SirEDCaLot
@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
- Comment on TikTok uninstalls are up 150% following U.S. joint venture 17 hours ago:
Yeah exactly. 150% is good. 1500% would be better.
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 5 days ago:
Is OpenAI likely to fold?
They bought in one day a significant % of the worlds memory output for 2026. Two huge deals with two huge companies, announced at the same time. Neither company knew of the other deal. But those deals weren’t even for chips- they were for finished wafers. I doubt very much OpenAI has the facilities to slice and package wafers. So it seems to me the only point of the deal was to kill the DRAM supply market and drive up prices for their competition.
Wouldn’t be surprised if those finished wafers are going straight in the dumpster.
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 6 days ago:
“For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,”
I would correct that to say ‘for this to not be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this a. Exist and b. Are significant enough to justify the extreme costs of building these systems’
Right now I don’t see anything coming out of this that justifies even 1/10 of the $trillions being poured into AI.
In fact I think you could make an argument that the net result is negative, even for businesses that adopt it, due to the increased prices they will pay for hardware over the next few years. If it makes your employees 5% more efficient great, if it makes your technology 50% more expensive in return, not so great.
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 6 days ago:
It becomes an everybody problem when we can’t buy memory chips
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.
It’s actually somewhat worse- a great many DGUs go unreported. After all, someone comes at you threateningly, you pull up your shirt and put your hand on your gun, they suddenly change direction. That’s in a sense a DGU. But most people wouldn’t report it because there’s nothing to report.
Thus most DGU stats come from statistical analysis of phone surveys. That’s why it’s inaccurate as hell, with one smart guy saying it’s 60k and another smart guy saying it’s 4 million. It’s all in how you crunch the data.
But it’s important to note that Hemenway is SOLIDLY anti-gun, if there was a way to make the number lower he’d do it. So I take that as a minimum agreed count.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.
Perhaps not, but it does correlate with OFFENSIVENESS of use.
The person who owns an illegal gun is more likely to be a criminal in a gang.And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.
Correct. Each year about 30-35k people die from gunshot wounds, about 2/3 of those are suicides.
I’ll even give you that increased gun ownership may slightly increase the overall suicide rate- a gun to the head is an easy, painless, instant way to become dead. Instant is the key there, lots of people who choose slower means of suicide change their minds mid-suicide. IE, the guy who jumps off the bridge changes his mind while driving there, the person who takes a bunch of pills changes their mind and pukes / calls 911, etc. If you shoot yourself in the head, you’re dead instantly.With that all said though, I don’t think this is a valid reason to restrict gun ownership. Suicide is absolutely tragic. But it’s also a decision that a person makes for themself, it’s not something forced upon them. And I don’t believe ‘you might INTENTIONALLY hurt yourself with this tool’ is a valid reason to deny someone from having it. I believe that’s part of having a free country- that if you decide to kill yourself that’s tragic, but it’s ultimately your own responsibility. Just the same- social media and shitty websites can drive a person to suicide, but we don’t shred the 1st Amendment to stop that.
- Comment on Google offers bargain: Sell your soul to Gemini, and it'll give you smarter answers 1 week ago:
Sounds like a fantastic deal to me.
- Comment on Hundreds of Millions of Audio Devices Need a Patch to Prevent Wireless Hacking and Tracking 1 week ago:
I’ll add to that- within a year’s time, less than 50% of the affected devices will even have a patch available.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
Determining the exact count is difficult. If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported, the only way to get any sort of number is with phone surveys and statistical analysis. That leaves a lot of opening to interpretation of the data.
Thus you have anti-gun researchers like Hemenway who put it at ~60,000 incidents/year and pro-gun researchers like Lott who put it at 2-4 million incidents/year. (I say anti/pro gun because Hemenway’s other writings advocate for gun control, while Lott’s other writings advocate against gun control). Obviously the number is somewhere in the middle.
But the firearm homicide rate (excluding suicides) is around 10k-15k/year, which means even if you only go with worst case data it means there’s 4x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.
