Curious_Canid
@Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca
I am owned by several dogs and cats. I have been playing non-computer roleplaying games for almost five decades. I am interested in all kinds of gadgets, particularly knives, flashlights, and pens.
- Comment on Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why? 3 hours ago:
I understand your point, but I disagree. There are currently no cars that are considered fully self-driving as defined by the people who created them. Except for the ones that are really just remotely driven, they all come with warnings that a human the driver must be at the controls and paying attention.
Current self-driving cars are like a printer that works most of the time, but requires a human to read everything it produces and to occasionally write in a few things that it missed or got wrong.
- Comment on Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why? 1 day ago:
No, there really aren’t yet. Driverless taxis and delivery vehicles are all “monitored” remotely by people who effectively drive them when they get into situations the automation can’t handle. Individual self-driving cars all come with a lot of warnings (which many drivers ignore) that they require an active and aware driver for similar reasons.
And Tesla, who have been lying about their self-driving capabilities from day one, continue to run people down and smash into other vehicles on a regular basis.
The systems are good enough to handle 99% of the driving situations they encounter. That remaining 1% is still a long way from being solved. And “pretty good” is not acceptable when failures kill people.
- Comment on Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break 2 months ago:
Possibly, but life is full of risks.
- Comment on Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break 2 months ago:
What you really need is a carbon fiber shoehorn. If you do manage to deform it the thing will go right back to its original shape.
- Comment on What kind of person am I if I decide to stay in a job, even if my supervisors work against me? 2 months ago:
I understand the desire to get even, but it isn’t likely to happen and it isn’t likely to be satisfying, even if you succeed. You should focus on things that will make your life better and not things that will make someone else’s life worse, even if they richly deserve it.
You are going to have to make some compromises. You are currently putting up with a situation you don’t like, in exchange for the salary, side benefits, and location. That’s isn’t necessarily a bad tradeoff, but it is not likely to be a good long-term situation. Once management decides they have a problem with you, things are going to get worse sooner or later. It will be better for you if you leave rather than being forced out.
You need to make some decisions about which of the things you like about your situation you would be willing to give up for a better job. That will tell you what to do next. Maybe the answer is to hold out for a better position within your current organization, although the chances don’t sound good. You may need to take a salary cut to find a local position that’s better for you. You may need to move. You may even need to change careers entirely.
The key is to make your own decisions and not allow others to force them on you. There are a lot of factors you can’t control. Focus on the ones you can. And don’t stay in a bad situation with the hope that everything will work out the way you want it to.
- Comment on Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers 2 months ago:
Exactly. The rich will be able to buy privacy, while the rest become ever easier to exploit.
- Comment on Amazon tech workers leaving for other jobs in response to return to office mandate 2 months ago:
I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.
- Comment on In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots. 3 months ago:
What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.
Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.
I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.
- Comment on If a corporation were subject to normal human health risks, we would have a clean environment and trillions invested in fighting climate change. 3 months ago:
Depending on the source, Wall Street is somewhere between 3 and 25 feet above sea level. It wouldn’t take much to dampen the market’s spirit. :-)
- Submitted 3 months ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 20 comments
- Comment on The world needs fewer cynics and more skeptics. 3 months ago:
It isn’t glamorous and it doesn’t grab headlines, but that is how these problems get fixed.
- Comment on The world needs fewer cynics and more skeptics. 3 months ago:
Making to tomorrow is sometimes not a small undertaking.
- Comment on The world needs fewer cynics and more skeptics. 3 months ago:
Not to far. Thanks for letting me know about it.
- Comment on The world needs fewer cynics and more skeptics. 3 months ago:
I certainly won’t disagree with that.
- Comment on The world needs fewer cynics and more skeptics. 3 months ago:
I do understand. I am constantly fighting that myself. For me it’s an aspirational statement, not necessarily one I always manage to live.
- Submitted 3 months ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 22 comments
- Comment on Intel’s advanced chipmaking process reportedly runs into trouble 3 months ago:
I love the idea!
The biggest problem with corporate governance is that precedent in US law is absolutely clear that the only financial responsibility is to the shareholders. If we expanded that to include employees and customers our world would look very different after a while.
- Comment on Intel’s advanced chipmaking process reportedly runs into trouble 3 months ago:
The sad thing is that the corporate sociopaths who made the bad decisions all made huge amounts of money doing it. The fact that they destroyed the company means nothing to them. And it will not mean anything to the next corporations that hire those same people as executives.
- Comment on Why is Kamala Harris being held at such a higher standard than Trump this election? 3 months ago:
The right wing has been actively working to undermine our educational system since the early 80’s. A poorly educated populace, particularly one without critical thinking skills, is much easier to manipulate. After four decades of underfunding, restrictive policies, and anti-intellectual propaganda, those efforts are really paying off.
Newt Gingrich and his co-conspirators have been waging war against the people of this country since Reagan was elected. And they are now dangerously close to winning that war.
- Comment on Microsoft pushes windows 11 ads into windows 10 4 months ago:
I love this image, but you know that Clippy would be holding the gun sideways, gangster style.
- Comment on Why are so many leaders in tech evil? 4 months ago:
The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life’s work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.
There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.
I’m sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.
- Comment on Video of Eric Schmidt blaming remote work for Google’s woes mysteriously vanishes 4 months ago:
Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.
- Comment on ‘Killer robots’ are becoming a real threat in Africa. 4 months ago:
That seems to imply that Facebook and Elon are not terrorists. I could make a reasonable argument for Facebook. Elon, I think, has already established his credentials with multiple acts that have led to riots and other violence.
- Comment on Meshtastic VS PMR Walkie Talkies 4 months ago:
Thank you! That was very useful.
- Comment on What kind of laptop charger do I need for my laptop 4 months ago:
Dell did some non-standard trickery to allow more than 100W charging through a USB C connector. If it’s one of those laptops it will only charge over 100W with a Dell USB charger.
- Comment on On Bears 4 months ago:
My sister lives in Alaska. The locals say that you can tell if you’re in grizzly territory by checking any bear poop you find. If it contains bells and smell like bear spray, you know there are grizzlies nearby.
- Comment on On Bears 4 months ago:
Polar bears will most likely hunt you, even if they don’t immediately attack. They are terrifyingly good at it.
- Comment on Why are weather apps so bad at telling you the current weather? 5 months ago:
NWS is a great resource, but there are a startling number of other organizations that collect weather data.
- Comment on Why are weather apps so bad at telling you the current weather? 5 months ago:
I appreciate that. :-D
- Comment on Why are weather apps so bad at telling you the current weather? 5 months ago:
I appreciate the suggestion. I have thought about it, but part of what I wanted, like the original poster, was more localized information. NWS is great for overall data, but it doesn’t get down to precise locations.