It's really a bit fascinating. I've had Claude one-shot complex functionality... and I've had it be unable to debug its own .mcp.json file effectively.
> I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in?
British spies in WWII wouldn't do that if the entire concept of what a swastika was baffled them. You have to understand at least basically what the thing you're looking at is in order to use it as a symbol.
If you have _no_ concept of people being made out of meat being possible, you don't dress up as people made out of meat. You do that if it's a common concept to you and you're trying to fit in.
> And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.
Only one of them has. The other is entirely surprised by the whole concept, and wouldn't even entertain disguising itself as something it has never considered and in fact it's being convinced during the story it even exists.
It's important for the story to work that one of the beings is entirely unconvinced and has to be told, as they discuss the matter, that this is an actual thing!
> He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.
Blend with what? It (the alien) didn't believe these "meat" sentient beings existed when the story starts! It had to be told during the conversation. It thought there must have been machines somewhere who were the real sentient beings. How can anyone attempt to blend in with something one doesn't believe exists?
I understand the adaptation changes this, because there's no other way of working with human actors and also staying within budget. I understand the decision; I'm just saying it misses the mark and makes the story way less funny.
The way I envision this story is a couple of aliens, much like the scenes with the Simpsons aliens, hovering in a spaceship near Earth, discussing humans, with only one of them having actually seen a human. It doesn't work if both have seen them.
All in my opinion, of course, taste and sense of humor are completely subjective.
You've never encountered, say, a baffling code bug that couldn't possibly be caused by X, spent a day on it, and found out it turns out to be caused by X?
More seriously, what you describe is partly the short story. The short film adaptation doesn't quite work for me, for the reasons I explained in other comments.
> They now take sides on what speech should be allowed.
Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of things to care about, they pick the specific cases that best improve the freedoms they're interested in protecting.
In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.
Sure. But there's 100 shitty people and you have to pick one or two.
So maybe you pick the anti-ICE protester instead of the Nazi to help out. Both got shot with pepper balls, both had their rights infringed upon. Why not pick the one who isn't a complete ass to establish the same precedent with?
I agree 100%, I’d rather the ACLU picked their battles and if there’s a choice, not pick a Nazi. But I’m not a huge fan about how they’ve explicitly said they won’t defend hate speech. It’s a betrayal of their original cause.
2023: "We joined Young Americans for Freedom, the Cato Institute, and other unlikely partners in filing an amicus brief on behalf of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in its challenge to New York’s new law regulating 'hateful conduct' in social media."
A disingenuous take. The ACLU has actively published anti-2A literature in the past, arguing (as all such arguments must) that only the police, government, and military forces should have access to effective weapons.
If they only installed them based on collision/injury data, and that data identified mostly poor areas, you would be ok with it? Because this is what the data finds over and over. The people most harmed by red light running are the poor people who live in these neighborhoods.
I might question the benefits of making the poor area even poorer via fines they likely can't afford. I might wonder if there are confounding factors like poorly maintained roads and vehicles at play. I might wonder if the yellow lights have the same timing as in the suburbs.
Are the small fines for red light violations costlier, or the impact on health and life from the collisions red light running inevitably causes? I think letting poor areas be high traffic injury areas through deliberate neglect is even costlier to the poor who live there than red light fines.
I might question why you are so opposed to interventions that save the lives of people in poorer neighborhoods (disproportionately not owners of cars).
In my experience it's the rich areas chock full o' Karens that get the latest and greatest in jackbootery because they have all the money for the new hotness, no real problems to divert their attention and almost nobody who's ever been on the business end of government enforcement so they don't see any real problem with dispensing it at the drop of a hat.
There’s no apparent mechanism to do so. Support was clueless. The privacy email address responded weeks later with “not out department”.
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