It always bothered me how so many Twitter users in Japan just kept using Xitter after everything Musk has done to it, like they’re not even aware. I think the language barrier has been filtering some of it out until now.

But,

I am not afraid of AI; I believe in its future and potential. However, I cannot accept my work being used, learned from, or exploited without my consent.

Boichi, that’s what’s been happening with AI to everybody’s art this entire time!

If you drive the same roads every day, you can start to pick up on the pattern and timings. It’s when it turns yellow in those times you feel almost too close to stop comfortably but too far to feel you’ll make it that people will “squeeze the lemon” and accelerate through that yellow light, not that I recommend it.

Also glad I don’t have to drive anymore.

In that scenario, I agree the pragmatic choice is to save the majority.

But many situations tend to be complex and aren’t as clear as a trolley problem, so I want to avoid falling into the trap of seeing a false dilemma when there’s possibly more than two options.

Those are already arguments for why NASA and space programs shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I remember watching something about the space race, and there was a clip of public opinion during the time of the first mission to the moon, where a man complained that the money should’ve been used to improve the lives of poor Americans instead.

Regardless, for the scenario in The Martian, if money is already being spent and going to continue being spent on space missions in the future, I think you can rationalize it as using money for another or next space mission. They would still gain knowledge from what they had to do to pull off that rescue, so it’s not a complete waste of funds for a mission either.

On the morality point, I’d argue that we should spend the money to rescue any person if we have the money/means, and it can feasibly happen without excessive risk to other lives, otherwise we’re assigning monetary value to human lives. That includes both people in imminent danger, requiring expensive emergency services, and people suffering slower, persistent risks like hunger that require sustained support.

While not what you’re asking for, but fun fact, in Asia, this sort of paradox is represented by the story of the all-piercing spear and the unpierceable shield in Chinese philosophy. So in Chinese and Japanese, the word for ‘paradox’ or ‘contradiction’ literally means ‘spear-shield’ (矛盾).

Been to Louisiana. Can confirm.

I don’t think he wasn’t praising himself there. I interpreted it as calling himself foolish.

I disagree. Apple might not be perfect, but it is better than Google when it comes to ads and tracking. I know my data is encrypted, both on the device and in my cloud. And in the App Store, it tells me exactly what data is being collected by the apps I choose to install.

I’ve heard stuff like that too. To be fair, if the United States were to resolutely defend Taiwan, China might not touch it, though there would still be a possibility, but at the least the US and Taiwan would likely win that war since they just need to keep Taiwan independent, not invade China.

Some years ago, I decided to play all the Half-Life games and expansions available at the time after watching a video game history series on YouTube. I enjoyed them all.