experbia

hell yes, Badly Broken Code is such an amazing album

I was top 0.05% for Battle Tapes. it’s good shit. Weight of the World is where it’s at, but it’s all good.

that sounds great. abstractivus, the machine overlord.

And it would never have gotten completely out of control, if people didn’t use ad-block.

“I wouldn’t get so carried away beating you if you didn’t make me so much angrier by trying to run when I smack you.”

We should never have tried to fund the web with ads in the first place.

I agree. But here we are. And until it’s illegal to do so (and, honestly, afterwards too), when a website I’m viewing politely asks me to download toxic ad content filled with psychological manipulation and malware, my computer will politely whisper “no.” I might revisit this policy in the future if the entire advertising industry takes a huge step back to tone down their abusive shit, but in the meanwhile, I have no problem blocking malignant content from my presence. No means no.

A business plan that requires psychological abuse and exploitation of your customers is not an ethical, sustainable, or valid plan and the people who push it are not worthy of my consideration.

do I have a case against either my institution, the professor who threw it out or OpenAI?

This all seems like such recent technology, I can not imagine this question being very answerable except via the long way: a courtroom. I suspect it would take someone trying in order to set precedent.

Weird, users can’t access the site, so ad revenue goes down?? Nobody can blame Elon, that’s literally impossible to predict. Maybe if he bans users from tweeting more than once a day it will get better?

Imagine if the straw started life as a solid cylinder and you had to bore out the inside to turn it into a straw

This would mean a straw has a hole, yes. It would be like a donut indeed - donuts are first whole, then have the hole punched out of them. This meets a dictionary definition of a hole (a perforation). A subtractive process has removed an area, leaving a hole.

But straws aren’t manufactured this way, their solid bits are additively formed around the empty area. I personally don’t think this meets the definition.

Your topological argument is strong though - both a donut and straw share the same topological feature, but when we use these math abstractions, things can be a bit weird. For instance, a hollow torus (imagine a creme-filled donut that has not yet had its shell penetrated to fill it) has two holes. One might not expect this since it looks like it still only obviously has one, but the “inner torus” consisting of negative space (that represents the hollow) is itself a valid topological hole as well.

None. Colloquially, we use “hole” in all kinds of weird ways. As others have pointed out, topologically a straw is no different to a torus (donut) that clearly has one “hole”… but I’d like to focus instead on the linguistic definition of “hole”, not the colloquial or mathematic definitions.

A hole can either mean:

1. a perforation (“a hole in my shirt”, “a bullet hole”, etc) - which is, specifically, “a hole or pattern made by or as if by piercing or boring”
2. a gap (“a hole in your reasoning”, “a hole in my heart”, etc)
3. a hollowed out or burrowed place (“a hole in the road”, “a fox hole”, etc)

i think we’re not talking about 2. It seems to require some larger uniform structure or set of items in which an item is missing. 1 and 3 seem really similar to me: both seem to require some active removal of matter to qualify. All of these definitions point towards a subtractive process, where something of a larger whole (heh) is removed or absent.

Most straws, I’ll venture a guess, are not manufactured solid and then bored out… so I don’t think it applies here. So I don’t think a straw matches a fitting definition of “hole”. A straw is created additively by assembling the “shell” by some means, not subtractively. Donuts, by comparison, had holes punched in them. A subtractive operation. Rubber bands have not had holes punched in them… they’re additive. Not holes.

Similarly (because I see a lot of talk about buttholes and mouths here too), your esophagus and digestive tract (and veins and all kinds of other things) were formed in a similar additive manner, not by forming a mass of meat and boring through the passage, and thus would similarly not qualify as “holes” (in my opinion).