I really didn’t expect Arsenal to boost up that goal difference vs. Man City against Chelsea of all opponents. I know they’re bad this year, but they’ve been better recently, and it is a derby of sorts.

The commentary on the double-deflection non-goal: “What a save by Petrovic!”

Dude… it deflected off someone else and happened to bounce into his head.

Yeah, I love rolling dice, but certain rolls shouldn’t be done by the players.

Rolling on a hit in combat? That should definitely be the player. You know how well you swing your sword and when it makes good contact.

Rolling on perception should almost always be done by the DM. This is especially true when another party member can rescue the bad roll. Like, someone rolls to spot a hidden enemy. They fail, but shouldn’t know it, but they rolled a 2, so… Another player at the table sees this horrible roll and they have their character light a torch and look out into the wilderness. Sure, that’s metagaming, but it’s really hard to avoid when you know someone failed a potentially important roll.

One idea I’d like to see, and might try if I ever DM’d a game would be Dunning-Kruger rolls. The Dunning-Kruger effect is basically how people who are incompetent at something sometimes think they’re much better than they are, and people who are experts (and realize how complex things are) underestimate their own competence.

So, in this case, the DM rolls a die which says whether the rolls are normal or reversed, then the player rolls. If the DM’s roll said the player’s roll was reversed, the player’s 20 might become a 1, or a 1 might become a 20 (the actual number is 21 - roll). Mid rolls stay roughly the same: a 10 becomes an 11, for example.

If the barbarian is trying to check for traps and gets an 18, the DM might say “You’re confident there are no traps”, but that could be the result of overconfidence when they really “rolled” a 3. If they get a 10, the DM might say “You didn’t notice a trap, but you’re not sure”. You could set this up so if someone has a proficiency, the DM rolls a D10 and only a 1 means the player’s role is reversed. But, if the player is trying something they’re not good at, a 1 to 5 on the D10 means it’s reversed.

I haven’t tried this, so there may be serious flaws in it in reality. But, I like the idea of players still being able to roll for something like spotting a hidden enemy, but not knowing for sure if their roll is good or not.

The whole reason that Google exists today is that their PageRank algorithm was a great way to identify good content. At its basics, it worked by counting the number of pages that linked to a certain page. More incoming links meant the page was more useful. It didn’t matter how many relevant search terms you stuffed into your page. What matters was votes from other people, expressed in the form of linking to your page.

But, that algorithm failed for 2 reasons. One is that it became cheaper and easier to put up sites that linked to sites you wanted to promote. The other was that people stopped blogging on their own blogs, and stopped creating their own websites, and instead used walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. That meant it was hard to measure links back to a site, and that it was easier to create fake links.

So, now it’s a constant war of SEO people vs. Google Search Quality people, and the Google people are losing. Sometimes there are brief victories for Google which result in good Reddit results appearing higher up. Then the SEO people catch up and either pollute Reddit and/or push Reddit links off the first page.

It would all be really depressing even if it weren’t for generative AI being used to pollute everything. With LLMs coming in and vomiting their content all over everything, we might be forced back to the bad old days of Yahoo where some individual human curated lists of good things and 99% of content was invisible.

Nope, that’s not what we’re talking about.

So which is it?

It’s the same consistent thing: Jaywalking is not punished as severely as illegal immigration, because it’s not on the same “level”.

The majority of the country disagrees.

Which country, because definitely not the USA.

They’re not common, but they most definitely are used, and nobody objects because it accurately describes the situation.

That’s the whole point of why it’s bad to use the word “illegal” as a noun

We’re talking about using the word illegal as an adjective: “illegal immigrant”. Immigrant is a noun, illegal is an adjective.

So the dehumanizing term

It’s not a dehumanizing term. That’s ridiculous.

What does leaving the country have to do with jay walking?…

Nothing. Is your brain mushy?

Ha, ok.

what makes you think anyone is in the country illegally?

Do you understand what illegal immigration means?

in america, people are entitle to a trial by a jury of their peers when they are accused of a crime

Illegal street racers are members of the group who race cars illegally on the street. Any person accused of that crime deserves their day in court. But, that doesn’t change the fact that we know illegal street racing happens, and therefore there exist illegal street racers. Similarly, any individual person accused of illegal immigration deserves their day in court, but when referring to the group of people who have illegally immigrated into the US, “illegal immigrants” is a perfectly reasonable label.

Unless you’re saying that you’re not convinced that anybody has ever violated immigration law, so “illegal immigration” is a myth?

If you honestly think this, you’re not paying attention.

I’m aware that there is a lot of discrimination against immigrants, both illegal immigrants and legal immigrants. But, that discrimination isn’t caused by referring to them by an accurate term.

What kind of argument is this?

It’s a response to the stupid statement “Literally the law they broke is on the same level as jay walking”, which is clearly not true.

has a jay walker ever been forced to go back and pick up their litter

What does litter have to do with jay walking. Do you even understand what jay walking is?

different crimes can be at the same level, and still have different punishments

No… that’s what makes the “level” different. A crime that is punished more severely is at a more severe “level” than one that isn’t. Come on, this isn’t rocket surgery…

an illegal immigrant makes it sound like the human being themselves is illegal

No it doesn’t, that’s why the word “immigrant” is there, to describe what the illegal thing was. So, an illegal doctor is a doctor who doesn’t have a license. An illegal motorist is someone who is driving a car without a license. Nobody thinks that the human being is “illegal” whatever that means, it’s the immigration that was illegal.