I’ll give you that’s a slightly apples to oranges comparison, as many firearm assaults don’t end in death.
But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.I’d argue that the lion’s share of those 10-15k homicides per year are committed with illegal guns / prohibited owners, they are gang and drug related. The problem is that’s often hard to prove and it doesn’t show up in data sets. For example, you have incidents in sites like ‘mass shooting tracker’ like:
‘On friday at 11pm, victim1 and victim2 were leaving a house party in the 12,000 block of Nowhere St. Two unknown males opened fire from a moving vehicle. Victim1 and victim2 were wounded, along with bystander1 and bystander2 who were injured non-critically.’
Now that’s a ‘mass shooting’ because 4 people got shot. Read between the lines and it’s ‘gangland drive-by’. But you can’t prove that as the victims won’t admit to being in a gang and the perps weren’t caught. But you can bet those guns were illegal and the car was stolen. - Comment on My apartment building gives me free water but I pay for electricity. What if I run the faucet nonstop and rig up a hydro turbine in my bathtub to generate my power from it? 2 weeks ago:
That’s a legal. Metered utilities can be either included in the rent, or metered on a per unit basis. In this setup, if your neighbor uses a lot of utilities your bill will go up. That’s why this is illegal.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 3 weeks ago:
Look up the stats on defensive gun uses. Just Google it.
The vast majority (90+%) end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.
If someone threatens me and my family I want a better option than ‘hope the violent criminal decides to let us live’.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 3 weeks ago:
I’ve never set my house on fire, but I still feel better having a fire extinguisher.
- Comment on The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Backlash Against Gemini, Sora, ChatGPT Is Spreading in 2025 - Newsweek 5 weeks ago:
The crazy thing is, none of these articles seem to want to admit that AI is bad.
As the old quote goes- “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.””
In such an environment, nobody wants to admit they are not mad, lest they be attacked.
Or as someone else said- I want a future where machines cook and clean and do menial work, so us humans can focus on art and poetry and writing. Instead we have a world where machines create art and poetry and books, so the humans can focus on cleaning and menial work. I don’t like this timeline.
- Comment on It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser" 5 weeks ago:
Exactly this. I would love to see just one tech company stand up and say we are not doing AI, our AI budget is $0 and our product will not ship with AI. If you really want to use AI with our system you can download a plug-in or something but we won’t waste our time writing one.
They would get a million users overnight.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 5 weeks ago:
You are confusing the spread of ideology with the spread of a conquistadorial government. Remember, most of the Germans who supported Hitler didn’t realize the Jews were being massacred. And we didn’t go to war to stop Nazi ideology, we went to war to stop Germany from conquering the entire fucking world through military means.
The problem with using force to stop an ideology is that to the people who might follow that ideology, the fact that you care enough to use force against a belief system must mean there is something important in that belief system they should be checking out. Trying to stop an ideology with force only makes that ideology stronger, gives it validation.
If you want to stop an ideology, ridicule it. Make fun of those who believe in it. Talk about how stupid they are. Talk about how they are morons not worth your time. Don’t give that ideology the validation of deserving force.The other problem with violence, is it prevents dialogue. If you are hitting somebody while talking to them, they are not going to hear what you are saying.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
Hitler was defeated by being nice to him
In that sense you’re right- some people only understand and respect force, and the only way to stop them is to use force against them. The analogy of Hitler might be compared to hardened criminals- being nice to a criminal won’t stop them from victimizing you.
This is a different battle though. The small % of racists who want to burn minorities’ houses down, they must be met with force.
Force doesn’t win hearts and minds though. Force is intertwined with fear- ‘if you do xxx, force will be used against you’. So it might stop some church burnings, but it doesn’t stop racism. Force doesn’t win ‘hearts and minds’. Force doesn’t convince a racist that they were wrong. It might make them too afraid to speak up, but it doesn’t win them over, and they will only take their message underground, where it will thrive.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
Can you point to some other times in history where the threat of being beaten up has been effective in eradicating an ideology?
