In the UK we’re super lucky to have Scan, in-store if you’re in the North West or online otherwise, but for the US I guess it’s too big for a single good store to cover nationwide, then when you get too big you inevitably lose the quality that helped you grow

Yes, I was referring to someone in the top 50% of earners, still half of all people in the US.

To get to most countries if you’re on that demographic, you just need to have a job.

To get to the US historically, you needed to either get a H1B visa, which last I heard had a 9% chance per year, enter the green card lottery, which has a 0.3% chance per year, or transfer within your company after getting promoted to a managerial role via an L1A visa, which is a slow process and very dependant on who you work for, and on your origin country for acceptance rates.

For people in the bottom 50%, I agree it’s historically been easier to go the US with the green card lottery, fairly accessible visas if you have immediate family living in the US, and even for illegal immigration with birthright citizenship, as then you can get a green card through your children.

I was basing my comment on the fact most people on Lemmy are going to be nerds working in IT/Sciences/Engineering, but even then, if you take a mean “ease for a random sample to move” then it’s still harder to move to the US than out of it.

Immigration is very possible to a lot of countries via employer sponsored routes, generally for highly developed countries the requirement is “you have to be earning above average for your industry,” so essentially if you’re in the top 50% by skill/experience you should be allowed in. Others require certain levels of education, etc. but for US citizens those levels should generally be achievable.

Relatively, moving to the US has been so much harder than moving out for a long time now, which is why people are saying “just move out.”

“Inspired word of God” differs by denomination though right?

I could be wrong, but I thought some viewed it as the exact word of God, others as the word of God as interpreted by the prophets

Counterpoint: London.

It’s easy to complain, with it being £2.80/$3.70 for a single zone peak single, the frequent strikes, the noise, etc. but the trains are at worst every 5 minutes or so, they have the most frequent rail service in the world (Victoria Line), they’re constantly making improvements (Elizabeth Line, Battersea extension), it has fairly good coverage (when including national rail for south London), overnight service, and the busses are absolutely amazing.

Is it on par with Seoul & Singapore? No. But it’s certainly significantly better than most cities worldwide.

I don’t think it’s ok.

I think it’s not the state’s job to dictate whether people can do it. I have the exact same opinion for cheating.

It depends how you define “racial hate” and how you define mental or social harm. I also do mean social harm, not societal, meaning to catch things like sunset communities (ie restricting where people can live, or where they can go), rather than “society is worse off because of people’s opinions.”

Again, in my opinion, it depends on intent. If you make a post on your blog with 200 followers saying “I’m tired of X race moving to my city,” I don’t think that should be illegal, even if it is disgusting behaviour. If you post it to (eg) a community group for those people, I’d say it should be illegal.

That said, I’m very liberal on policing, so believe that the state shouldn’t be responsible for policing morality, which people may not like when they realise it involves making things that are pretty much objectively immoral legal, regardless of what they are.

I would say intent matters and while it’s impossible to truly determine it, we still have a distinction for murder/manslaughter and negligence.

If a politician lies or hides something for personal gain, that should be illegal, but there’s so much stuff the state does where it’s best if the general public don’t know, public order would probably break down pretty quickly otherwise.

Same with racial hate. If it’s just stating an opinion, fine, I probably don’t agree but go ahead. If you’re actively trying to harm (mentally, economically, socially or physically) that group, or inciting others to do the same, then that’s not fine.

Everyone has a different definition, but yeah generally free speech in an ideal sense extends to just before you start causing what a reasonable person would concern harm to someone.

Eh, there’s a lot of blending of conjecture, opinion and fact all presented as truth, and their handling of mistakes could be better - they’ve openly said if they consider a mistake to be minor then they don’t even issue a correction or update.

I personally think that attitude towards production pushes it towards slop, as for things like entertainment one of the key defining things that separate slop from quality media is passion, but if you don’t care about making accurate content then are you any better than just getting AI to write a script?

They know exactly what they’re talking about, and especially how they’re talking about it.

It’s all considered to make it look like both the local and national politicians are doing a great job and you should vote for them. Whatever the medium for that happens to be isn’t really important.

With China, UK and afaik US (at least some states) attitude to regulation, a VPN is turning more into a necessity to browse the open internet rather than a tool for people who value privacy though

I’ve been trying to plan a hiking trip and the number of sites, even those without any nsfw or user generated content, that just geoblock the UK because it’s not worth dealing with their government’s shit is impressive

At least LLMs produce something, even if it’s slop, all crypto does is… What does crypto even do again?

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The intersection between Authoritarianism and Socialism:

You’re wondering if a place that grew on monopoly and extortion, with some of the most impoverished, deprived and violent neigborhoods in the country, along with some of the most exclusive and expensive collections of gated mansions, could have serious fundamental issues?
I’d think it’s safe to assume that’s it’s this one…

A quick google search when I was initially fact-checking took me to this reddit post; I’m highly skeptical of both the LAPD and reddit so went for 15 minutes to be “safe” but make of it what you will…

In an ideal world, if it’s someone who immediately mentions that it’s third time they’ve called this week about a neighbor having a dead tree in their garden, or someone’s mad because someone else parked in “their” spot, someone’s calling the fire department on someone having a bbq or someone’s stubbed their toe, that sort of thing can get put way down the “call back later” list

Everything else gets put through to a person. In LA it’s not unusual to wait 15+ minutes after you call 911; most cities are going to be shorter, and if the wait is under a minute, you don’t need the AI triage. If you do have a wait and block out 25% of calls which are obviously a waste of time with AI, you can significantly reduce that (ideally in addition to hiring more operators, but let’s be realistic…)

The difference between reasoning models and normal models is reasoning models are two steps, to oversimplify it a little they prompt “how would you go about responding to this” then prompt “write the response”

It’s still predicting the most likely thing to come next, but the difference is that it gives the chance for the model to write the most likely instructions to follow for the task, then the most likely result of following the instructions - both of which are much more conformant to patterns than a single jump from prompt to response.

The difference is people still write Java, regardless of whether it’s a dated pos or not, so the use cases have evolved

Then there’s the use of the JVM/JRE which have evolved even more due to Scala, Clojure & Kotlin

Yeah, now AI can produce infinite slop there’s no need for human-produced slop anymore