ArbitraryValue
@ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Clippy's coming for you 2 days ago:
Man, this hits close to home. Just yesterday I decided to get in touch with an old friend from college and I found out that she had died in a car accident years ago, not long after I lost touch with her. Don’t put things off, folks.
- Comment on Bears Cave 1 week ago:
- Comment on Having $270 billion dollars and spending the bulk of your time trying to make more money is like weighing 900 pounds and thinking "ooh, I bet I can get to 1000". 2 weeks ago:
If you’re a billionaire, that usually implies that you really enjoy being a successful businessman and I don’t see why business success for its own sake would be inherently less satisfying than other sorts of accomplishment.
- Comment on The grand prize 2 weeks ago:
I’m seeing $30,000 per ton there (as of 2018) so wouldn’t the cubic meter cost about $640,000?
- Comment on what's stops one from scavenging the best parts of old phones and putting them into a new one? 2 weeks ago:
Don’t forget about device drivers. I can’t even install a newer version of Android on my Android phone because the community never managed to get the antenna to work after upgrading the OS.
- Comment on Brazilian Wandering Spider 3 weeks ago:
So, uh, is the spider hotter in person? Because the picture isn’t doing it for me.
- Comment on It's a learning exercise 3 weeks ago:
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel.
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 3 weeks ago:
I oppose letting anyone define hate speech as a matter of principle, because even if I agree with the definition completely now, I may not continue to agree with the definition in the future. Look at what has been happening in the USA since the October 7 attack: a lot of people I had considered my political allies turned out to have beliefs I consider to be hateful, and meanwhile these people consider my own beliefs hateful. The solution is not to empower a single central authority to decide which sort of hate is allowed. It is (as it has always been) to maintain the principle of free speech.
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 3 weeks ago:
I’m a little surprised to hear people so willing to let the government of Ireland determine who they are allowed to hate and for what reasons.
- Comment on The ability to be spontaneous in life is directly proportion to the size of your bank account 4 weeks ago:
Most financially secure people still work full time. I suppose that in theory, they’re able to quit their jobs without suffering immediate, catastrophic consequences but if they actually did that sort of thing, they wouldn’t be financially secure for long.
(In my experience, many financially secure people actually work much more than full time. I think they would be better off if they didn’t because at some point time becomes more valuable than money, but they have the sort of personality that compels them to. This is often related to starting out without financial security.)
The very rich can do crazy stuff without consequences but they’re such a small part of the population that I don’t think comparing oneself to them is useful.
- Comment on How come people who are against abortion are in favor of the death penalty? Kind of seems like a contradicition/ 4 weeks ago:
There’s no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn’t be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies.
- Comment on Why do residential skyscrapers always seem to include balconies that never get used? 4 weeks ago:
Heh, I walk around naked with the blinds open because where I live, people would need binoculars to see me and if they choose to, their resulting suffering is their own fault. One advantage of being unattractive…
- Comment on Why do residential skyscrapers always seem to include balconies that never get used? 4 weeks ago:
I think people value private outdoor space differently than public outdoor space. I don’t actually have a balcony but I think I would usually prefer a private space to a public one, even if the public one was much nicer.
- Comment on Why do residential skyscrapers always seem to include balconies that never get used? 4 weeks ago:
That’s funny. I see all the skyscrapers around here with balconies and I get jealous, but I never thought about the fact that I almost never seen people on those balconies until I read your question.
- Comment on Why do residential skyscrapers always seem to include balconies that never get used? 4 weeks ago:
I wanted a balcony but the real estate agent politely implied that I couldn’t afford one in the area where I was looking for housing. With that said, I can see myself using it for just an hour or two a week while the weather is nice. I like the idea of sitting out on the balcony but in practice it’s noisy out there and boring to do on my own.
- Comment on ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 4 weeks ago:
Caffeine is poisonous to us too. It’s generally not possible for a healthy person to drink enough coffee to die, but they sell pure caffeine (for research) and even seemingly small amounts of that will kill a person.
