People are crazy when they promote closed-source AI (okay, okay, generative model) projects like ChatGPT, Bard etc.
This is literally one of the most important technologies of the future, and after all the times technology companies screwed them (us) up big time and monopolized the Internet, they go into the same trap again and again.
First they surrendered the free Internet, now they surrender the new frontiers.
Wake up, people. Go HuggingFace, advocate for free AI, and ideally - for a GPL one. We cannot afford for this part of our future to be taken away from us.
Disruptive protest, no matter how annoying, is valid and should be protected under law. When the government moves to ban protest and dissent, they've crossed the line into authoritarianism.
The right to protest is a fundamental of democracy, and we should not accept any erosion of the fundamentals of democracy.
Pitbulls are not more genetically predisposed towards biting or mauling than other breeds and the supposed "statistical data" on the subject is based around a confluence of inaccurate metrics caused by 1) people not being very good at accurately identifying dog breeds, 2) existing groups that hate pitbulls pushing bad statistics for political purposes, and 3) a self-fulfilling prophecy of pitbulls having a bad reputation and actively being sought out by people who want vicious dogs and who will treat their dogs in such a way as to encourage that behavior. And I say all of this as someone who does not own a pitbull and probably never will.
That pedos shouldn't be subject to extra-legal punishments. Think being lynched and shit. I also don't think they should be getting their own special cases in the law beyond those with a clear purpose of preventing reoffending.
Don't get me wrong, I think they are pure scum.
But things we allow on the basis of the accused being a pedo or terrorist have a habit of spilling over and affecting the general population. A lot of bad laws have made it onto books by blaming these two groups, for example.
Lilo and Stitch is the best Disney movie.
Many, many spoilers below. But, seriously, this movie is 21 years old. Get over yourselves.
Check it: a young girl adopts an illegal alien (killing machine from deep space) and protects him from the U.S. (and galactic) government (Military-Industrial complexes), while keeping her incredibly depressed sister (slices both ways) from giving up completely as they keep their Indigenous Hawaiian family together in their co-opted homeland. One sister works a series of dead-end tourism jobs; the other has anger issues. The hate each other and love each other fiercely, though they are about 12 years apart in age.
Oh, yeah, and their parents are dead.
Meanwhile, the alien is a political refugee and freedom fighter fleeing from his own people who want him dead for —get this— existing. A lab-grown, indestructible terrorist, he seeks asylum on an island — but he can't swim.
He does learn to surf.
The only downside to this film is that Disney produced it. And Elvis.
"Ohana means family. Nobody gets left behind or forgotten."
What we're currently calling AI isn't AI but just a language processing system that takes its best guess at a response from it's database of information they pilfered from the internet like a more sophisticated Google.
It can't really think for itself and it's answers can be completely wrong. There's nothing intelligent about it.
TikTok and YouTube shorts are brain-rotting garbage, and if you use them regularly you need to stop now. Yes, even if you claim you only watch educational stuff.
Also giving a child under the age of 8 or 9 a personal internet-connected device should be seen on a similar level as neglect if not full-on abuse.
Copyright should have stayed the original initial 14 years with possible renewal to 28 years. But like in France back then, also include the original authors (last one alive, if several) lifespan. Hence, a copyright would last either the authors lifespans or 28 years, whichever is longer.
Moreover, the patent system is being abused and does not serve the original goal of "any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement there on not before known or used." It granted the applicant the "sole and exclusive right and liberty of making, constructing, using and vending to others to be used" of his invention.. It needs major changes, including the requirement to have the "invention" be under examination by reputable third-party laboratories (such as Intertek, SGI, Underwriters Laboratories, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Technischer Überwachungsverein, SGS - Société Générale de Surveillance, etc…) before being granted a patent. Nowadays, patents are given almost willy-nilly to anyone no matter how vague or obvious the supposed invention.
