Joined the Mayqueeze.

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  • 120 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As a general vibe in life, I try not to punch down. Antivax kids through no fault of their own are at a disadvantage in life (and make life for immunocompromised folks harder). Wondering if they’d be okay with a cootie shot as a question seems snarky and punching down to me.

    You could not answer this question categorically anyway. It would depend on the age, how much autonomy they already have over their body, and to how much RFK junioring they’ve been subjected. So the answer is care and individual attention for each kid, not a generalization.

    I don’t know where you get the idea I suggested we hunt them down from. But I think you’ve correctly picked up on my critical opinion on this question.




  • How does confidence factor into this? I’ve been confident in stuff before and it turned out that confidence was misplaced. Pride cometh before the fall shit. Confidence alone risks cockiness. Cockiness may lead to somebody testing your Golden Shield. Didn’t work. You now don’t have a country any more.

    If the Golden Shield really worked it’s a question of capacity. If you had enough juice in it to repel all nuclear weapons you could throw at this country in a worst-case scenario, you’d have a powerful defense against the most powerful weapon on Earth that’s ready to deploy this minute. It may not save you from conventional attacks. It may not shield you from chemical or biological weapons so gruesome they aren’t currently shelf-ready. But development of those would suddenly become a viable prospect. I fear it just turns the spiral of development of more destructive weaponry one more rotation. Extrapolating from the last 6000 years of history, we’ve gone from sticks and stones to vaporizing people into thin mist by harnessing the power of the atom. We’re already in the narrow bit of the spiral. Paradoxically, developing a Golden Shield against nuclear attacks may lead to wiping our species out for good.






  • This sounds to me (fixed typo) like the same percentage of people are susceptible to cult crap. It’s just the availability of gurus is broader because you can have your own personal bs whisperer in your pocket. Kind of like how social media helped isolated village idiots to network and exchange views on DC pizza places. We wouldn’t see them as a problem if the ability to scale hadn’t become suddenly available.

    Ironically, I think ChatGPT can help reverse some some of these troubled souls’ convictions. It just needs to gently and repeatedly tell them they’re not Jesus or a disciple of the builders of the universe.

    My LLM always says I’m beautiful and always right. So no downvotes on this comment.




  • It’s time to get concerned about Forbes. As a journalistic standard I would’ve expected to read about all the jobs some of these companies created during pandy times. There’s been a trend towards layoffs long before OpenAI burst onto the scene. Also everybody is going to espouse the same streamlining bullshit in their PR even if layoffs are business-driven and not so much AI’s fault. A best of press releases is not good enough journalism.

    It’s also not critical by reporting on some of the failures of the pivots to AI that have made the rounds.

    New technology displaces workers in some areas and eventually creates demand in others. For time immemorial. All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. That’s why I regret having driven traffic to the Forbes website to be able to read this.



  • I think this USSR quote is a good answer:

    We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.

    (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

    In any authoritarian system where indoctrination starts young you’ll probably have a fifth of the population that’s high on the coolaid or never questioned anything due to ideology or intelligence (or both). The rest know they’re lying, etc. And keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to go to Siberia or El Salvador.