I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.

I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.

So if I just pour enough water on my salad it becomes a broth? Awesome!

You could say this about most standup comedians. The sober ones are the weird ones!

Part of the reason I included the link to Connections was to illustrate just how many people are involved in maintaining our critical infrastructure. But of course the show can only highlight a tiny fraction of them.

You might think “oh, we don’t need insurance companies so we could eliminate all those jobs” but even if we did eliminate the insurance industry we’d have to replace a lot of the work that people at insurance companies do.

Take health insurance for example. You might say “we should get rid of health insurance and give everyone free, public health care!” Well, I live in Canada and we have free public health care. Guess what? We still have a health insurance company: the government. They do all the same jobs: receive and process health care claims, decide which treatments to cover and which to reject, and send payments to health care providers once the treatment is approved and the work has been completed. The only difference is that there’s no profit in the government system. Otherwise they’re still doing the same amount of work, so we still need all those people doing those jobs.

You might go on to say “why don’t we just eliminate the approval process and pay for every single treatment?” but that line of thinking shouldn’t get you very far. We don’t have unlimited doctors or unlimited hospital beds. There will always be far more possible treatments to give people than should be given. In the case of older people with terminal illnesses, you can spend essentially unlimited money on treatments in a desperate attempt to prolong their life… and prolong their suffering in the process.

That environment of our evolution, like the Garden of Eden, no longer exists. We’ve created a new environment in which sitting around and vibing is no longer sufficient to thrive. Without the economic output we all die. See this first episode of Connections for details.

The conservatives are pissed of because he’s drinking their milkshake. The electorate moved rightward (Justin Trudeau fatigue) and he moved with them, elbowing the Conservative Party further to the right into unelectable fringe la la land.

The Liberal party has a history of making these rightward shifts. It’s why they’re called “Canada’s Natural Governing Party.” They have no real ideological base, they just see which way the wind is blowing and go that way.

If you give it some random address then they’ll get the food, not you?

Also why even use the app if you’re going to pick up at the restaurant yourself? Just call the restaurant and give them your order. You’ll pay less for the food because there’s no fees going to the app!

Too much eye contact can be threatening (predatory animals are really good at staring). There’s a fine line between eye contact with romantic/sexual overtones and aggressive/scary/creepy eye contact. If they’re avoiding your gaze then it might be the latter.

If you don’t tell them your location, how does the food reach you?

You’re ordering food delivery through a VPN? Why?

Just get Maxwell’s demon to separate the plasma into positive and negative charges, effectively creating a capacitor, then discharge it directly over some HVDC lines!

Yes exactly. What they really want to offer is an AI employee replacement service. If they could replace one of your employees who makes $40k/year then they could easily charge $30k/year for the service and you (the business owner and AI customer) could add $10k to your profits.

The fact is that they can’t do that. They can’t even make money charging thousands of dollars a year for basic LLM service that people use to write emails and the like.

The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.

Yes exactly. Hobbies can be enjoyed once a week or two weeks or even once a month! Or they can be practiced more frequently but for less time. 20 minutes a day practicing a musical instrument can do a lot for your learning in so little time. The hard part is sticking to it!

The stat is for passenger deaths. People jumping in front of the train are not passengers, so don’t count for that.

I think what’s likely to be a big cause of train passenger deaths is the derailments they sometimes have in India. Those trains tend to be extremely overcrowded so one derailment can cause a lot of deaths.

Academic performance is about performing well on closed book written exams covering narrow subjects. The whole system is designed for 19th century teaching and testing. Using a computer does not help with that whatsoever and may in some cases hurt (by distracting someone who should be studying).

I tutor high school kids as a volunteer (next year will be my 10th year doing so). Over that time period I have noticed a sharp decline in a lot of basic academic skills: mental arithmetic (without a calculator), spelling, grammar, handwriting. These are the very skills one needs to master to perform well on closed book exams. Your ability to research a topic or get help from Google (incl. spellcheck and grammar check in Google Docs) or ChatGPT is of no benefit whatsoever when all you’ve got is a pencil and a piece of paper in front of you.

It says you can teleport. Doesn’t say you can take anything with you. Maybe you arrive there completely naked?

I love VtM:B but I never had high hopes for this one. Direct sequels made by unrelated developers rarely work out.

The family destruction came first. You don’t get to that level of cynical populism with a healthy family life and outlook.

I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?

I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.

A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.