Nowadays, patents are being misused in Patent Ambush mechanisms and scenarios, meanwhile Patent Trolls and Hoarders whole existence is are to impede/obstruct legally and impose exorbitant levies/fees onto organization and companies actually innovating and developing useful art/process/devices. Even more incredible, there are Submarine Patents being hidden away to suddenly take hostage existing products and process of various companies by imposing extortionate royalties.
Those math questions that rely on purposeful ambiguity in order to drive engagement are annoying as fuck. It's like "congratulations, you just proved that in math (and questions in general) if you're not clear with what you're asking, people will get different answers". What fantastic value! What a novel hypothesis! Now fucking knock it off. I'm tired of literally everyone screaming about how their way is right when it doesn't fucking matter, the question was asked in a bullshit way in order to piss everyone off.
Bonus, PEMDAS, BEMDAS, PE-MD-AS. It's a goddamn terrible mnemonic that twists itself in knots to make the acronym work, rather than to make the order of operations clear. Screaming it doesn't make your shit any clearer anyways.
Zelda BotW and TotK are not fun. The stamina system is pointless and the weapon durability is frustrating. On top of that, the world's are just sooo empty. There's really nothing in them. Oh look, an interesting ruin... it's another repetitive shrine. Oh, that geological formation is really unique aaannnddd it's another fucking korok seed. That's all you ever got for exploring. Shrines and korok seeds.
I did like slapping random shit onto my weapons in tears of the kingdom though. All in all to me the games are fine but not really Zelda games.
We accept that it's unhealthy to be a shut-in and never leave your house, never interact with others if you can help it, but equally unhealthy is this sort of toxic extroversion where the thought of being alone with yourself for even a few hours is torture to you. If this is you, clearly you have some shit you need to work out that you're avoiding. Take a week off from the internet and going out. Don't talk to anyone. Maybe go camping alone for a couple days. You will survive, and be much more comfortable with yourself for it.
Air fryers are only popular because Americans have been using microwaves to cook for decades, which are possibly the worst cooking devices ever created.
If they had decent fan ovens during that time, they wouldn't be anywhere near as popular
Conversely, air fryers are seen to be popular in the UK, because nobody will admit they fell for the advertising, and now only use them for chips
Force damage in D&D 5E is too poorly-defined to be a good part of the game and exists solely for when the designers don't want any characters or creatures to have access to resistance against the thing in question. Either we need an actual description of what happens to a thing that gets hit by it or it should be cut; the vast majority of the things that deal it could perfectly easily be magical bludgeoning / piercing / slashing. Spiritual weapon and Bigby's hand are particularly egregious
Modern "wellness" has gone too far to where people experiencing any hardship or adversity of any kind is "trauma" .
Negative reinforcement is a massively powerful motivator, but it doesn't feel good while it's happening.
Ideally there's also positive reinforcement in your life to make a nice balanced stew, but we need to be able to survive off negative, especially in professional pursuits.
Every emotion you experience isn't a condition, even if you feel it often.
If you feel it CONSTANTLY, then yeah something is wrong.
We learn and teach inferior personal computing practice, and most people don't realize how much they are missing.
The vast majority of people outside of enthusiast circles have absolutely no idea what a personal computer is, how it works, what is an operating system, what it does, and how it is supposed to be used. Instead of teaching about shells, sessions, environments, file systems, protocols, standards and Unix philosophy (things that actually make our digital world spin) we teach narrow systems of proprietary walled gardens.
This makes powerful personal computing seem mysterious and intimidating to regular people, so they keep opting out of open infrastructures, preferring everything to come pre-made and pre-configured for them by an exploitative corporation. This lack of education is precisely what makes us so vulnerable to tech hype cycles, software and hardware obsolescence, or just plain shitty products that would have no right to exist in a better world.
This blindness and apathy makes our computing more inaccessible and less sustainable, and it makes us crave things that don't actually deserve our collective attention.
And the most frustrating thing is: proper personal computing is actually not that hard, and it has never been more easy to get into, but no one cares, because getting milked for data is just too convenient for most adults.
