Still waiting on news from .zip. I applied weeks ago, never got an email. Ah, well, I’m trying out piefed while I wait.

ColdFusion

I was there, 3,000 years ago

Remember when Gemini said that you should eat at least one small rock per day?

Talking a whole lot of shit for someone riding around in a machine that will find literally any excuse to break down. Helicopters are sketchy as fuck, and even if you manage to autorotate perfectly to try and recover from a stall, you’re still liable to suffer severe or fatal injuries. It’s super easy to crash due to human error or some kind of mechanical failure.

“Copy” is essentially 200-OK

Remember when Trump said he was going to end this war even before taking office? Then proceeded to try and extort Ukraine, whined at Putin, and gave up when neither of those worked?

Yeah, I’m in California’s central valley, which is a lot like the Serengeti in that it’s a grassy desert-ish thing that’s seasonally wetted by snowpack melt. It’s actually pretty swampy in its natural state. Used to be that you couldn’t drive forty minutes here without your car being a hopeless mess, especially in the late winter/spring. Now, I almost never hit a bug at all. It’s been that way for years. I pointed it out to my nature-loving MAGA mom and it freaked her the fuck out.

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.

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.

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.

Good luck calling them already. A lot of services make it flat out impossible to talk to a human.

Psst, the artist doesn’t get paid when AI companies use the IP for free to turn out slop

Well, let’s replace it with whatever they’re doing for the AI companies.

Not if we’re just giving it away to the richest people on earth to feed into a plagiarism generator, no. There’s either IP law for everyone, and EVERYONE gets DMCA, or there’s IP law for nobody. Nobody is above the law, including AI execs.

Nothing, but only if they’re quite serious about demolishing IP law. If we’re going to do this, let’s not half ass it for a couple of spoiled rich kids, let’s go all or nothing.

Bullshit, why give them special treatment? Just dumpster the whole copyright system.

The stupid thing here is that mass transit, pedestrians, and cyclists are all way better for small businesses than huge parking lots and enforced car dependency. There’s lots of studies that show that car dependency really only benefits big box stores and big corporate chains. Fucking dumbasses.

I’m a parent. I’m not going to try and sell you on having a kid; don’t do it unless you know you want to. What I’m about to say isn’t trying to sell you on parenthood or making apologetics, but just sharing my own personal experience having thought of almost all the same things you’ve thought and then crossed the bridge anyway. I figure that parenting really isn’t about what you get out of it, and you do get stuff out of it- the love, the experience, the ups and downs, someone to depend on and who depends on you. In a lot of ways it’s a microcosm of the human social experience in that you much more personally experience the things that make up existing with others in a society. You don’t necessarily need kids the same way you don’t necessarily need a significant other or a circle of friends, it’s just that humans are, by our nature, social creatures, and we’re almost always better off with richer social connections in our life than not. Yeah, you definitely do lose stuff; take autonomy, it’s kind of similar to how you lose a certain degree of autonomy when you get into a serious long term relationship, only you really shouldn’t break up with your kids if they piss you off. If that tradeoff isn’t for you, that’s cool!

Everybody’s different, but my kids have motivated me to get involved in politics (beyond just voting) at the local level and try to start planting trees whose shade I may never get to enjoy. It made me think hard about the kind of world that we’re leaving to them, and about what responsibility I have as a parent to do what I can to make that world a better place. I don’t expect anything from them; if they move away to live their life, that’s fine, I trust them to use their best judgment and live their life how they see fit, and just knowing that they’re depending on us to do everything we can for them has really motivated me to think differently about things in ways that I believe are generally positive. In case you’re curious about it, you could always try hosting an exchange student. It’s about the lowest commitment way to be a parent to someone, especially since they’re typically older teenagers. If you hate their guts, you can always ask the host organization that they be placed elsewhere. I’ve hosted I think eight exchange kids, and in hindsight, I don’t regret a single instance, even for the kids we didn’t get along with and had to place elsewhere.

This might be a good time to pitch looking into joining or starting a local chapter of Strong Towns. They’re a local-first advocacy group rooted in the premise that our cities are broken because we’ve been building them badly for nearly 100 years now. Strong Towns aims to restore cities as places that are built first and foremost for people to live in. As I’ve gotten deeper into this, it’s really shocked me how much of the blame lies nearly exclusively with municipal policy and political inertia (politicians sticking with doing things the established bad way because that’s the established way and they’d rather have a bankrupt, unlivable city than risk changing what they know). The good news is that municipal policy is probably the easiest, most accessible level of policy to effect, and it has the most direct and immediate impact on your life and the lives of people around you. Affecting good urban policy to make our cities livable is what Strong Towns is all about.

You might also look at the Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability. They’re another local-first group that focuses on all forms of justice for lower-income communities.

That’s not unique to Russia. Birth rates in developed nations have been plummeting across the board. The only reason the US was escaping it and hanging out around replacement was because of immigration, and, well, I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, but it seems like that’s going to change.

There’s lots of reasons driving demographic collapse, but I don’t think war is one of them. South Korea is usually heralded as the shining example of demographic collapse because their birth rate is the worst by far, and it generally seems to be the case that as economies becomes more “advanced”, women have less time and supports to focus on motherhood, and so just choose not to have kids. I put advanced in scare quotes because it seems to me that a truly advanced economy wouldn’t footgun itself with rapid demographic collapse. Not to say that the trend shouldn’t be towards a smaller population that will tax the Earth’s resources less, but the way to get there safely for civilization isn’t by falling off a cliff.