• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

    This one just pisses me off. It’s framed so dishonestly.

    I can recall extremely specific things about when people I know died. What the weather was, what I was wearing, what video game I was playing when I heard the news, and so on. But I couldn’t necessarily pull the right year out of my brain without checking. Or necessarily even the date for some people.

    I promise that Biden remembers the death of his son in whatever specific way is meaningful to him. It might not be “on this day/month/year.” It might be “on a Tuesday” or might be “a cold snowy day when I was baking bread.” I have no idea. But this just isn’t how memory works, and it’s hurtful, evil even, to print something that dishonest. It boils my blood to read such dishonest reporting.






  • Dictatorships are not intrinsically bad.

    You can have good dictators, even if they are rare.

    Hard disagree there.

    But it really depends on what you value as good and bad.

    For instance, if you think that people have an inherent right to have a say in how they are governed, then a dictatorship can never be good because it infringes on that right in the most serious of ways.

    If you think a stable and sustainable system of government that will last beyond the life of a few leaders is important, then dictatorship is not a good system, because one good dictator creates no guarantee that the next dictator will be good, and establishing a system of dictatorship affords a bad dictator that much more power to ruin lives.








  • IT guy here, I am not that worried about AI

    That’s pretty much because you’re an IT guy. You’re in an industry that AI won’t replace any time soon.

    If you were a cashier, or a stock clerk, or a busboy, you should be terrified by AI. The speed at which those jobs are already vanishing is astounding. The other day I was at a restaurant, and I never interacted with a human. The ordering was done by touch panel at my table, the food was delivered to the table by a robot and I paid at an automated terminal. I don’t know how many staff were on duty but it had to be a fraction of what it would have been a decade ago. I bought clothes last week and there was one employee in the store, overseeing the self-checkout lanes (but really just sitting idly by in case anyone had issues). I read an article yesterday about how robots are now being distributed to convenience stores that can clean, stock, and reorder items, so these shops will pretty soon have only one employee in them.

    The gimmicky shit that your browser AI and chatbots can do is nothing compared to how this is already revolutionizing the world.