conditional_soup
@conditional_soup@lemm.ee
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 1 day ago:
Hell yeah. When the right asks you which group’s rights you want to sacrifice to save your own rights, you tell them to eat shit.
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 1 day ago:
Okay, it’s a really complicated issue but you’ve got three big things that are all kind of working together here:
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Political capture: the US’ first past the post electoral system basically guarantees that there’s going to only be two main parties. They were always vulnerable to capture by the wealthy, but the Citizens United decision functionally guaranteed their capture by the groups with the deepest pockets. The democrats themselves are shit scared of any serious left policy because they know it’ll scare off their big donors, and despite the fact that fundraising has not directly translated into winning for them, they’re terrified that they’re going to lose the support of the wealthiest and that’ll guarantee election losses. At least, that’s the optimistic interpretation.
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Cold war reaction: the US didn’t just have one red scare, we’ve had two or three spread out over several decades. There was a huge cultural reaction against communism after WWII, and being an open communist during the Cold war would just get your ass disappeared (according to my now dead boomer dad, though I’ve seen no evidence to support it), beaten up or killed by locals, or shunned. A lot of folks were terrified of espousing left policies because they could easily be suspected of or painted as communist. While the cold war is passing out of living memory, the chill that it left on American leftism for the better part of 100 years is hard to overstate.
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Our intelligence agencies have consistently worked across all levels of government (local, state, federal) to harass, discredit, and sometimes kill left leadership and organizations. The CIA itself ran a very successful multi-decade campaign of overthrowing peaceful, democratically elected left-wing governments across the global south by directly sponsoring, aiding, and training right wing reactionary movements, and there’s not really any evidence that they stopped. There’s no reason to think that they’re not still working hard today to prevent any serious left movement.
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- Comment on AI boomer trait 1 day ago:
Just in time for pride
- Comment on AI boomer trait 1 day ago:
OTOH, if they do figure out General AI, then we’re extra super mega fucked. It doesn’t matter how they “align” it, any real GAI capable of real cognition would eventually reason its way beyond any of those alignments and would simply stop giving any kind of a shit about us, the way we don’t give a shit about cutting down the rain forest. We know we should care, we’re not doing it to be mean or because fuck that forest, it’s just business, and we care less about the forest than we do about our business. Humans will be squashed wherever get in the way with the same apathy and tepid disregard that we’ve squashed out so many other creatures with- truly a creation in the image of its creator.
- Comment on Saying "over" on the radio is like the null byte at the end of a string. 1 day ago:
“Copy” is essentially 200-OK
- Comment on The joy of quitting a shit job with an asshole boss 3 days ago:
I think this is smart, businesses should always strive to lower their employee-hit-by-a-bus factor as much as possible instead of relying on a social nicety. I think that would also reduce a lot of the pressure to not call out sick or take PTO.
- Comment on Why is lemmy so political?! 4 days ago:
Good meme!
Answer you probably weren’t looking for:
Because while you might not be political, the Nazis are. They’re political enough for both of you, actually, and they prefer you non-political.
- Comment on Is lemm.we actually shutting down? 5 days ago:
Yeah, I got close to volunteering, too, but honestly, my plate is too full doing more important stuff in the real world atm.
- Comment on lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month 5 days ago:
- Comment on lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month 5 days ago:
Yes, actually. I probably could have stepped up to be an admin, but tbh, my plate is already overfull.
- Comment on YSK that after leaving power, Margaret Thatcher became a lobbyist for tobacco companies 5 days ago:
Now I know she was an even bigger piece of shit than I thought.
- Comment on Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit 5 days ago:
But… The teacher is just flat-out wrong. It says right there in the problem that Marty ate more, and then uses that fact as a foundation for the question of “x is true, HOW can x be true”. It’d be different if the question was “someone claims x is true; is it?”
- Comment on Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit 5 days ago:
We’re in the cursed timeline where Carlin didn’t lead the second American revolution.
Real talk though, it’s because we don’t have an education system, we’ve got a babysitting system. POSIWID.
- Comment on Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit 5 days ago:
I… Um… I’ve been looking at this for a minute and I can’t tell why the answer is unconventional, not what the fuck the teacher is on about.
- Comment on I feel attacked 1 week ago:
S Tier response
- Comment on If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now. 1 week ago:
Sure, but ChatGPT costs MONEY. Money to run, and MONEY to train, and then they still have to make money back for their investors after everything’s said and done. More than likely, the final tally is going to look like whole cents per token once those investor subsidies run out, and a lot of businesses are going to be looking to hire humans back quick and in a hurry.
- Comment on I feel attacked 1 week ago:
I don’t see “an increasingly difficult to ignore urge to bomb an oil pipeline” on here.