- Comment on Badgers 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Everybody who ever voted for trump is a cunt. 4 weeks ago:
Wait, so this is the sort of Conservative place that’s voting for Harris? I’m not judging (I wouldn’t call Trump a conservative) but I am surprised.
- Comment on U.S. Media’s Doublespeak: Israelis Live in “Densely Populated Areas,” Palestinians Are “Human Shields” 5 weeks ago:
CNN did not, of course, vehemently denounce Israel’s use of civilians as “human shields” when it noted Mossad’s civilian-dense location. Because for CNN, like almost every Western media outlet, Israelis, unlike Palestinians, get to be human.
Mossad’s headquarters is a legitimate military target. It is located in a densely populated area in the same sense that, for example, the Pentagon is located in a densely populated area. It’s still a distinct target, not a tunnel under a hospital.
- Comment on It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word 1 month ago:
The computer wouldn’t be telling humans what to do. It would be the one doing things. Imagine a group of chimpanzees that somehow create a human. The human isn’t going to just passively give the chimpanzees directions.
That’s not a perfect analogy because chimpanzees don’t comprehend language, but if a human with a brain just 3.5 times the size of a chimpanzee’s can do so much more than a chimpanzee, a computer with calculational capability orders of magnitude greater than a human’s could be a god compared to us. (The critical thing is to make it a loving god.)
- Comment on It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word 1 month ago:
I don’t think you’re imagining the same thing they are when you hear the word “AI”. They’re not imagining a computer that prints out a new idea that is about as good as the ideas that humans have come up with. Even that would be amazing (it would mean that a computer could do science and engineering about as well as a human) but they’re imagining a computer that’s better than any human. Better at everything. It would be the end of the world as we know it, and perhaps the start of something much better.
- Comment on College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time 1 month ago:
That and the following makes me suspect that this is a faked publicity stunt rather than a real prototype.
“The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it,” Nguyen and Ardafiyo write in a document explaining the project. Instead, the students say their goal is to raise awareness that all this isn’t some dystopian future — it’s all possible now with existing technology.
- Comment on College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time 1 month ago:
PimEyes doesn’t search Facebook. You can try it for yourself. It will find faces for you for free, but you have to pay to find out where it found them.
- Comment on College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time 1 month ago:
I have not come across facial recognition software that contains Facebook pictures in its database. I don’t mean to be creepy, but I’m curious about what software you’re referring to.
- Comment on College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time 1 month ago:
Public databases have photos of people’s faces? Or do they mean public if you pay for access? I didn’t think those had photos either but I’ve never paid for access so I don’t know.
- Comment on Men Harassed A Woman In A Driverless Waymo, Trapping Her In Traffic 1 month ago:
Doing things like this when you’re certainly being recorded is a great idea. Wait, hold on…
- Comment on How come the US does not put a bounty on Putin like they did Bin Laden? 1 month ago:
the size/capability of violence
That’s, uh, not a small difference.
- Comment on You'll have to use pto time to drown, but make sure it's approved first 1 month ago:
I think people are generally slow to realize that they are in a life-or-death situation. I’m not talking about just the victims here, but rather about everyone accustomed to living in safety. We’re so used to making choices where death is not a potential outcome that we simply don’t take the possibility into account.
I was in downtown Manhattan on 9/11, close enough to the World Trade Center that I felt the building I was in shake when the towers were hit. The funny thing is that I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t even horrified. The whole thing didn’t feel real. (Now I know that I was in absolutely no danger, but I couldn’t have known that at the time.)
- Comment on Undulating 🐍 1 month ago:
Every day I’m undlatin’ undlatin’, undlatin’
(How to shorten undulating to two syllables? Undlatin’ is still three.)
- Comment on X will let people you’ve blocked see your posts 1 month ago:
Isn’t that what blocking someone usually does on other platforms? I don’t use Twitter but if I block someone, I expect that I won’t have to see anything that person writes. I don’t expect that that person won’t see anything I write, because that’s a silly thing to expect about something I deliberately make available to the entire internet.
