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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 13th, 2023

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  • That’s the bar that automatic driving has. It messes up once and you never trust it again and the news spins the failure far and wide.

    Your uncle doing the same thing just triggers you to yell at him, the guy behind him flips you off, he apologizes, you’re nervous for a while, and you continue your road trip. Even if he killed someone we would blame the one uncle, or some may blame his entire class at worst. But we would not say that no human should drive again until it is fixed like we do with automated cars.

    I do get the difference between those, and I do think that they should try to make automated drivers better, but we can at least agree about that premise: automated cars have a seriously unreasonable bar to maintain. Maybe that’s fair, and we will never accept anything but perfect, but then we may never have automated cars. And as someone who drives with humans every day, that makes me very sad.




  • Their wealth is almost entirely composed of equity, which topples if the world fails. All the cash they have to build these mansions is derived from this. The value of cash itself is derived from this. The only things of worth in a post-apocalyptic world are the tangible things they bought with cash while it was worth something. Shelter, food generation, defense… those are still worth something, along with more important things: physical skills and practical knowledge.

    They will find themselves in their mansion-bunker, surrounded by people who they have paid to be there, in a world where the currency they use to pay them has failed. Do they not see what will happen? Even if their plan involves complete self-isolation, how do they plan on maintaining these massive properties and fixing things when they break? Perhaps they have a plan to close themselves off to some smaller, easier to maintain part of it. But then what is the whole point if all you have is solitary confinement? Even if it all works and they can survive it, they will eventually emerge into a world that has failed, where their wealth means little to nothing and the skills that built that wealth are as useful as ornamental testicles on a monster truck.

    Why do they put their money toward projects like this, instead of towards ways to make the world more stable so that it doesn’t fail in the first place. If I had the immense wealth they have, which was completely contingent on the world and people that it stood upon, I would do everything I could to make sure the world would not fall apart. And if it wasn’t enough and it was failing still, I would spend even more until almost nothing was left. Building a fortress in a failing state is stupid, and history can tell you that with 5 minutes of reading.

    In all their supposed intelligence, it seems they haven’t thought it through much… or I am missing something glaring.







  • Agreed. Physical ownership is the shelf of old DVD and CDROM PC and XBOX classic game boxes in my basement that take up space, collect dust, will never work again, and will only be a remembrance of nostalgia for a bygone day. Plus I’ll probably never seriously want to play them again… let’s be honest. I can watch a video of someone else playing, it scratches the same itch, and saves me the trouble.

    I like digital ownership, but there needs to be protections so we can’t be screwed.






  • I was actually sitting here not even thinking about ChatGPT or about Brazil. I was thinking about the metadata and algorithms on the internet that propped this story up and want me to be mad about it… or something. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to say about fucking Brazil having ChatfuckingGPT write their laws. Is this the thing I am supposed to care about this week?

    Sometimes it’s more frustrating not knowing how they want me to feel about this stuff than it is to be constantly barraged by the outrageous posturing of the news.


  • I wonder if they know the dollar figure in sales that ads, for all their expense, have gained out of me. I’d say it’s near zero. You may say I am subconsciously influenced and even if I don’t click the ad, I may buy the product at some other date due to recognition. Maybe. But that individual ad impression that someone paid for that I did not click (or blocked) does not know that. And it’s quite likely they don’t care, because ever missed click is still getting the word out so to speak.

    But what they should care about is the absolute dislike I have towards aggressive advertising. And I am not alone. When I face an unskippable or full page or pop up ad, I don’t subconsciously want that product then or later. I consciously hate the product just a little more and more with each impression.

    And now that it’s an arms race, the lines are being drawn, the hatred being cultivated, and the whole effort has lost its entire point: To make me friendly toward the product and to buy it. And I feel like sites like YouTube essentially don’t give a shit. They have the advertisers convinced through some great effort that ads are effective and worth it. All while doing everything that they can to keep us corralled and our eyes pried open to view them.