EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

I can’t imagine how the surveillance in China could possibly be worse than in the west. We have CCTV cameras everywhere, the government has a backdoor into every major software platform, smart devices are passively listening to everything we say and do, feds are constantly reading social media and infiltrating message boards, etc. It’s probably the same in China, but the idea that our dystopian panopticon is meaningfully less intrusive than China’s dystopian panopticon is cope.

Western media loves writing stories about things that happen in China that are not unique to China, but that are bad and scary because they happen in China.

This is grounds for a class action suit

I’ve heard WD40 works on some glue residues. Couldn’t hurt to try it.

Hard to believe that anyone involved in AI would stoop to plagiarism.

that’s just how the internet really works, Things come down, nothing lasts forever.

While this is true, I think a lot of people are surprised that this is the case. For a while, I think there was a sense that the internet was essentially a permanent record, with storage and bandwidth always getting cheaper and bigger, but the reality is that cheaper and bigger doesn’t mean free or unlimited, and so there would inevitably be a point where you couldn’t just store everything and have it available forever. It makes sense once you think about it, but then the question becomes about what gets saved vs what disappears, and why. That’s where there’s fertile ground for conspiracy theories and speculation.

There’s also a really interesting conversation to be had about what we ought to expect in terms of what data and content we do want to archive long-term, and then what kind of infrastructure is required to maintain that. This article is less illustrative of what China is or isn’t doing and more of the issue that we don’t have a clear set of parameters or any long-term precedent for digital content storage, which is exacerbated by the fact that most of the infrastructure is privately owned. Those owners have no real obligation to archive anything except to the extent that it maximizes their profits or shareholder value, which isn’t a great way to decide what does and doesn’t make it into the ‘record’ so to speak. Somewhere along the line, there will be a need and a demand for a more robust public effort to curate and archive internet content.

This is happening on every part of the internet. A lot of old content is disappearing for a variety of reasons. I’m guessing that this is one of those things where they take a phenomenon that is not unique to China and explain how it’s bad when it happens in China because China bad.

Making generalizations about people is a problem when the generalization is false or misleading, or is being used to make a false or misleading argument, which is often the case. If you’re wondering if a given generalization is problematic, odds are the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise you probably wouldn’t think of it as a generalization.

Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He’s a comedian, and he doesn’t have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he’s been criticized in the past it’s by liberals who are mad that he’s being critical of liberals. I’m not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.

There’s not much you can do as a consumer to fight tipping culture. If you don’t tip, you’re an asshole. If you do tip, you’re participating in the system.

I would start by recognizing that calling it “tipping culture” is inaccurate. It’s not a cultural issue, it’s a structural one. Tipping is part of the wage structure for tipped workers. To change it, the structure needs to be different, which means that establishments need to get rid of tipping. Some places do that, either by raising prices and wages so that it evens out, or by having a mandatory gratuity. I’ve seen some social enterprises frame the mandatory gratuity as a revenue share with employees, so the price is X and some percentage of that goes directly to the employees, which seems like a better way of thinking about tipping.

Ultimately, there are structural incentives for some businesses, consumers, and employees to maintain the current tipping status quo, and those incentives would need to be addressed in order to change the culture.

Big spoon me, daddy

If you already struggle with some form of mental illness, it’s probably best to assume that you’re being irrational, rather than ascribe any meaning to this particular thing. There is a lot of random stuff that happens, and you could project meaning onto any of it to create a narrative. Unless you have a good reason to believe that a specific person or group is messing with you (not just a vague sense of unease) then it’s very likely that it means nothing.

Smart. Argentina is very vulnerable to a Russian invasion if Russia ever decides to drill a tunnel straight through the earth’s core and out the other side.

Basically fearmongering about China doing what the West has been doing for the last century and is still doing now. Debt-trap imperialism, loss of sovereignty, the crafty Chinese being schemey and underhanded, etc. The headline is all that really matters, these articles should be written by robots at this point.

Properly-designed tools with good data will absolutely be useful. What I like about this analogy with the talking dog and the braindead CEO is that it points out how people are looking at ChatGPT and Dall-E and going “cool, we can just fire everyone tomorrow” and no you most certainly can’t. These are impressive tools that are still not adequate replacements for human beings for most things. Even in the example of medical imaging, there’s no way any part of the medical establishment is going to allow for diagnosis without a doctor verifying every single case, for a variety of very good reasons.

There was a case recently of an Air Canada chatbot that gave bad information to a traveler about a discount/refund, which eventually resulted in the airline being forced to honor what the chatbot said, because of course they have to honor what it says. It’s the representative of the company, that’s what “customer service representative” means. If a customer can’t trust what the bot says, then the bot is useless. The function that the human serves still needs to be fulfilled, and a big part of that function is dealing with edge-cases that require some degree of human discretion. In other words, you can’t even replace customer service reps with “AI” tools because they are essentially talking dogs, and a talking dog can’t do that job.

Agreed that ‘artificial intelligence’ is a poor term, or at least a poor way to describe LLM. I get the impression that some people believe that the problem of intelligence has been solved, and it’s just a matter of refining the solutions and getting enough computing power, but the reality is that we don’t even have a theoretical framework for how to create actual intelligence aside from doing it the old fashioned way. These LLM/AI tools will be useful, and in some ways revolutionary, but they are not the singularity.

I’ve been looking for an appropriate analogy for the current AI hype and this sums it up perfectly.

Good. No shade on Pocket Pair, they’ve obviously done something that resonates, but imo while Palworld suffers a bit from borrowing too heavily from Pokemon, the real issue is that it borrows too much from Ark. I’d like to see a similar concept executed with an updated interface, crafting system, and progression system. Ark is fine for what it is, but it’s ten years old and Palworld didn’t really make any improvements over the basic structure. It makes sense that they built it the way they did, given that their MO is taking existing component parts and putting them together, rather than designing from the ground up, but I’d like to see a dev team take the same concept and be more intentional about it. There’s a lot that could be done to improve quality of life and create an overall smoother experience, even just by implementing current best-in-class features.

This is surprising to read. Ukraine was never going to have enough ammo, weapons, or manpower to win the war, but I never thought the western media would run out of cope.

Oh, is that what we’re gonna do today? We’re gonna fight?

Anthropologists discover evidence of ancient subspecies of humans with gigantic, goose-like penises.

Some facilities should be free because they’re intended to be fully accessible by everyone in a community, which means if the demand outstrips the capacity, the capacity should be raised. If the library or gym or cafeteria is too full, there needs to be a new one built. The exceptions would be unique or high-demand spaces that couldn’t feasibly be accessible by everyone all the time, in which case you would have to ration them in some manner or another. But even then they wouldn’t necessarily need to have a cost, per se. Provincial parks in Canada, as an example, offer very cheap camping, but you have to book in advance during times of high demand. They are essentially free, something like $6/night per campsite, with the fee mostly being a good faith payment to ensure that you’re not just squatting on the reservations. Other than the very modest fee, the rationing is done via people making plans ahead of time for use of the parks, which is a reasonable enough way to handle it.

One thing about communal spaces under socialism is that there should be way more spaces available to everyone. Without the incentive to make places exclusive for profit, there should be a lot more capacity overall to accommodate communal areas. The question is more about what kinds of services are required for communal spaces, because that’s where the real cost comes in. Buildings require maintenance, swimming pools require lifeguards, bars require bartenders, etc. and that’s where there might be fees required or useful to ensure that it’s worthwhile to maintain the programming within those spaces.