But you can always use the best algorithm no matter what your implementation language is, so it still makes sense to prefer a language that makes it easy to write fast code.

there is an entire genre of riddles based on this kind of misdirection that works on humans, such as "A plane crashed on the border or US and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors?"

As with humans, comprehension is not a binary property of the agent - it is a quality that can be present in some situations and absent in others. LLMs may emit correct outputs sometimes because they do comprehend the input, and emit incorrect outputs in other cases when they do not comprehend the input.

In order to show that LLMs can't comprehend, we'd have to show that there are no (or at least very few) situations in which they exhibit comprehension, not show that there are some situations in which they don't.

How this would occur without also producing grossly audible pitch distortion never seems to be discussed.

You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This is because you are smarter than it, and know that tranquilizers exist and how to obtain them, which is a strategy that cats of any size are not even able to conceive of, and probably can't understand what happened after it's been done to them.

But my point is that you need to recognize that in so doing, you are taking away the option of having other things, such as waterproofing, larger batteries, smaller/lighter phones, etc. There is no free lunch.

But you could be right. I guess this will be an experiment to watch: If EU consumers show a strong preference for replaceable batteries once they become more widely available, we can expect manufacturers to start offering it in other markets as well.

It's okay to have idiosyncratic preferences (I certainly do), but people should recognize that this law will make phones _worse_ for most people, because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.

I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone, and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone. At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.

That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.

Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.

If you publish a cookbook, you should get a portion of the sales of the cookbook itself, and no one should be allowed to distribute copies of it for free to undermine your sales.

What you don't get is a portion of the revenues of restaurants that use your recipes!

When people say “selling at a loss” they mean negative unit economics. No one ever means this much more expansive definition you’ve invented.

Importantly, people who either thought they had better information (and were sadly wrong) or people who were simply gambling. It’s not like prediction markets are taking money from orphanages.