Thus, murder is a species of homicide. The specific differences of murder relative to homicide is that it is voluntary, premeditated, and malicious.

The law merely recognizes this distinction. It doesn't construct some convention around homicide. Indeed, law in general is a particular determination of general moral principles within a particular jurisdiction.

So, a lion doesn't commit murder, because a lion's actions are involuntary and neither malicious nor premeditated. Also, while a lion can kill a person or non-person, it is not capable of homicide, because its meaning specifically pertains to the killing of one person by another.

The world was never a wise and virtuous man's paradise, but it has been quickly sliding into ever increasing and monstrous irrationality. Give Plato's "Republic" a read and you might find it concerning how closely we exemplify the last stages of political and social decline.

Hostile defaults, not just in tech, is how Western liberal soft power often works. They can always claim "hey, you have the choice", but they know very well most people won't even know they have the choice, or is it so cumbersome or costly to move away from the hostile defaults - and stay that way - that in practice, the effect is the same as if you lived in a totalitarian regime. The difference is that you can keep believing in the deception of "freedom" in a Western liberal society; in a totalitarian regime, you are much more likely to know you've got a jackboot on your throat, because there is one.

What is needed isn't radical liberal atomistic individualism which rationalizes the antisocial war of all against all that rewards raw might. You won't find freedom there. You need a culture of respect of and sense of duty toward the authentic common good, backed by moral authority, where authority is power + justice.

(Entailed also by personhood is social nature. So, murdering another person is bad, because it is opposed to the very nature and thus good of the murderer. It's why killing in self-defense and the death penalty for murder are themselves mere killing, but not murder. Justice is served against the injustice of the gravely antisocial.)

From a game theoretic perspective w.r.t. just resources, murder does not generally pay especially given the social nature of a species given how antithetical it is to the social, but even if it does in some constrained sense, there is a greater intangible loss for those with personhood. Speak to almost anyone who has murdered someone. They will tell you that it changes them drastically, and not in a good way.

I wouldn't overestimate the quality of this forum. It certainly has its uses, but I wouldn't overstate the quality of discourse here. It's not that great.

(Of course, strictly speaking, LLMs have neither temperament, "personality", nor intellect, but we understand these terms are used in an analogical or figurative fashion.)

Josef Pieper wrote "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" [0], a book on this subject that people should read. John Paul II also wrote an encyclical, "Laborem Exercens" [1], that discusses, among other things, the purpose and nature of work and responds to both communist and capitalist views on the subject.

[0] https://ballyheaparish.com/resources/Leisure-The-Basis-of-Cu...

[1] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

One of the marks of an educated person is the ability to dispassionately think from first principles. It is not a sufficient criterion, but it is a necessary one. In this case, the basic questions we must ask are: what is education, and what is education for?

An instrumentalist view of education, the one that has claimed the soul of the modern university and primary education , tells us that education is about preparing for a career - preparing to be an economic actor - and about the effect you can have. In short, it is about practical power and economic utility.

Now, the power to be able to do good things, to be practically able, is a good thing as such, and indeed one does acquire facility during one’s education. (And I would argue schooling today isn’t great at practicality either.) But the practical, unlike the theoretical, is always about something else. It is never for its own sake. What this means is that there must be a terminus. You cannot have an infinite regress of practical ends, because the justification for any practical end is not found in itself. And if the primary proximate end of education is the career, then what distinguishes education from training? Nothing. What’s more, if you then ask what the purpose of a career is, you find it is about consumption. So education today is about enabling people to be consumers. You wish to be effective so you can be payed more so you can buy more crap. Pure nihilism.

True education is best captured by the classical liberal arts, which is to say the free arts. Human beings are intellectual and moral creatures. The purpose of education is to free a person to be more human, to free them to be able to reason effectively and competently for the sake of wisdom and for the sake of living wisely. In other words, it is about becoming what you ought to become as a human being in the most definitive sense.

What good does AI do you if you haven’t become a better version of yourself in the process? So AI writes a paper for you. So what? The purpose of the paper is not the paper, but the knowledge, understanding, and insight that results from writing it.

This is largely an American phenomenon. If you visit some other countries, students don't walk around all day saddled with what look like Medieval tomes in backpacks that come comically close to dwarfing the student. There is no reason for them to be so thick, so heavy, so expensive, hardcover, or even loaned. And there is no reason to lug them around all day either.

Frankly, teachers should be relying more on delivering material in class without a textbook.

Consider that it's just an ice cream maker. Few people need an ice cream maker. Few people need or even benefit from all the crap they buy in consumerist societies and pile into their houses.

You say you may want to make ice cream one day. So what? That's hardly a good basis for keeping something, especially in light of evidence to the contrary. So what if you one day want to make ice cream? So you don't make ice cream. So what Do you have to satisfy every impulse? The psycho-spiritual burden, distraction, and waste this thinking produces far outweighs some one-off use.

Maybe a friend has an ice cream maker, perhaps one he uses all the time. Ask to borrow it for those one-off cases. Or make it a social event.

Now, intrinsically, the job of a manager is to serve the company by serving those they manage. They do this by enabling workers to do the work that needs to be done. A middle manager is supposed to represent his team to upper management. However, too often, middle management is more interested in schmoozing with upper management rather than standing by their team. And if he is too difficult, upper management can just replace him with a more compliant manager who will function as a faithful messenger and nothing more.

So, there's no structural way to ensure these things work. Culture and personal virtue are necessary.

I don't know why people assume managers are interested in increasing salaries and distributing promotions. Every incentive and preference works against those things. If you want change, you have to ask for it.

In my experience, while I have found Clojure enjoyable and practical, it is still a "dynamic" language. A good deal of run-of-the-mill programming can manage quite well with such a language, but as projects become larger, deeper, and more complex, the lack of static types really does become a cost and an impediment. To understand any function and what it expects, you often need to read a few layers in to find what exactly something consumes and returns. Types really are a boon in such code bases. Some may point to various schema libraries in Clojure. While these can be helpful, they are often comparably inscrutable in practice (both in terms of specification and the resulting errors) and really do not compare to bona fide types, especially with LSP integration. And when you model something using types, the code sort of just falls out of the type definition.