I've donated £5000 again.

Thanks! It mostly did better at object recognition than me. I imagine I'd have improved with the full res unscuffed images, but I still don't think I'd have recognized the fridge so quickly (though admittedly it wasn't helpful). The only place I thought I'd have done better was when it got confused by the door in the mirror.

I'm interested.

Hm, I think I'd bet against this:

• The instruction referred to "the doorway on your left", not "on the left"; "on your left" is even worse in context.
• It doesn't give a coherent world model that the rest of its instructions follow. e.g. if it thinks I didn't take a photo from that door when it asked me to, then its instruction "walk straight ahead past where that bedroom doorway was on the left" gets me past the kitchen again.

Overall agreed, but I note that the video (which I enjoyed) is a significantly different challenge - when the dad starts sliding the bread around the table with his knife, he doesn't give the kid a chance to say "ah, I see the problem! You need to dip the knife in the peanut butter..."

The EU executive, on the other hand, where most of the real power lies, is apolitical, and the individual commissioners are appointed by member states, not by political parties.

What does apolitical mean in this context?

Like if Fred's business costs $1m to start and creates $100k/year surplus value, it gets paid off in ten years

Oh, not quite. "Costs $1m to start" sounds like it's talking about the cost to Fred. Some of that will be e.g. wages paid to construction workers. For this accounting to work, we need to talk about the costs to society versus the value to society. (The costs to society being similar to those from Tom's shop - space, time and materials.)

The only one losing out is Fred.

The article mentions fixed costs of building Tom's business. Like if Fred's business costs $1m to start and creates $100k/year surplus value, it gets paid off in ten years, which seems like a good return on investment. If Tom's building costs $1m to make and only creates an extra $10k/year surplus value (growing the market a little but mostly taking Fred's business), it gets paid off in 100 years, which seems like a bad return on investment.

I guess some things involved in the fixed costs are

• Tom's space isn't used for some other purpose
• Time and materials spent building Tom's shop are lost

How much should we expect the market to be like "well, if Tom's business is a net negative socially, then I'll be able to find some other use for that location and time and materials, which will leave society-at-large better off"? I don't know.

I donated £5000 through the Anglo-American charity last year and found it fairly painless. Details in this prior comment.

This has been proven to me on multiple occasions when I have done relatively "transgressive" things in public, things like jumping fences, and been surprised that no strangers noticed.

I guess it can be hard to distinguish between "no strangers noticed", "someone noticed but didn't care", and "someone noticed, cared, but didn't react". I once saw someone do a wall backflip in public, and thought it was cool, but he presumably didn't notice me notice him.

I feel like jumping a fence is pretty likely to be noticed - though not shocking if it isn't, depending how many people are around. But even if someone does notice, and dislikes that you're doing it, what are they gonna do?

So distinguishing between them also doesn't usually matter.