When the AI bubble bursts, even janitors and nurses will lose their jobs. Financial institutions will go bust.

It would be the one sensible thing about him then

Make it a fountain at least

I find it interesting, from my own experience, that video games often are comprised of structured problem solving within clear boundaries and with explicitly stated goals: In many ways it closely resembles something we’d describe as work. Do a unit of work, get a point. Get enough points, you win. Only, the real world is nothing like that. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly less like that with corporate intermediaries and algorithms that are added on top of everything, e.g. empoyers’ Applicant Tracking Systems that automatically throws your job application in the trash because it didn’t include some keyword, or whatever.

I think focusing on the dopamine kicks from the games’ rewards misses part of what make video games effective escapism from many alienated youths and adults. It’s the game themselves that are the escape.

Yeah, taking the service down is an acceptable solution, but do you think Open AI will do that on their own without outside accountability?

I’m sure that’s true in some technical sense, but clearly a lot of people treat them as borderline human. And Open AI, in particular, tries to get users to keep engaging with the LLM as of it were human/humanlike. All disclaimers aside, that’s how they want the user to think of the LLM, a probabilistic engine for returning the most likely text response you wanted to hear is a tougher sell for casual users.

This gas no basis in reality. No way that society makes it to 2050.

Every country is moving towards this and there is no fucking stopping it, it seems.

That’s what the Cybertrucks were for all along

Yeah, for sure. A lack of talented people is definitely not the limiting factor here. The Nissan Leaf DIY community is doing awesome things, for instance.

Not really going to happen, I think, battery warranties make up really big parts of EVs market value. You don’t want to do anything that could risk that.

You are right that there are no perfect democracies, but the EU really isn’t even close. Rather the EU should foremost be considered a technocracy with some formal democratic underwriting.

In most cases, that’s totally fine and not a problem in terms of democracy. Most policies, especially in the matters the EU was originally formed to make decisions on, there isn’t a huge interest for citizens to get involved – national interests (governments) and organized interest/lobby groups usually offer enough avenues for input on things like technical agricultural export standards. However, as the Union expands into things like organizing mass surveillance under flimsy pretexts, and whatnot, private citizens aren’t adequately represented – a stronger popular mandate is required for the decisionmaking to truly be considered democratic.

Formally, I, as a citizen of an EU member state, can influence the decisions of the EU in two ways: By voting for my country’s parliament every fourth year and by voting in the general elections for European Parliament every fifth. So let’s examine how far that goes.

Where I live, the main opposition party and the largest government party generally agree on most controversial issues pertaining to privacy or individual rights, e.g. Chat Control. Together these parties control a majority of the seats of parliament. Those parties gain the bulk of their support on domestic issues, such as tax policy, crime prevention, etcetera. Thus, question like Chat Control are essentially dead on arrival in terms of parliamentary politics. Now, my country is also not a perfect democracy, but comparatively it would (justly) rank quite high and parties can be responsive to popular opinion and outcries. So let’s say a citizen group managed to put Chat Control on the agenda, to the point where parties feel vulnerable on the issue. What then? Then that amounts to one vote out of 27 in the European Council, which is only meaningful when that is enough for a veto.

But the ubiquitous vetoes are what truly undermines the EU’s standing as a democracy, in my opinion. Notably, vetoes are pretty much the best you can get from your EP vote as well, in terms of the parliament’s decision making powers. In reality, the only thing citizens of the EU can rally behind is stopping proposals by, chiefly, the supreme technocratic body, the Commission. There is no cross-border party mechanism with pan-European campaigning on the council level. Voters do not influence majorities. And on the EP level the party mechanism, built on “political groups”, is opaque and not truly cross-border. Cohesive citizen involvement is foreign to the EU decision making process.

That is not to say that the EU is a nefarious body, or that the democratic deficiencies are intended to alienate EU citizens from the decision process. It’s just that it is glaring, especially in the context of Chat Control, that public opinion isn’t in the driver’s seat.

It’s really cool, but also kind of depressing, to see what we’re capable of when we’re also speed running to extinction while not even implementing well-known and obvious mitigation steategies.

That place is just flabbergasting nowadays. Click almost anywhere and you’re greeted with colorful descriptions of jews and any other kind of bat shit overt comicbook bad guy levelf of absurd racism. Anywhere. What is Twitter’s utillity even?

Keeping thieves away by never cleaning the bike reminds me of the old bicycle touring strategy of hanging sweaty and unwashed clothes to dry from your handlebars when parked. Bonus theft deterrent!

Also, I technically do have an engineering degree, which is why the lights and wiring are, ahem, functional. Most of the time.

To be clear, having an engineering degree is cool – it’s the very specific (but all too common) type of engineer that wants jerk off into his own mouth when he sees a Cybertruck and organically follows Elon Musk on Twitter, that is lame and has a lot of bad ideas, sometimes about “innovation” of bicycles.

Buying used makes a lot of sense, especially for commuting. The design of the bicycle was basically perfected in the late 1800s, anybody trying to tell you different is a fart boofing Tesla fanboy with an engineering degree and zero cycling experience.

(Admittedly, I ride a carbon frame road bike with electronic shifting, not because I’m a shit sniffing engineer with a hard-on for Musk, but because I’m a middle-aged man with lycra for brains).

Hah! Shows your morals! He could have meant you could build it, but your thief brain went straight to thieving, eh, thief?

/s