I can point to plenty of instances where driving an ideology underground only fuels its growth…
And look at the simple logic of it- if the guy in the big KKK hood says ‘the establishment doesn’t want you to acknowledge this’ and he then gets beaten up by mainstream majority people, you’ve just proved him right in the eyes of a would-be follower.
It’s like if you found someone who knows nothing about astronomy, and told them ‘today the sun will rise at 7:15am and set at 5:43pm, and the moon is mostly made of bleu cheese’ you’ve predicted two things correctly so that gives you credibility when they consider the 3rd.
If I said that to you, you’d say ‘you looked that up on Google, anyone can do that, and it’s well known the moon is made of rock’. But you are knowledgeable about astronomy (on a basic level at least).This works with the KKK person because chances are the KKK person has had limited or no actual contact and understanding with black people. So he sees news reports of inner city black people doing crimes and it becomes easy to convince him black people are somehow inferior. And ‘THEY don’t want you to know the truth’ is a powerful message for someone already interested in counterculture / dislike of the mainstream.
That’s why Daryl Davis is effective- he sits down with the racist, who has a mental image of what a ‘black person’ is, and he’s not that. It’s like putting you on a rocket and flying you out to the moon and saying ‘okay we’re here, where’s the cheese?’
And that’s why violence ISN’T effective- because the racist is expecting violence, so being violent only reinforces their belief.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
I think we need both of these —punching Nazis and talking with them to change their views.
Can you explain to me how punching Nazis works to reduce Naziism and racism? What is the mechanism of action? Like how specifically does getting punched make someone less racist?
That is a genuine question and I’d love an answer.
I personally believe that punching racists only creates more hatred. The racist will be angry at the one who punched him, and thus less open to anti-racist messaging.
- Comment on Control Resonant - Announcement Trailer | PS5 Games 1 month ago:
I general, I agree 100%.
There’s an exception for Remedy though. They have a strong track record of not releasing underwhelming unfinished crap.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
Why?
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
I think that’s called conflict exhaustion. You’re sick of fighting, sick of holding your nose and respecting things and people you find repugnant, while there’s little/no serious progress in your direction, it seems like there’s more racism and hatred than ever. So part of you is ready to set the world on fire if it gets rid of MAGA and all the thinly veiled (or not so thinly veiled) racism and intolerance.
Just keep in mind that the dark wolf actually serves those nazi punks. Punching them only makes them stronger.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
Exactly 100%
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
No worries my friend. I know it’s hard, but it’s useful to always assume good faith.
“The monster never sees a monster in the mirror. We all have good reasons and justifications for what we do.” – J. Michael Straczynski
That applies to us too.
I think it especially applied in 2016, first time in my life that all pretense of respectful debate went away, replaced with ‘unfriend me if you like Trump’ as a mainstream accepted even encouraged position to have.
I talk to a lot of people who supported Trump. Most of them talked about tariffs, manufacturing, jobs, there was a dream of bringing back American industry and rolling back outsourcing. Yes there was some assholes, but there were plenty of good American folks who just wanted to keep their jobs.
But if you listened to Democrats, the only valid reason anyone would vote for Trump is because they are a tiki torch wielding racist misogynist sexist xenophobic islamophobic basket of deplorables. The public discourse broke down for good, it was all just insults from both sides.Nobody saw a monster in the mirror. We only saw an opposition supporting a guy who was basically openly racist and creeped on his own daughter.
But they didn’t see a monster in the mirror either. They only saw an ivory tower elite whipping ourselves into a frenzy over which bathroom someone uses while the middle class is dying.That’s why, in my opinion at least, it is always vitally important to generally assume good faith on the part of your opposition. Because if there is good faith, then we repair the cracks that are dividing the country. And if there really isn’t good faith, then we are all totally fucked anyway so it doesn’t make any goddamn difference.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
People who I used to think were smart and empathetic were jumping on the “fuck your feelings” bandwagon.
I don’t know your friends. But I’d argue there’s at least some reasoning for this.
