Are you claiming that all of Gaza is Hamas?

This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I've always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I've never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don't understand it at all it just seems natural.

When there's a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It's not that my memory is particularly good but I can "synthesize" shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.

With music it can be a bit distracting. I'll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it's incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I've never heard before. I can play that enough times to "drive out" the other one but not enough to "light up" the new one and I'm fine.

As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven't found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.

As an aside, I'm also one of those people that's terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone's name and face within minutes of meeting them. I've started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I'm supposed to know and run through them every night. It's a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I'm one of those people that never forgets a face.

Yes but there's a threshold of how much you need to copy before it's an IP violation.

Copying a single word is usually only enough if it's a neologism.
Two matching words in a row usually isn't enough either.
At some point it is enough though and it's not clear what that point is.

On the other hand it can still be considered an IP violation if there are no exact word matches but it seems sufficiently similar.

Until now we've basically asked courts to step in and decide where the line should be on a case by case basis.

We never set the level of allowable copying to 0, we set it to "reasonable". In theory it's supposed to be at a level that's sufficient to, "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).

Why is it that with AI we take the extreme position of thinking that an AI that makes use of any information from humans should automatically be considered to be in violation of IP law?

Yeah. Even 6 year olds know their Lego houses will fall apart if they don't interleave the bricks.

Forgive me. I'm old so I'm not up on the current vocab. I thought "woke" and "tankie" were opposite pejoratives. What is a "woke tankie"?

And more to my original question, what have they actually done that causes any problems? Even if these "woke tankies" have terrible ideas, who cares if they're not actually causing any problems?

What have they actually done?

I'm all for defederating from instances that cause problems but all the quotes above basically seem to say, "I know you want a revolution but you still gotta follow the rules of whatever instance you're posting on."

It's your server so your under no obligation to provide a reason for defederating beyond disagreeing with them but it leaves me wondering if there's anything else or if it's just a matter of disliking them?

Interesting point. I looked into it a bit more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country

You can sort that list by Muslim population.

The top one, Pakistan had a minimum marriage age of 18M/16F but recently changed it to 18 across the board.
Indonesia is at 21M/19F.
India has 21M/18F.
Bangladesh is 21M/18F.
Nigeria is 18+.

It looks like when a bunch of Muslims get together the trend is that they reject child marriage and enshrine that rejection in law.

If a cop just acts like some random "guy with a gun" who might shoot you at the slightest provocation they probably shouldn't have a gun.
Or be a cop.
An honest cop should be keeping a close eye on that guy.

I’d actually start by playing around with the automation and customization functionality you already have. Learn to set email sorting filters, get some cool browser extensions and configure them, maybe even start by customizing your windows preferences or making some red stone stuff in Minecraft.

Computers are just tools. Programs are just stuff you tell a computer to do over and over again. All the fancy programming languages give you really good control over how you talk to a computer but I’d start with the computer equivalent of “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”

I'm not a lawyer and you should go talk to several. Most states have several ways to find lawyers. If you have any friends who are lawyers, describe this to them and ask if they can refer you to anyone. Every state in the US has a bar association. Their websites have search engines for all the lawyers licensed to practice in their state. Make appointments with a few of them. You don't have to pay for the initial consultation. You explain the circumstances and they tell you what your legal options are and what it will cost you. Pick which ever one you want to work with (if any).

Talk to them about this but here's my basic understanding of how it breaks down.

There are basically two avenues; criminal and civil.

In order for there to be a criminal prosecution, they would need to have broken some law and it needs to be bad enough that a government attorney is willing to spend their time going after it. There are a whole bunch of federal laws around phones and telecommunications. You're probably familiar with a bunch of them from your IT work. Chances are pretty good that they broke some law. If you give the police your evidence they may care enough to go after it.

In order for there to be a civil suit, they need to have done something that harmed you, in a quantifiable way and they need to have done it in an illegal way. This does seem like their methods met the threshold. The harder part might be establishing harm. Feeling violated is hard to quantify, unless there's some statutory compensation. If you can point at something like lost wages or lost economic opportunities it's probably stronger.

"Finally" makes it sound like this doesn't already exist for multiple platforms.

Amazon has been trying to get me to buy https://www.bhaptics.com for a while now.

It's amazing how much additional immersion you can get just from some vibrations though. I once saw a demo of a device that uses an array of ultrasonic speakers to create a 3-d haptic "display". You put your hand over the array and you can "feel" a virtual object. The sensation is odd, since there's no actual resistance, just a sensation. So it ends up feeling like you're holding some really light and delicate object. Like an ultralight gel.

We're not quite there yet on VR and I suspect this thing won't exactly fly off the shelves but it definitely has potential.

Adding some detail. Evaporating water takes way more energy than just heating it up.
When you put energy (heat) into water that's below 100c it gets hotter. When you add 4,184 to a liter of water the temperature goes up by 1c. If the water is already at 100c it takes 2,260,000 to turn that into 100c steam. The energy that goes into turning water into steam isn't going into the steak.
So if you put a wet steak on the grill it will create an insulating layer of steam that keeps the steak at around 100c (even if the pan is above 100c).
That's also why you only salt your steak right before or after heating it. If you let salt sit on the steak it will draw out moisture, reducing the Maillard reaction and drying out the steak.

For a great practical way to grill the steak perfectly, check out videos on "cold searing".