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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • fatal police shootings in more-Democratic states have declined 15 percent on a population-adjusted basis, with the rate holding relatively steady since Mr. Floyd’s death.

    But in Republican-leaning states, they have risen 23 percent. And within those redder states, exurbs and rural areas, which tend to be more conservative than cities, have the highest rates of police killings.

    You’re telling me that in republican bastion states of lower education, less unions, less social spending, and more racism, is tied to more violence and a greater amount of extra-judicial killings by the state-sanctioned corporation-protectors? But they have almost 4 weeks of training! How could this possibly be??

    But don’t worry! They’re trying to make it worse! Far worse!

    This week, the Justice Department said it would no longer investigate or oversee nearly two dozen police departments that were accused of civil rights violations, including in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. And in April, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at “unleashing” law enforcement, including by directing the U.S. attorney general to “provide legal resources” to defend police officers accused of wrongdoing.


  • I was thinking about their horrifying conclusion as well, and your comment made me pine for the days when you wouldn’t know something. Think about it, back before the internet, if you had a random question, you either had to interact with some trusted person, or you went to the library and looked it up. It’s like the ever-present access to all information has quelled or killed any notion of curiosity or boredom, and it’s within those frames of mind that learning and inspiration come. I remember as a kid when I wouldn’t know the answer to something, I’d think on it for days, weeks. I’d get stuck on a video game level, and hit my head against the wall for hours trying to overcome it, only to pick up a random gamer magazine off the rack at the mall, and read the solution. Treating that magazine like it was the lost treasure map of some ancient expedition, passing it around my group of friends… Interactions and experiences that are gone forever.

    The idea that we’ve gradually went from relying on trusted professionals, learned educators, and scientific rigor, replacing them with a corporations data-harvesting LLM, on-line influencers, and click-bait “journals” cosplaying as academic centers with integrity. This article is basically celebrating the fact that we’ve off-shored all of our thinking, curiosity, and inquisitiveness to machines, all the while we struggle for scraps in a corporation dominated life devoid of genuine human interaction. We’re all to busy sipping dopamine hits from a screen instead of actually living our lives.

    I grew up while the internet was being slowly rolled out, and being from the last generation to remember what it was like before the internet, I can say that the things I miss most are privacy, the ability to be bored, and not knowing.

    It’s worse now, and it’s harder everyday to imagine that life on this planet will improve.


  • The existence of this kind of instinct within an LLM is extremely concerning. Acting out towards self-preservation via unethical means is something that can be hand-waved away in an LLM, but once we reach true AGI, this same thing will pop-up, and there’s no reason to believe that 1. we would notice, and 2. we would be able to stop it. This is the kind of thing that should, ideally, give us pause enough to set some world-wide ground rules for the development of this new tech. Creating a thinking organism that can potentially access vital cyber architecture whilst acting unethically towards self-preservation is how you get Skynet.




  • When I was a cook, even if I was just making something simple, I could still find creative satisfaction in a variety of ways. How you sprinkle on the garnish, plating, using a little more of this, a little less of that. Food to a chef is like art designed to be destroyed, so with the temporary nature of the medium, it really allows you to be creative. You’re not hung up on making it perfect, because it’s just about to be eaten, so it let’s you be more free with your design choices. It can be fun creating art while you’re supposed to be working.

    but if my job was suddenly just washing up after a machine… well. That will get old real quick.







  • nobody would care

    Information Overload. The march doesn’t matter. The people who did the upsetting thing have already gone on to do several more upsetting things by the time we’ve started marching against the first one. The people reporting about the upsetting thing miss the point but it doesn’t matter because nobodies actually paying attention, it’s just fluff on in the background. The white noise we need to go about our day maintaining some false sense of “staying up to date” when it’s impossible to do. The torrent of information comes from all over the globe and never stops growing. Even if everything is suddenly perfect in your neighborhood, city, state, or country, it doesn’t matter because there’s a genocide somewhere else, and the pope died, and there’s a famine and a new study that says the sweet treats you like are going to kill you and the stock market is down but it’s back up by the time you check and you should’ve bought the dip so you could actually retire but you were too busy ignoring a TV while looking at bad news on your phone and eating a sweet treat because nothing feels real anymore and you just need a hit of dopamine before you start panicking and reach for the gun in the nightstand to put a bullet in your brain because at least the bullet will be real and the silence afterwards won’t be temporary.