Edit 8 days later: Wow, a lot of people really like using their free speech rights to advocate against free speech...Weird.
If you don't support the free speech rights of the people you hate the most, then you don't support free speech at all.
All censorship is bad. One day it's naughty racial words and then the next day religious zealots can lock people up for saying "god" in the wrong context.
Leadership has the capacity and capability to change things for the better and continue to fail to do so because true leadership means making decisions that at times may hurt and may not be universally liked.
This is as true in politics as it is in business.
In short our leaders are not leading out of the fear of repercussions of leading.
Extreme leftists, A.K.A. "tankies" (i.e., apologists for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the CCP, the DPRK, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Xi Jingping, etc.), are threats to a free, egalitarian, and open society, are just as violently authoritarian as their religious, corporatist, and fascist counterparts, and should be treated with the contempt, distrust, and ridicule they deserve.
They claim to speak and fight for the proletariat, promising a new utopia, never before seen, once their revolution executes the last "class-traitor". In practice, once they're finished with "seizing the means of production", they'll never relinquish control and become the new ruling class.
They'll assume the mantle of an enlightened elite post-revolutionary administration to guide the proletariat to their promised utopia of "each according to their need, each according to their ability". In practice, they'll "need the most, because they're obviously the most able" in reorganizing the economic and political structure of society. The utopia of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" will never exist, only the dictatorship of the "revolutionary party". Repression and execution await those who question their claims and decisions. The former champions of labor will become champions of death.
They're akin to the pigs in Animal Farm, the loudest voices in the revolution, but a bit "more equal" than everyone else after the farmer is done away with. Fortunately, the pigs, like the farmer, got their comeuppance in the end of the story.
Your liberty and self-determination are beset by many threats: the religious, the nihilists, the corporatists, the fascists, and the supposed collectivists. They all claim to be the true authoritative "voice of the people".
Beware of their cults. Your life is worth more than their "cause" and/or "solution". Understand what they really are; power over everything, forever, is what they seek. They want you either as a willing pawn or dead, just like all the other presumably benevolent dictators throughout history. Arm yourself with knowledge and clarity in perception. Train your mind and body. Fight and deny the peddlers of arbitrary authoritarianism as if your life depends on it - because it does.
E: Lots of butt-hurt invertebrate Molotov-sippy-cup-throwing wannabe-dictator tankie shit-heels out there, all tryna start the revolution tomorrow. Good luck, comrades.🖕🏽
All DST and time zones should be removed and we should only have one global time. People in different locations would just get up at different times on the clock. Communication about times would get so much easier, communication about schedules would get so much easier. "The same time every week" would have an actual meaning all year around regardless of any notions about getting up later relative to local sunrise in the darker time of the year.
Large corporations are, indeed, soulless and thankless. No amount of their pandering to the masses with charity campaigns and outreach programs ever end without them making money.
Knowing this, I prefer to take everything at face value. If I start concerning myself with the ulterior motives of these people that don't believe in class equality, I will very quickly want to put a lightbulb in my mouth.
For those familiar, Destiny 2 (a video game by Bungie, the originators of the Halo franchise) has come under scrutiny lately due to mass layoffs, and the following PR nightmare it has turned into. With every day that passes, we learn more thanks to the diligent work of journalists doing their job.
I appreciate knowing to help me make informed decisions about who I fiscally support, but I will spend my money on entertainment based on the value it gives me. Not the morals I'm told I should have by people bickering on the internet, and content creators that use these situations as clickbait.
And that all goes for any corp, I'm just largely invested in this one example. I am aware that Nestle is garbage ass company, but due to me not existing in their world view, I will buy a KitKat when I want one, thanks.
Lore is not story. Sekiro is the best From Soft game. Sekiro's second half doesn't fall apart or disappoint. The puzzle boss is acceptable. The combat actually feels like Seven Samurai and Star Wars: a flurry of blocks and parrys, culminating in a coup de grace.
