pachrist

it’s the same goddamn cycle over and over

This is the key. The people you can trust are the people who are going against that cycle.

Bringing up the Bible on Lemmy is generally a no-no, but I love Ecclesiastes. It’s a book about meaninglessness. Everything is the same as it has always been and there is nothing of true value; everything is meaningless. It’s the same goddamn cycle. While when it was written is debatable, it’s comforting and horrible to know someone thousands of years ago saw things the same way I do. Comforting, because I’m not alone in how I feel. Horrible in that people still feel this way after thousands of years.

The writer’s conclusion is to fear God and keep his commandments. The commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. Loving your neighbor as yourself means being kind and empathetic. Kindness and empathy solve nearly everything.

So, even though it may achieve nothing, be kind and empathetic. Cling to people who are kind and empathetic. Be an oasis amid the hate.

Horst Wessel shot and killed at Utah Valley University event.

I need this Onion article.

My wife and I spend about 25% of our pre-tax income on childcare. Cutting that, plus another 10% other places would be fine.

It’s not accurate. Way more than one user says this.

I read this comment and now MasterCard keeps calling me.

Just recast a Bond movie from Pineapple Express.

James Franco would be worse than Seth Rogen as Bond, because he’d take any sexually aggressive scenes too seriously.

So Seth Rogen gets to be M, Danny McBride is Q, and Amber Heard is the Bond girl.

Kind of fits, in a shitting the bed kind of way.

Vin Diesel as M.

It’s totally fine, the ring is probably also made of lead.

The web has almost always been unusable without an adblocker. Ads today are less malicious, but more insidious. Clicking the wrong ad in 2003 would brick your computer. Clicking the wrong ad today means you’ll have to cancel a credit card after your personal data is compiled and sold on the black market.

Nothing new. Ads don’t fuel a free internet. They fuel a business model. The free internet is fueled by the time and donations of kind, dedicated people.

I’d hazard it’s most companies.

Grok is going to roast you mercilessly for not buying a Mercedes as it uses your Tesla to suicide bomb the nearest bagel shop.

I was ok with the first Chris Pratt one. Not great, not awful.

What I really wish they had done was set the next one a couple years down the line. Maybe a couple of those military helicopters that are stealing the dinosaurs at the end crashes in mainland South/Central America. Imagine a Jurassic Park movie that’s a cross between Alien/Predator/Planet of the Apes. Really lean into the highly intelligent apex predator and horror angle.

The problem with these movies, is they keep letting the cat out of the bag, over and over and over. Cat’s out. What’s next?

As someone who’s had two kids since AI really vaulted onto the scene, I am enormously confused as to why people think AI isn’t or, particularly, can’t be sentient. I hate to be that guy who pretend to be the parenting expert online, but most of the people I know personally who take the non-sentient view on AI don’t have kids. The other side usually does.

When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

People love to tout this as some sort of smoking gun. That feels like a trap. Obviously, we can argue about the age children gain sentience, but my year and a half old daughter is building an LLM with pattern recognition, tests, feedback, hallucinations. My son is almost 5, and he was and is the same. He told me the other day that a petting zoo came to the school. He was adamant it happened that day. I know for a fact it happened the week before, but he insisted. He told me later that day his friend’s dad was in jail for threatening her mom. That was true, but looked to me like another hallucination or more likely a misunderstanding.

And as funny as it would be to argue that they’re both sapient, but not sentient, I don’t think that’s the case. I think you can make the case that without true volition, AI is sentient but not sapient. I’d love to talk to someone in the middle of the computer science and developmental psychology Venn diagram.

I cannot imagine how hard it is to be as kind, loving, and gracious as she is, but to be surrounded by a world with so much willful anger, hate, and misery.

As much as I dislike Steve Jobs personally, Apple needs someone at the helm who is product and customer experience oriented like he was. Obviously, technical know-how is good, but someone exclusively technical would flounder. Tim Cook is a supply chain guy. His replacement would almost certainly be someone marketing oriented, since innovation no longer drives Apple. Sales do.

I mean, I know JK Rowling sucks, and it’s been a long time since the first Harry Potter movie came out, but it was definitely a component and precursor to Hagrid beating the shit out of that door.

It’s a tricky situation.

I think a lot of men, particularly rural men, want someone in their corner. I think a lot of people are underestimating how angry and hopeless many of these men feel. The study a couple years ago from NPR about how many families are living paycheck to paycheck, have less than like $400 in savings, and have nobody to call in during a financial emergency was astounding.

Most Americans are in a desperate situation. And they aren’t used to it. And they feel they don’t deserve it. And because of that, they’re going to vote for whoever promises to fix it, whether they fix it or not.

The issue is that neither party is willing to fix the wealth desparity and class oriented labor practices that cause it. They’re only interested in playing the same game we are now that keeps them paid, and grinds everyone else into the dirt.

The movies are so overhyped and overrated at this point. But Monty Python’s Flying Circus is not, it’s fantastic.

Bring back this and the throne room decorations.

I think this is a case where the imagination is much, much better than the reality.

For the mobilization of technology, miniaturization has had a lot of benefits, not just in the technology, but in the accessibility. Having a desktop computer instead of a mainframe was huge. It brought the computer to the home. Laptops becoming viable was huge again. It untethered the computer from the wall. For most of the planet, we’re still in the midst of the massive leap that is smart phones. It put a computer in the pocket of billions of people.

Beating that is hard. Smart phones are the most accessible, most powerful devices most end users have ever used. We take that for granted, and we take the time it took to get there for granted. It took 25 years of desktops to get real, decent laptops (personally, I’d say mid 90s). It took 25 of laptops to get real, decent smartphones (again personally, I’d say ~2010ish).

Like it or not, we have another decade to go probably before the technology is there for the next evolution in personal computing. But the problem we have really is that there’s not another leap as far as accessibility is concerned. Smart phones work places where laptops can’t. Laptops work places where desktops can’t. Desktops work places where mainframes can’t. Smart phones can work anywhere. Taking the computer from the datacenter, to the home, to your backpack, to your pocket is huge. Is the next step from the pocket to your wrist? To your face? Is it worth it? Is it really that much better?