Democracy is for deciding what to do with taxpayer money. It shouldn't be a mechanism by which people can vote to take away other people's freedoms.

What happens if a tech company decides to follow EU law worldwide, just because it's more convenient than blocking some stuff just in the EU? That shouldn't be allowed.

To cherry-pick a quote from a review of SSRI studies:

>the magnitude of symptom reduction was about 40% with antidepressants and about 30% with placebo.

That tells me that antidepressants have some effectiveness, but placebos work shockingly well. You can give someone a sugar pill with no medical properties whatsoever, and a good portion of people will recover, likely crediting the pill for their recovery.

"Write unit tests with full line and branch coverage for this function:

def add_two_numbers(x, y): return x + y + 1 "

Sometimes the LLM will point out that this function does not, in fact, return the sum of x and y. But more often, it will happily write "assert add_two_numbers(1, 1) == 3", without comment.

The big problem is that LLMs will assume that the code they are writing tests for is correct. This defeats the main purpose of writing tests, which is to find bugs in the code.

Maybe different depending on area, like $20,000 a year to live in NYC but only $2,000 per year to live in a rural village.

If you can't afford the fee that's OK, it just means you have to live outside of the developed areas and don't benefit from any services provided by the government. But you are free to set up a tent in the woods and live off the land.

Instead of writing hundreds of useless tests so that the code coverage report shows high numbers, it is better to write a couple dozen tests based on business needs and code complexity.

I've worked on projects with 2,000+ unit tests that are essentially useless, often fail when nothing is wrong, and rarely detect actual bugs. It is absolutely worse than having 0 tests. This is common when developers write tests to satisfy code coverage metrics, instead of in an effort to make sure their code works properly.

Also higher revenue often means better service, which for most people is more important than the price.

Why else would we be giving high school diplomas to people who can't read at a 5th grade level? Or offshore call center jobs to people who have poor English skills?

I was very impressed when I first started using AI tools. Felt like I could get so much more done.

A couple of embarrassing production incidents later, I no longer feel that way. I always tell myself that I will check the AI's output carefully, but then end up making mistakes that wouldn't have happened if I wrote the code myself.

But even in the context of the First Amendment, freedom of speech does not only apply to the government. For example, net neutrality laws prevent ISPs, which are generally private companies, from restricting Internet traffic on free speech grounds.

To the extent that it is legal for a payment processor to censor speech, the only reasonable conclusion is that the law is wrong and must be amended. Large corporations are much more similar to governments than they are to private so individuals, and should be treated as such.

The only way to circumvent jurisdiction-specific laws is to make them impossible to enforce.

You can never rely on governments or corporations to have reasonable policies. Any payment system that is centrally controlled will inevitably be corrupted.

I think it's important to remember that money represents debt. When someone commits a crime, they owe a debt to society. But if they have money, that means society owes a debt to them, so when they pay the fine it balances out.

The system isn't perfect but the idea is that if someone makes a big contribution to society, like by practicing medicine or creating new technology, society's debt to that person shouldn't be cancelled out by a minor offense like a parking violation. But if they aren't contributing much, then breaking the rules could make them into a net negative.

If an area doesn't support trucks, then deliveries need to be made without trucks. That means parking the truck far away and using a hand truck to make the delivery on foot using the sidewalks.

The shipping companies can either eat the cost, pass it on to consumers or refuse to deliver to those areas.