Chipping hit points with a light sabre or a battle axe is dumb as shit and it's been normal so long we don't notice.
Religion and conservativism.
Humanity cannot and will not change its practices fast enough to avoid running out of resources we keep ourselves dependent on because it's "profitable." We are a doomed species and won't be around for very much longer. We are likely living in the flash of bright before the long dark. I don't think the world my grandchildren live in will be remotely like the one we have now.
I'm perfectly fine hedging my bets and living life normally, but I think our longevity is an uncomfortable truth most people don't want to face.
Gender is the cultural outcome of primary and secondary sexual characteristics and in no meaningfully physical way exist. In other words, we traditionally have a "boy" culture and a "girl" culture, not a gender. We are artificially indoctrinated and assimilated into a given culture based on primary or secondary sexual characteristics.
Likewise, it follows that all other gender identities are similarly a cultural phenomenon and not the outcome of some essential characteristic of the individual.
Gender cultures are, at least historically speaking, bad. They've generally been used to persecute people who aren't in the dominant (boy) gender, and the conditions dictating mobility between genders is so intensly arbitrary that it warrants abolishing the whole stupid idea. Gender dysphoria is a symptom, generally, of the tyranny of these conditions.
(PS, I totally am open to being wrong about this.)
The main story of Baldur's Gate 3 is pretty bland and mediocre.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a phenomenal game! The companion arcs, acting and overall presentation are still next level, some sidestories are very good, and it’s great how faithfully they adapted the D&D rules. But the main story ...
Spoiler
... is pretty bare bones and has no real twists and turns along the way.
- You start with a mindflayer tadpole in your head, so who do you think will be the final boss? Exactly, an elder brain.
- On the way you kill 3 major henchmen, who just want power, destruction, or are confused beyond saving. None of them were particularly interesting or multi-layered (maybe Ketheric a bit). None of them could be saved, convinced to switch sides, or at least affected somehow. Aligning with them is only temporary, makes barely any difference, and absolutely no difference for the end afaik.
- Most big quests end in act 3 in the same manner: Go to a place in BG and dispose of the boss character behind it all.
- The revelations with the Emperor/Balduran were nice, but he was a very mysterious character for the entirety oft he game, and his decision to fight you if you side with Orpheus is just absolutely ridiculous!
All forms of communication that promotes any level of division between the general population, and the idea of payback or revenge is very wrong and toxic and are some of the main reasons for the shit we all go through these days, yet most people either don't think it's a big deal or think it's necessary. We're gonna end up killing ourselves and we're all gonna lose, but at least you got to punch the guy that punched you first, right? Or kill all the ancestors of the guy that punched your great great great granddad, then their ancestors killing yours for killing their ancestors, right? You deserve to kill them all, they had it coming, so did your ancestors, right?
Until the childish ideas of revenge and division is gone from our adult society, i don't see us surviving as a civilization before we kill each other first.
I'm tired of hearing people justify either. It's all nonsense, illogical, and childish.
Both Mario Odyssey and SMB Wonder are only innovative in a vacuum where Mario is the only platformer franchise. Which for a lot of people I imagine is the extent of their knowledge about platformers.
The things people call "innovative" about Mario Odyssey are just half Kirby and half Banjo-Kazooie. Yeah Odyssey's biggest maps are way bigger than Banjo-Kazooie, but SMO runs on hardware that can emulate the N64, and it still has quite a few maps on the smaller side
SMB Wonder... I don't actually know what people call "innovative" about SMB Wonder, but I've seen people call it "innovative." It's the best 2D Mario made in the 21st century and it has a pretty cool gimmick. What's innovative about this?
im da king of da highway
People who are unable to smoothly merge or use slip roads without slowing down 500m before even starting to turn off should have their licenses revoked unless they take a driving course to correct their behaviour.
People who zigzag should just be put in a gulag however. Scum of the earth.
