It’s straight to Hell for you, no Purgatory.

I am very wary of explanations of the world which emphasize “the people who disagree with this are evil” or “the people who disagree with this are stupid”. If only people weren’t deliberately trying to do harm or remain ignorant, they would of course agree with the speaker. This leaves no room for different (but reasonable) priorities, different tolerances for risk, different trusted authorities, etc. Plus, when evil and stupid do exist, they always think that their opponents are actually the evil, stupid ones. So an individual ought to remain humble: if he’s sure that he’s on the side of God fighting a clear battle against evil, that itself is evidence that he isn’t.

most proposed ideas that haven’t been tried at the relevant scale before probably legitimately would not work very well

Before you can even get to those, you have to stop all the people who are proposing ideas that have been tried, over and over, and didn’t work every one of those times.

Watch out, you’re straying close to heresy.

In relation to the process of digestion, the Catholic Church’s teaching has been expressed in this way: “The substance of Christ’s body is not subject to processes of digestion or to any chemical reactions. The qualities of bread of course behave in their normal way, undergoing a change as they are affected by digestion. Our Lord’s substantial presence ceases as these qualities cease to retain those characteristics proper to bread.”

I’m not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave something sweet then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of some other desserts (baked sweets are often the worst offenders) is relatively high. That means that a lot can be gained simply by replacing one dessert with a different, equally tasty dessert. Hence my ice cream advocacy.

Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.

I don’t see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.

With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don’t eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.

Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.

I guess humans do it as a sign of interest specifically because it indicates “I am listening closely.”

I definitely am interested in it, although I’m worried about buying a car from a new company’s first production run. I haven’t driven an electric car before but maybe it’ll be fun.

Don’t human do that too? I sometimes even do it deliberately to indicate that I’m interested in listening to something another person is going to say, but maybe my body language is way off?

I don’t mind hair everywhere (although I wouldn’t get a dog with long fur because they overheat so easily) but I don’t understand how people who don’t live on a ranch take care of herding breeds. Australian cattle dogs are really popular in New York City but I would never dare to get one in an apartment. It was hard enough to have a dog with a strong prey drive - he could not be off-leash anywhere without a tall fence and double-layer gates, and he would forget that he was on a leash and take off at full speed whenever he saw a squirrel. I admit I envied the people with guarding breeds a little - my sister’s pit bull mix looked like a crossbreed between a crocodile and a pig but that dog just followed my sister everywhere, even indoors, leash or no leash.

I actually owned a 1998 S10 before I got that BMW. It was the most basic trim, with a manual transmission, a regular cab, and hand-cranked windows. That truck was a lot of fun because of how poor the traction was. I could skid around corners at 25 mph and one time I did a burnout accidentally when trying to start moving up a steep hill after stopping for a crossing guard letting a bunch of little kids across the street. I would love to have an S10 again but mine had the brakes fail in 2011 (to be fair, I had bought it used with 200k miles on it) and I wasn’t comfortable driving it after that. I can’t imagine how many problems it would have after 14 more years.

It’s too bad that there are exactly zero options for a truck like that these days. A truck would actually be very practical for me (I live alone so I don’t need passenger space but I do move big stuff sometimes) but there are no fun models that aren’t already old enough to drink.

Relatively old cars. I’m not talking about antiques. I just don’t want a screen or an automatic transmission in my car. Right now I need to buy a car and frankly the only ones I want are a manual-transmission BMW or a late-90’s pickup. Either one would be a rather impractical choice.

I used to own a 2008 BMW 328i with a manual transmission and sport suspension. It broke down, fixing it would have cost more than it was worth, but I think I should have just paid for the repairs because at least then I would have the same car I had been driving for 14 years rather than a car with the same problems of old age but no nostalgia value. (2018 was the last year than BMW made a manual 3-series, and also coincidentally the year that backup cameras and therefore computer screens became legally required in US cars.)

Edit: I accidentally wrote that I didn’t want a manual transmission. Totally wrong!

Take the commuter ferry on the East River from Brooklyn to the Bronx. It’s far cheaper than the tourist ferries and the views are wonderful.

“The vicar of Christ trying to conquer his neighbors is normal, as is defeating him in battle if you can. Everyone involved is still a good Christian.” is the weirdest thing about medieval Europe to me.

One time I brought a watermelon to a picnic so that I could show off my fancy butterfly knife and I ended up cutting myself so badly that I had to wrap my hand in duct tape to stop the bleeding while someone else distracted the children. Worth it.

Benches are in neighborhoods where people live and work. There are a few (with the dividers that make it impossible to lie down on them) in front of the building where I live, so I’ll accept that someone isn’t a hypocrite if he has homeless people camping right outside his house.

That’s a roach but keep in mind that there are hundreds of cockroach species in the world and most of them aren’t pests. A roach you see in nature probably couldn’t even survive in your house. When I lived in rural New Hampshire I frequently saw cockroaches in the forest but never indoors.

(If you’re in an urban area, then chances are it’s a pest.)

Three options:

1. You support putting spikes where people might sleep.

2. You have a homeless person camping in your living room.

3. You’re a hypocrite.