If trade policies like globalization have harmed your economic status, offshoring a lot of the jobs you’d previously held, and you were having trouble feeding your family, wouldn’t you vote for the person you thought could fix this? Wouldn’t you say ‘fuck your feelings, I need to feed my family so I’m sorry if you have trouble putting the sex you want on your passport I’m more worried about feeding my family’? At least in concept?I think that’s where a lot of that sentiment came from. The people of the nation are hurting, and part of Trump’s message always was ‘I see you hurting and I want to fix it’. Dems are totally tone deaf in their messaging. A huge % of the populace gets left out of the ‘American Dream’ and they say nothing. And in recent years they focus a lot on social justice issues and identity politics while ignoring the elephant in the room. It’s why those good people are saying fuck your feelings (IMHO at least), because if the choice is your feelings or their livelihood, then of course they’ll tell your feelings to shove off.
Of course it didn’t work out that way- government cutbacks, tariffs, foreign policy, all handled in such a ham-fisted non-strategic way that whatever benefit might have been gained was instead lost. And now it’s the little guy suffering, so you see a lot of people renouncing their votes.
All I’m saying is keep in mind some of those people who said ‘fuck your feelings’ thought they were fighting for a greater good. I don’t believe they turned malicious. Some did I’m sure, but not all of them.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
This thread got me thinking a little more about Mr. Davis.
We talk about ‘not tolerating intolerance’ but I think there’s a second level-- there’s the intolerance (the actions of the racist), and then there’s the intolerant (the racists themselves). It’s easy and simple to group the two together- we don’t want racism, we don’t want the KKK, we don’t want KKK members, all of you go fuck yourselves with your burning cross and go die in a fire (preferably in another county).
I don’t think Mr. Davis would tolerate intolerance any more than you or I. But I think what he does is tolerate the intolerant person, engage them in conversation, treat them like a human being. And THAT can help fix intolerance- by reaching out to the intolerant people and trying to bring them into the larger community and heal them, rather than shunning them and reinforcing their stereotypes.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
It’s BY tolerating it (or more specifically, the people who espouse it) that he fights it.
And I think that’s the key difference- tolerating intolerance (the action), vs tolerating the intolerant (the people).
I think we would all (probably including Mr. Davis) agree that the action of intolerance should not be tolerated. For example, if a local movie theater wants to have ‘whites only’ movie nights, that should not be tolerated and in fact we should all aggressively fight back against such things wherever they happen.
But what of the intolerant person? What of the theater owner in the above example? Should we run him out of town? Tar and feather him? Refuse to talk to him?
The KKK folks he encountered are used to intolerance- threats, shouting, protests, etc. They know they’re not popular, but that helps feed the belief that they are right. They’re used to it. They’re NOT used to being welcomed by anti-racists.And thus Mr. Davis got through to the racist- by tolerating the intolerant, not by tolerating intolerance. It’s a subtle but vital difference.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 month ago:
This guy obviously didn’t get that memo
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 1 month ago:
I couldn’t agree more. Acting like a million dollar company is important.
A million dollar company would recognize that reliable, continuous production and sales is more important to growth than the occasional hickup or a few extra bucks in the payroll budget. Thus, the million dollar company would hire sufficient staff that an occasional absence, even at a critical moment, would not harm production or sales.
And a million dollar company would recognize that hiring sufficient staff is a wiser and more cost effective strategy than a possible labor lawsuit along with the associated bad PR.
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 1 month ago:
If only that was a legal cause of action…
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 1 month ago:
What’s there to sue for? Companies shut down product lines and brands all the time.
- Comment on Japan Unveils Human Washing Machine, Now You Can Get Washed Like Laundry 1 month ago:
That’s why I said, different approaches.
My approach is targeted at somebody who just wants to get clean as quickly as possible, and the machine can help them do that faster and with less effort than a manual shower.
If you are going for luxury, or if you need help doing it like an elderly person, then the sit-down submerging spa is absolutely the way to go.