Literally the law they broke is on the same level as jay walking

No, it’s not. Has anybody ever been removed from a country when they’ve been caught jay walking? Even a fine is extremely rare. Being in a country illegally is a more serious offense by a pretty large margin.

However, I think you already understood that.

I understood that some people trot out those terrible arguments, but I don’t think even they actually believe them.

So when you jaywalk you’re an illegal pedestrian

Sure, that’s not a term anybody really uses though.

when you do a rolling stop at a stop sign you’re an illegal driver

No, an illegal driver is a driver without a license. It’s a pretty widely used term. There’s also “illegal doctor” for people who are practicing medicine without a license. Normally when the term is used it’s not for a brief violation of the law, but for a persistent status.

So what kinds of illegal are you?

If you think “illegal pedestrian” is a thing, I’ve been that pretty often, but I’ve never been caught. Was this supposed to be some kind of gotcha?

I really dislike the newspeak about “undocumented immigrants” vs “illegal immigrants”. The problem isn’t that they don’t have documents. The problem is that they entered the country illegally.

throes

We need to talk about data as a physical object.

We need to admit that it isn’t and that that’s a terrible metaphor.

It’s still saved on disks somewhere, whether they’re a traditional HDD or a modern SSD.

Yes, often multiple copies are saved. Sometimes it is aggregated with other data, sometimes not. Making a new copy is insanely cheap, and, under the hood, even when just moving the data from the hard drive to the computer’s memory, a copy is made automatically. There’s no way to avoid copying the data.

But, to make it clear, “data” is basically “ideas”, and you can’t really treat ideas as objects. For thousands of years the idea that you could control ideas was ridiculous. You could control the physical object that an idea was expressed on, but if someone took their own time and copied it, that was a new object and the person who made the original had no claim on it.

Copyright, and its evil friends, is a relatively new concept where the government grants a temporary monopoly on the expression of an idea. Stealing the physical object on which the idea is printed is one thing. But, now you can get in trouble for “stealing” the idea. That’s what you’re talking about with stealing “data”, is that what you’re supposedly “stealing” is information.

But, of course it’s not theft. When you copy an idea without permission, the person with the original doesn’t lose it, they just lose control over a copy of that information.

Treating ideas, data, etc. as physical objects just never works because ideas can be copied without the original person losing anything. This is different from physical objects where my taking it necessarily means that you no longer have it.

In other words, data was always as physical as words on the page of a book.

Not at all, because each copy of a book is its own physical object. Copying a book is difficult and requires its own printing press. Even a low-fidelity copy like a photocopy requires a photocopy machine, ink and paper. Copying data is essentially free. When copying a book required a printing press, you could sort-of pretend that ideas were objects because copying was so burdensome. But, with digital data it’s clearly ridiculous. That doesn’t mean you can’t have laws about data (i.e. information), it just means that those laws care going to have to be completely different from laws about physical objects.

Why did we accept the change in how ownership worked simply because of a change of storage medium?

Because copying is essentially free. It’s no longer an object, it’s information.

But, having said that, the storage medium isn’t a major issue. The real question is when did people start accepting that you could treat ideas as objects. Stealing a book out of someone’s backpack and photocopying a book are completely different crimes. In one case, the person no longer has the object. In the second case, they still have it, but they don’t have control over the copies of it.

Talking about data as if it’s an object or something you can own is a red herring. The real issue is privacy.

For instance, say you use a period tracker app, that is owned by an non-profit, trying to use the data to better understand women’s hormone changes so that they can get better medical care. Great! Ok, now what happens if that non-profit goes bankrupt and as part of the bankruptcy proceedings sells its data to Meta or Google so that it can afford to make payroll. Well shit, your data is now owned by them, and you’re out of luck.

A privacy rule handles that situation better. You can give the company access to your private data, and then revoke that access later. If your data is something they own, they can use it however they like. But, if you own your own privacy, it doesn’t matter if the period tracker app gets bought out or goes bankrupt or whatever. The data they have isn’t something they own and can sell, it’s private data that they had temporary access to.

That’s like saying “Watch my new TV show, it’s better than the other shows because our scripts are printed on an Epson printer!”

They don’t have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them.

Erm, you think Bing is a serious competitor? Aside from search (91.54% of the global search market), Google is part of an ads duopoly that is only stalled by walled gardens like Amazon, TikTok, Wal*Mart, and the various entertainment companies. There’s also Google Maps, used by 77% of users between 16 and 64, and their biggest non-iOS competitor is Waze, which Google also owns. For email, 75% of the US email market is dominated by Gmail. As for the user-generated media market, YouTube absolutely dominates that. The closest competitor (Twitch, A.K.A. Amazon) is far behind.

As for what Google engineers do, it’s mostly not rip-things-up-and-start-over innovation since these are all very mature markets with billions of users. Instead it’s small tweaks that generate hundreds of millions in savings or additional revenue.

IMO it’s more important to talk about the specific elements of the system, because all the successful systems have used mixes of other systems.