dairy farm while not maximizing calf output is like running a low-yield gold mine while dumping gem quality emeralds out with the tailings. Yeah it can be done, but you would be foolish not to do both, especially if it means your competitors across the road are able to squash your business with far higher capital returns after a few years.
What do you think happens to a cow, when she stops producing milk? She is kept constantly pregnant, what do you think happens to most of her male offsprings? In the end, almost every single cow’s life ends in violence.
Yeah, I hate being stuck with a luscious rare filet mignon basked in clarified butter, it's so flavorless that I have to chase it with celery, cucumbers, and lettuce just to stomach it... /s
Keep in mind, there are more people who have a medical necessity to avoid cruciferous vegetables (like cabbage), gluten, nuts, and other types of plants than there are people who have a medical necessity to avoid meat.
As a whole, more humans are medically biologically incompatible with plant consumption than animal consumption.
Note that I'm talking about adverse medical reactions that range from worsening of chronic disease to acute death, not merely gastric discomfort, like with lactose intolerance.
Not everyone has the privilege of enjoying buttered cabbage.
The target audience for malware authors/distributors typically isn't a community full of technically literate software engineers, security practitioners, reverse engineers, malware analysts, etc.
Same reason that burglars don't typically target security camera stores and robbers don't typically target police departments - it's basically a fast-track to early detection, which disrupts the main objective of the adversary.
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