immutable

@immutable@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal to feel tired of technological progress?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

  I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second off life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

  To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

  The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

  I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

  There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

  Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

  Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

  The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them. You are in charge of your life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

  Look at this madness robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Men Harassed A Woman In A Driverless Waymo, Trapping Her In Traffic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

  If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

  Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

  Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

  It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay frosty⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  American checking in, this was also how I was taught to pluralize throughout my education.

  The usage in the post title seemed correct to me fwiw

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

  Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a tunnel boring machine were installed facing downward in a cemetery, you wouldn't need to expand the cemetery⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s a shame that when we figured out skyscrapers we didn’t start doing that with the dead. Catacombs in the sky reaching to the heavens.

  I’m gonna go pay my respects to grandma she’s in the towns bonescraper. Smash cut to a giant tower made of skeletons.

  Aliens come down to that kind of society, they’d want to party with us because that’s metal as fuck

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China is on track to reach clean energy targets six years early⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  True but we should also realize that China didn’t just sit around one day and go “let’s set up a bunch of coal fired power plants and steel mills for funsies.”

  Most western countries that have run the neoliberalism playbook have gone “let’s let China build shit, we will do service, finance, and knowledge work instead” but we still want manufactured goods. I just think it’s important to bring this context when people point to China’s coal use as if they are just burning it for fun. They are burning it because we wanted cheaper goods and if we hadn’t have offshored that industry to them we’d be burning it.

  We pay them to burn the coal and then complain that China is a polluter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rock Eagle Flag⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While I believe in common sense gun control I think that one thing people might miss when comparing America to Finland or Sweden is just how brutal America can be.

  America is an interesting country, if you can stay on the gainful employment ladder you can have a lot of creature comforts and for a few people they get to go up the ladder and have a really nice life.

  That ladder though is dangling over the mouth of a volcano and there are more ways to fall off then anyone wants to admit. There’s also a ton of people just barely hanging on.

  Easy access to guns is a problem, but the fact that so many Americans are so crushed by the system we live under that violence and deadly violence are things people routinely turn to is also a massive problem. For a lot of working poor the system can feel a lot like running on a perpetual treadmill stuck at full speed. We retooled our economy towards service and knowledge jobs, a lot of people in that service industry make just enough money to scrape by.

  There is not a single state in the nation where minimum wage affords a 2 bedroom apartment

  So you have a large number of people that spend the vast majority of their time working difficult jobs rife with customer abuse. They earn just enough money to afford a place to stay and food (and a cellphone so people can sneer at them and say, oh you have a cellphone so you can’t be struggling). Mix that with a big pile of guns and violence is bound to happen.

  We can take away the guns but I suspect Americans have the ingenuity to find other ways to do violence against each other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk Begs Advertisers to Return as Twitter's Revenue Plunges⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t worry, he seems hard at work making sure all that Tesla stick he got will also be worth less everyday.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sulfur Better than Hydrogen for Energy Storage, Engineers Find⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Whenever she makes a video about something I know about it’s chock a block with misunderstandings on her part. Now my field is much different, so that’s not really too surprising.

  What I find detestable though is that she will look into the camera, say something fucking stupid, and say it with a straight face and a degree of confidence that misleads other.