US Senators and congressmen are underpaid. Their salaries should be doubled. The president should make at least a $1 million a year, directly paid by taxpayers.
Reason: If I, the taxpayer, pay them, then they have to work for me. The payment makes that service relationship explicit. I pay you, you work for me. And, yes, the current pay is too little, $174,000 - barely comparable to tech workers.
Only taking $1 is an invitation for corruption. (Not claiming it happened, but it is an invitation.)
Basically any opinion I have about capitalism. 🤷
Time doesn't slow down when you approach the speed of light and the theory we're using to describe much of the universe is based on a bad premise, that the speed of light is constant.
I don't care that I'm not as smart as einstein or that a lot of complex theories i also don't fully understand are validated by special and general relativity. I, an everyman, know better.
I'm right
Josh Groban has an annoying singing voice.
That capitalism is not the cause of most societal grief. Pathological self preservation is a fundamental human problem. It’s the reason we’re okay with seeing hordes of homeless people, or with killing people to resolve geopolitical issues. Greed can optimize any system to work for itself, people who are or will be adept at such optimization would thrive under any kind of socioeconomic or cultural system, including extremely leftist systems. Just spit ballin’ tho, haven’t thought about it much tbh.
Worker Cooperatives are better than traditional corporations or state owned firms.
I don't want to get rid of daylight savings, because it's still a better option than keeping either summer or winter time.
Edit: another one: not having kids does not in any way contribute to solving environmental problems, we need MORE young, educated minds who have a chance to figure it out (as terrible as it sounds to push problems on the new generation), and we should ensure that in the event that we do manage to stabilize the situation, we won't instead have fucked up demographics to deal with.
I'm not big into books - J.C. Denton
Coffee tastes bad, coke zero is great first thing in the morning, and egg nog is better without any alcohol in it.
Andrew Tate is a mysogonist fuck-up profiting from dumbasses and his "very legal" whore buisness.
Cars > public transportation. I forget things & often have to turn back, and I like the freedom to change my mind at any point, stop where I want, and go wherever I want. I also hate being forced into shared public spaces. I also hate the idea of trusting the government to make any of it in any way near efficient. Fuck public transportation.
Starfield is fun.
Your are assailed by many threats: the religious, the nihilists, the corporatists, the fascists, and the alleged "collectivists". Extreme authoritarian "leftists", A.K.A. “tankies” (i.e., apologists for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the CCP, the DPRK, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Xi Jingping, etc.), are threats to a free, egalitarian, and open society, are just as violently authoritarian as their religious, corporatist, and fascist competitors, and should be treated with the contempt, distrust, and ridicule they deserve.
They claim to speak and fight for the proletariat, promising a new utopia, never before seen, once their revolution executes the last “class-traitor”. In practice, once they’re finished with “seizing the means of production”, they’ll never relinquish control and become the new ruling class.
They’ll assume the mantle of an enlightened elite post-revolutionary administration to guide the proletariat to their promised utopia of “each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. In practice, "the party leadership needs the most, because they’re obviously the most able” in reorganizing the economic and political structure of society. The utopia of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” will never exist, only the dictatorship of the “revolutionary party”. Repression and execution await those who question their claims and decisions.
These supposed champions of labor are really harbingers of death - of the mind and the body. They claim to be the true authoritative “voice of the people”. Understand what they really are; power over everything and everyone, forever, is what they seek. They want you either as a true believer (a willing pawn) or dead, just like all of the other supposedly benevolent dictators who promised utopias throughout history.
They’re akin to the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm, the loudest voices in the revolution, usurpers of a righteous cause, but a bit “more equal” than everyone else after the farmer is done away with. Fortunately, the pigs, like the farmer, got their comeuppance in the end of the story. Make these pigs squeal.
The stock market should not exist. Investing in companies is fine, but we shouldn't be able to buy our sell investment shares like a commodity.
All subsidies should not exist. They only alter the supply/demand in unnecessary and damaging ways. This must come with ending commodities trading like stock market investing.