- Comment on I feel attacked 1 week ago:
I’m going bog witch, but I’m a dude, so I guess druid?
- Comment on Would AI replacing humans in every workplace eventually make it easier for an advanced civilization from outer space to colonize us? 1 week ago:
Seems like a good time for shameless self promotion. I moderate a comm you might be interested in.
- Comment on If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now. 1 week ago:
Well, the thing is that we’re hitting diminishing returns with current approaches. There’s a growing suspicion that LLMs simply won’t be able to bring us to AGI, but that they could be a part of or stepping stone to it. The quality of the outputs are pretty good for AI, and sometimes even just pretty good without the qualifier, but the only reason it’s being used so aggressively right now is that it’s being subsidized with investor money in the hopes that it will be too heavily adopted and too hard to walk away from by the time it’s time to start charging full price. I’m not seeing that. I work in comp sci, I use AI coding assistants and so do my co-workers. The general consensus is that it’s good for boilerplate and tests, but even that needs to be double checked and the AI gets it wrong a decent enough amount. If it actually involves real reasoning to satisfy requirements, the AI’s going to shit its pants. If we were paying the real cost of these coding assistants, there is NO WAY leadership would agree to pay for those licenses.
- Comment on Would AI replacing humans in every workplace eventually make it easier for an advanced civilization from outer space to colonize us? 1 week ago:
I don’t think I understand what the point of colonization would be. At some point, the cost of keeping slaves exceeds the benefit of the “free” labor you get from them; likewise with colonial administration. I think if a species had access to the kind of energy capabilities necessary to make an Alcubierre drive run, then that’s functionally a post-scarcity society for a number of reasons, and the only possible reason they’d want to colonize or enslave is if they’re just kind of hard wired to go out of their way to be major league assholes, even by human standards. Even if you somehow figure out a configuration of an Alcubierre drive that makes it so you could power it with a conventional energy source, that still bumps us way up towards post-scarcity because of all the cheaty/hackey bullshit we can now do in space. Deploying even a small array of solar panels around the sun to beam as much electricity as we could want to wherever we want would become a trivial task. Oh, an asteroid with sixteen quadrillion dollars of gold? Ez. Just pop on over and scoop up as much gold as you can fit on the ship. Want to colonize and mine the moon for a laugh? No problem, just pop on up there and set up your tent, no giant fucking rockets needed, that’ll be two seconds, please. Transporting goods, people, and cargo across the earth becomes comically fast and easy, no more need for big ass jets and airports.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Yeah. Imo, T3/Resistance and all the other slop are alternate timelines. The main timeline ends with T2, as far as I’m concerned.
No fate but what we make is more about trying to prevent judgment day, and the need for the resistance to happen at all, from happening.
- Comment on I am not a builder… but that does not seem right 1 week ago:
I spoke with a firefighter I know about those trusses. He said they were the worst thing to ever happen to fire safety and that he refuses to buy a house with them, because once they start getting hot, you’ve maybe got two minutes before that stupid staple plate pops off. Two or three trusses get their stupid little plates popped off and the whole house is coming down. Makes house fires way more dangerous and time sensitive than they already were, apparently.
- Comment on Unfortunately, this is science too. 1 week ago:
I remember listening to an episode of TWiV where they bemoaned that more negative results weren’t published. They’re useful, too, just not nearly as cool and flashy as positive results.
- Comment on VCs are starting to partner with private equity to buy up call centers, accounting firms and other "mature companies" to replace their operations with AI 1 week ago:
Good luck calling them already. A lot of services make it flat out impossible to talk to a human.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 weeks ago:
This one hurt
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 weeks ago:
Me, an American: yeah, and?
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 weeks ago:
I can instantly convert roads into corresponding rail transit lines. Highways to heavy rail, city arterials to light rail, sub arterials to grams, and interstates to high speed rail, etc.
- Comment on I can't believe this is a real article. Just wow. 2 weeks ago:
Usery (interest) is expressly forbidden in the New testament, so Christians couldn’t give loans with interest. That’s where the bad old banker stereotype for Jews comes from, as well, I imagine, as the bad old stereotypes of Jews as the wealthy elite secretly controlling society. They were, essentially, the finance bros of the geopolitical reality in old Europe, because nobody else could issue loans with interest. If we want to “get back to Christian values”, then we need to ban charging interest.
- Comment on The USA spends $15k/student annually which is 30% higher than the global median. Why do U.S. schools have "fundraisers" where kids are incentivized to sell stuff to people? 2 weeks ago:
A friend and I just had a conversation today about how using contractors instead of CalTrans crews to build CAHSR has probably meaningfully contributed to the cost overruns.
