• 0 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

    I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

    To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

    The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

    I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

    There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

    Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

    Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

    The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.

    You are in charge of your life.




  • It will truly be a shock to the owner class when after extracting every last bit of value out of the planet they realize that they can’t eat money.

    They can’t breathe it either.

    It won’t protect them from drought or super hurricanes.

    The bunkers they are building to ride out the doom they are sowing will be protected by men. Men who today are willing to accepts their slips of paper. But when that paper becomes worthless, they will slit their throats and sleep in their beds.

    They are piling up paper that will turn to ash and they think they are oh so clever. They’ve been able to buy off and escape accountability in almost every domain. But the extraction has taken its toll on the earth, the delicate balance that the ecosystem exists in and the damage they have done can’t be fixed by buying a senator or even building a bunker.

    It may be the only solace the rest of us have, man seems incapable of holding this class accountable, but reality doesn’t care. The laws of physics will not bend as easily as the law of man, and they will sit there with their bank accounts full of zeroes and impotently slap at the cold cement walls of the prisons they’ve built for themselves and they will know fear.


  • “Which are looks or an extravagant personality”

    Why won’t cure girls date me, I’m ugly AND boring!

    It’s so sad that these people clump together and just reinforce each other’s insecurities. Sure if you look like a thumb and only want to regurgitate 4chan memes you aren’t a very desirable partner. But there are tons of guys that are not leading man attractive that have partners. How do they do it?

    Do things, when you do the things if there are women there, treat them like the human beings that they are. The more things you do the more stuff you have to talk about, when you find people that like the same stuff you do and you treat them like people, they end up liking you… it’s really that easy.

    It is maddening watching so many men gather together to try to unravel the mystery of “treat women as people” and the absolutely bonkers alternatives they will come up with. Did you know that there are fitcels? These are incels that bought the propaganda and decided “I’ll become the Chad” and dedicated themselves to building fit bodies. They still have the “-cel” suffix because for all the effort, all the hours in the gym, all the supplements, all the physical pain, they never realized that women are people.

    It’s fucking wild. Maybe the internet was a mistake


  • What stability though? They’ve been there since being established after WW2 and it’s been an extremely volatile region the entire time.

    It would at least be a Faustian bargain if they were doing horrible atrocities but that’s just the price you pay for the Middle East being a peaceful and stable area of the world… but the Middle East has been in crisis for my entire life, so what am I missing?

    Also America has the ability to project its power in the region without Israel, so what exactly is there to gain?


  • It is not, in fact, cheaper to impose the death penalty.

    I was given the con side of the death penalty to argue once in forensics. I was actually pro death penalty and one reason was that I thought it was cheaper. I went to do research on this because it was certainly a point I’d have to contend with from the pro side.

    It is vastly more expensive to execute a prisoner than to imprison them for life. https://ejusa.org/resource/wasteful-inefficient/

    Now you might think, hey that’s a link to a group that wants to get rid of the death penalty, of course they are going to say it’s more expensive. Go read the studies, I did, and again and again it is far more expensive to execute.

    Why? Because we, pretty reasonably, put a high burden in front of the state before we allow them to kill a citizen. The legal process for both reaching the death penalty and then the numerous appeals to that decision is not cheap. It is a massive cost that the taxpayer has to bear to uphold the ruling and actually carry out the execution.

    So it is far cheaper to house a person for life, and this shouldn’t really be that shocking. The prisons are built, the daily care of a prisoner is minimal, we provide them with the barest living conditions and food. The number of people we even could execute is a tiny percent of the prison population, so it’s not like they are taking up some huge amount of space and require us to build huge facilities to house them. If you could thanos snap every prisoner that could reasonably be executed out of existence, you wouldn’t free up enough prison housing space to close even a single facility, even more so when you consider that these prisoners are a handful in each facility.

    The danger with “common sense” things that confirm our beliefs is that they can be wrong. The world is more complicated than it seems. I used to believe that it was cheaper to execute than to house. I was forced to argue the other side and because I’m competitive and want to win I did the research. I’m glad I did, it taught me an important lesson in not just believing something because it felt obviously correct.

    All told, I’m not really sure I’m even against the death penalty. Some people are irredeemable and their deaths don’t weigh heavy on me. On the other hand, the idea of making it any easier for the state to execute me if they want to is unsettling. The common arguments in favor of the death penalty don’t really hold up. I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe the person is going to some eternal torture, they simply cease to exist. And it’s more expensive. From a practical standpoint I see little benefit for imposing the death penalty, but I understand the point of view of people being so reprehensible they don’t deserve to live even if it’s a high cost on society.

    If you would like to continue arguing in favor of the death penalty though, you’ll do yourself a favor to go research the subject. It is more complicated and nuanced than you might think at first glance. And at the end of the day, if the thing you care about is cost, you’d never execute another person. It is far far more expensive to execute a prison than to house them.




  • I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

    If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

    Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

    Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

    It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.






  • Honestly the teacher laughing was enough, literally no one is going to give a fuck after that.

    People need to realize that they are not the main character, if you want something embarrassing you did to go away just don’t bring it up. People aren’t jotting down notes to bring up later, they have full lives of their own, no one in college has time to commit this to memory any more than a funny anecdote and they won’t bother to remember who did it.





  • The most poetic death for trump would be to suffer a stroke at one of his rallies. The stroke hits and he begins to mix up words and blather nonsense. He can sense something is wrong but his bigly words are not working, he tries to tell his faithful what’s happening.

    The meschia and windmilths are shooo shlaaaaad

    He slurs out, those weren’t the words he wanted, but with neurons misfiring the most used pathways are trying to help. He spends minutes, all recorded for history, dying in front of his bored onlookers unable to ask for help. His years of word salad and lies have finally achieved an awful goal, no one can tell his brain is broken. For this boy that cried wolf a million times, finally the fangs of an enemy he can’t bully or bribe have sunk in deep, years of kfc fried chicken grease now blocking bloodflow to his brain.

    It’s only been a few minutes, the crowd awaits some applause or laugh line, but for trump the time feels like an eternity. The pain is increasing, the fear all consuming, he collapses and dies there.

    A fitting end to the man whose greatest fear was that people would realize his weird incoherent ramblings were a con.