Friends, if you're in a blizzard or severe winter storm, do not drive if your car cannot handle it.
CALLICLES: Well, Socrates, you know the saying, ‘When going to war or a battle, it may be too late to join in!’
SOCRATES: Oh! Does this mean that a banquet has ended and we are late?
Excerpt from the conversation in the high IQ society earlier today:
WAYLAND: I imagine, Onnia, that you, like me, have experience of a whole range of speeches, and that you have observed something about them – that the speakers are not easily capable of mutually defining the issues they are trying to discuss, and of learning and teaching themselves, and concluding their meeting upon that basis. Instead, when they dispute over something, and one says that the other is not speaking correctly or clearly, they become angry and they believe that the other is speaking from resentment towards them, from a thirst for victory, rather than pursuing the issue in front of them for discussion. And some of them end up behaving most disgracefully, engaging in slander, and saying and hearing such things as make even their audience angry on their own account, because they deemed such fellows worth listening to.
Well, why am I saying this? It is because I think that what you are now saying is neither entirely consistent nor consonant with what you first said about rhetoric. Yet I am afraid to refute you in case you assume that I am out for victory and my words are aimed at you rather than the issue and its elucidation. Now, if you are the sort of person that I am, I would gladly continue to question you, but otherwise I shall have done with it.
What sort of person am I? I am one of those who would gladly be refuted if I say anything untrue, and would gladly engage in refutation if someone else were to say something untrue, and yet I am no less averse to being refuted than to engaging in refutation. Indeed, I think that being refuted is a greater good insofar as it is a greater good to be released oneself from the greatest evil, rather than releasing someone else. For I believe that nothing is so evil for a person as a false opinion on the issues with which our present discussion is concerned. So, if you claim to be someone of this sort, let us have a discussion, but if you think we should have done with it, let us bid the issue farewell now, and bring our discussion to an end.
ONNIA: No, Wayland, I say that I myself am the sort of person you have described. However, we should probably take our audience into consideration too. Yes, I should tell you that a while ago, before you arrived, I gave numerous exhibitions to these people, and we are now likely to prolong this unduly if we engage in discussion. So, we should also consider their circumstances in case we are detaining some of them who wish to do something else.
ARTHUR: Wayland and Onnia, listen for yourselves to the commotion from these men, who wish to hear anything you have to say. As for myself, I pray that I never become so busy that I would set aside such discussions as these, conducted in this manner, because it became more important to do something else.
HF: Yes, by God's grace, Arthur, I myself have been present at many discussions over the years, but I don’t know if I have ever before been so delighted as I am now. Accordingly, if you wish to converse for the whole day, you will be doing me a favour anyway.
WAYLAND: And, indeed, HF, there is no impediment on my part as long as Onnia is willing.
ONNIA: Well, Wayland, after all that it would be a disgrace for me to prove unwilling, since I was the one who announced that anyone could ask whatever they wanted. So, if this is how these people see it, proceed with the discussion and ask any question you want.
Let's call autocomplete "intelligence" and give it the ability to completely delete parts of our infrastructure. What could go wrong?
Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.
All profits from this channel are donated to the Foundation for Platonic Studies.
A thoughtful debate from the high IQ society this afternoon:
MR. HITLER: So tell me, do you have a dog?
ARTHUR: Yes, a very nasty one.
MR. HITLER: Now, does he have puppies?
ARTHUR: Yes, and they are very like himself.
MR. HITLER: So the dog is their father?
ARTHUR: Yes, I saw him covering the bitch myself.
MR. HITLER: Well now, isn’t the dog yours?
ARTHUR: Certainly.
MR. HITLER: In that case, he is a father and he is yours, and so he turns out to be your father, and you turn out to be the brother of puppies.
From Pictures Rocks National Lakeshore:
40+ inches of snow later...
The Munising area received a historic winter storm this weekend, bringing high winds and drifting snow.
Our maintenance crews worked hard to dig out Sand Point Road, the Munising Falls Visitor Center, and Pictured Rocks Headquarters!