Chick-fil-A isn't that great.
I would never eat there because of their bigoted politics, but I am always shocked at how many people act like they can't live without it. Weird.
Based
Free will as it's commonly understood is a complete myth. Almost nothing about anyone's life is the consequence of their having made responsible or irresponsible decisions in the sense that they could have decided otherwise. This is especially true with regard to the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we got where we are in life. The vast majority of both the good and bad events in our life are completely undeserved and do not in any way reflect upon our intrinsic value as human beings. I'm probably 90 percent on-board with Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky on this one.
Israel is justified in responding violently to the attacks of 10/7, though I do think they've made a tactical and moral error in not taking greater pains to do so with a much greater regard for civilian lives.
I expect to get a lot of downvotes for that last one.
Blocking traffic as a form of protest is bullshit and counterproductive in that it hurts poor wage-earners and single parents the most while also turning them against causes towards which they might otherwise be sympathetic.
Finally, in the US, the left has gone too far with things like policing language and identity politics such that it's now alienating large portions of the working class that rightly or wrongly feels that its economic issues are being sidelined at the behest of an educated professional elite with whom they have almost nothing in common. I say this as a union activist and organizer who interacts with these people every day. There's a lot more to unpack on this issue, so this is basically the Cliff Notes version of it.
Oh yeah, one more; while I think he eventually did kind of lose the plot and started getting high off his own supply and so forth, I think that Jordan Peterson was originally a perfectly well-intentioned self-help guy who originally really did have some useful advice for young men struggling to better themselves in a dystopian reality.
Fractional measurements are better than decimal measurements for anything where the level of precision is important.
Decimal measurements can only increase our decrease in precision by a factor of 10.
For example if your precision is accurate to 1/4 of a unit, you can represent that with fractions no problem.
What is that in decimal? "0.25" implies precision to the hundredth of a unit.
What if your measurement is half a unit, but it's precise to 1/64 of a unit? Just don't reduce the fractions. "32/64ths" is more precise than .5.
Chick-fil-A isn't that great.
I would never eat there because of their bigoted politics, but I am always shocked at how many people act like they can't live without it. Weird.
Parents who purchase animal products care more about their “personal choice” than the world they’re leaving for their children. Bacon is more important to them than their own kids.
Dancing is a fucking weird thing
Pineapple is good on pizza
C and C++ are awesome and I hope they survive for another 50 years. Sorry Python folks. I just can't get past the strange syntax. Gimme my curly braces, away with this function block spacing crap.
I'm not cut out for this politically correct shit. I say one historical fact people act like I'm making shit up and they delete my comment and call me dumb even though it's a universally established tradition of ancient states. I really can't deal with this "you have to be sensitive about others' feelings" so much so that you can't talk about real historical facts! I say fuck you to all.
all memes including this one are unfunny and lazy as hell type words instead
Here's something about American politics to provoke a lot of people, especially on this site:
Donald Trump should be elected in 2024 purely to serve as an exam to the left. Liberalism clearly doesn't work anymore, there's a lot of discontent in the world and a shift towards far-right politics, while left is almost non-existent in almost any country, it doesn't have an answer. With Donald Trump getting elected for his revenge term and demolishing democracy, hopefully it's a catastrophe strong enough for the left to wake up.
NFTs are an interesting and valuable technology that will be useful in the future as a means of digital media 'ownership' in place of 'perpetual licensing' like we see when we 'buy' media from servers today.
There's more to it than monkey pictures, and if people saw that, we would have greater control over media libraries than in the present.
Note I own 0 NFTs
Tipping is good.
I’m American and have worked in the service industry in the US and Germany. I fully support tipping in the US, because waiting tables is one of the few jobs in the US where you can actually earn a good living without breaking your body (as much as construction, as a comparison) and without a training program. In a place where unions actually make a difference, it’s just a nice thing to do, and that’s obviously a better solution generally, but that’s not currently the case in the US.
