Massad Ayoob, one of the most prolific firearm instructors, said that if you have to defend yourself using a gun, you should hope your attacker survives. Because if your attacker dies, a prosecutor can invent a plausible-sounding story as to how your attacker wasn't posing any real threat, and your "self defense" was actually murder. But if the attacker survives, he can be subpoenaed to testify. And most criminals are bad at testifying.

Kyle Rittenhouse may have been saved by Gaige Grosskreutz's disastrous testimony.

Idk I'm a doomer and I haven't been able to handle it well at all. If I were told "You have cancer, you're expected to live 5-10 more years", I'd at least have a few comforts

• I'd know that I would be missed, by my family at least, for a few years.
• I'd know that, to some extent, my "work would live on" in the form of good deeds I've done, people I've impacted through effective altruism.
• I'd have the comfort of knowing that even I'd been dead for centuries I could still "live on" in the sense that other humans (and indeed, many nonhuman) would share brain design with me, and have drives for food, companionship, empathy, curiosity ect. A super AI by contrast, is just so alien and cold that I can't consider it my brainspace cousin.
• If I were to share my cancer diagnosis with normies, I would get sympathy. But there are very few "safe spaces" where I can share my fear of UFAI risk without getting looked at funny.

The closest community I've found are the environmentalist doomers, and although I don't actually think the environment is close to collapse, I do find it somewhat cathartic to read other people's accounts of being sad that world is going to die.

Don't worry, as soon as AGI goes live we'll all have a peaceful, eternal rest.

Prompt: "Consider a new variant of chess, in which each pawn can move up to six squares forward on its first move, instead of being limited to one or two squares. All other rules remain intact. Explain how game balance and strategy is changed with this new variant of chess."

Successful responses might include:

• The number of moves available in the early game increases, improving white's edge over black.
• Drawing your knight out from 1st to 3rd rank becomes more dangerous, as black can immediately threaten the knight by moving a pawn forward three spaces. The knight declines in importance.
• An untouched pawn with an empty file ahead of it can immediately advance to the end of the board an promote itself to queen. Players will be wary to leave their home rank undefended.
• It's easier to create a diagonal line of pawns. The early game becomes more aggressive.

Now as far as I can tell, no one has ever played "pawn goes unlimited spaces" chess. It's possible that if a metagame developed around PGUS chess, these predictions would prove wrong. But I'd still rate these responses as successful, since they share something not immediately obvious about PGUS chess and provide a plausible justification for why they might be true. Some responses that would not succeed would be

• The pawns become more powerful. (Too simple, close to a tautology.)
• New strategies will need to be developed. (Too vague.)
• Bishops become more valuable. (Needs a justification for why we should expect this.)

I'd put 70% odds that GPT4 is unable to give successful answers to this prompt, and 90% odds that no AI in the next two years will be able beat a human at PGUS chess without having trained on PGUS chess beforehand. (Training on regular chess is acceptable).

I'm a nurse in an at risk area. Should I shave my long hair like the Chinese nurses were doing?

Is it worth it to learn a second language for the cognitive benefits? I've seen a few puff pieces about how a second language can help your brain, but how solid is the research?

I want to have more focus and find it easier to do boring things.

I think I have ADHD. What should I do now?

Could you breed crickets at home?

You said you use this for ROT13ing things. How does that work? Suppose I wanted to make a Facebook post that gave my friends the option of knowing Obama is a werewolf, but also gave them the option for them not to know this if they'd rather be surprised later.