“Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure” has always been my policy for spiders, mosquitoes and ticks, so I’m looking forward to World War 3 going nuclear. I’m just a bit concerned that the “from orbit” part implies I’m supposed to be up there when it happens, and while I understand the basic mechanics of how to get there, I’m not sure how I’m going to handle the logistics after that point.
Have it spray tear gas first. But wait, then the laser won’t be able to penetrate the cloud. Maybe we could add a quadcopter drone to clear a path to the mosquito for the laser to fire. But then we’ll need a system so the drone doesn’t run into a human choking on tear gas, and the drone can’t see because of the limited visibility, could we use infrared sensors I wonder? /s
This is a stupid system. I love engineers, but they tend to uh… overengineer things like this.
Us digital hippies just believe in free data and world peace, man.
Rest assured, the feeling is deeply mutual.
Technically almost everything is educational in some way, if you’re willing to engage with it in the right way. Like you said, period dramas and historical dramas are often a great way of learning about (some aspects of) history. The problem is you need to be able to sort out the fictional elements from the non-fictional elements and without at least a little bit of background that becomes challenging. Some methods that might be useful is cross-referencing by watching multiple shows about the same topic from different sources. If both shows include the same element, there’s a good chance it’s based on some real historical evidence. But you also have to understand that evidence is not proof, and there’s a lot of disagreement in science and understanding, and that’s good and natural. Not everything is going to match up exactly. You have to do your own research and actually study real sources and do your own experiments. This is why edutainment starts to become of limited value.
The problem with growing up is that you’re getting to a higher level of education and understanding, and that comes with caveats. No longer can you just rely on simplistic expositions of “this is absolutely how it works” and you start to get into a lot of “seems” and “maybes”. There’s a lot of stuff we just don’t know with absolute confidence and as we have learned from the historical documentary Star Wars, only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Most things at the adult level are not explicitly going to teach you things (because they effectively can’t) as much as they are going to motivate you to research further, experiment yourself, or become interested in things you might not otherwise find interesting.
With that said, there is tons of educational and entertaining content out there. Sometimes stuff that seems stupid is actually very educational. Sometimes stuff that seems boring and educational can be entertaining as hell. If you want a bunch of Youtube channels to help point your recommendation algorithm in the right direction, try some of these channels (in no particular order or topic consistency):
Honorable mention for bugfishhhh’s insane and comedic hour-long video on the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England which came out of nowhere but I’m here for it.
Given that AIs are demonstratably incapable of successfully operating a vending machine for more than about a week, sounds like a great time to start a competitor.
A romantic partner is ideally also a friend. They can often handle both, but they’re just one friend and that’s putting a lot of weight on their shoulders. And things in life change. What happens if your romantic partner gets seriously ill and you can’t confide in them anymore? What if the romantic partner is the person you’re having issues with and you need an outside point of view? Not everything is so minimalist in real life. Good luck trying to keep it minimalist like you’re proposing, but life often has other ideas.
Yeah like most people probably don’t remember the web before Google, but there was altavista. You know what happened to altavista? It became overrun by SEO bullshit and people stopped using them literally overnight because Google did a better job. If Google starts doing a shit job, you know what’s going to happen? People will stop using them literally overnight as soon as anyone else starts doing a better job.
Yes, web search is a “hard” problem, but a lot of it is a hard problem because there’s an insane amount of corporate SEO slop out there, and now there’s a lot of AI slop out there too. The first person to solve this problem is going to completely destroy Google. Is it an unsolvable problem? I don’t think so.
At its core it’s a federation problem. Websites want to be discovered. People want to discover websites. But bad people also want to abuse the discovery process to show their own spam that people don’t want to discover. The magic that Google brought to the table was PageRank, which allowed them to determine the authenticity of the spam by the number of backlinks that went from other real sites TO that site. This is essentially just “voting”, same as we do here. Of course immediately people tried to abuse it by generating their own massive backlink farms but those are pretty obvious and easy to taint as bad actors and scrub out their rankings or remove them completely. If it’s not clear yet how similar this is to the exact sort of trustworthiness problems the fediverse is also dealing with with, just wait. People will find ways to solve this.
The arms race against shitty content will never stop – but the point is, if Google is no longer participating in the war against shitty content and is now switching sides to become a producer of shitty content, they’re not going to succeed. People don’t want that shit, and people will instantly vote with their feet the moment any very inevitable alternative appears.
It’s not “smart” it’s a “convincing text generator”. It’s very good at being convincing, like making you think it is smart. But it doesn’t know anything, it doesn’t understand anything, it is a parrot repeating what other people on the internet have said in similar situations.
If you want to do businesses in a country, don’t complain when…
Complaining about things the government tells them to do on behalf of society is pretty much the foundation of every company’s whole business model at this point.
A high power laser? That feels like it might work. Perhaps we should start experimenting on Jeff Bezos’s head to see what works best.
Sadly the inescapable physical truth of convex vs concave lensing still relentlessly holds its tenacious grip on reality, despite the billions of dollars these folks have accumulated they have still, thus far, been unable to alter that particular aspect of reality.
The only solution I can offer for Jeff Bezos is to begin forming his skull inwards somewhat so that any captured light can reach a proper focusing point. As as astronomer with some experience with such reflective optical surfaces, I’d be happy to begin the grinding and polishing process for you at any time, I’ll just need you to hold him still while I work. It’s a very precise process.
I assume his head is mostly thick skull surrounding empty space anyway, so I think there should be little harm done.
I haven’t had my intro sequence where some dramatic event forces me out of my horrible corpo job yet, but I’m expecting it any day now.
I haven’t age verified anything and I don’t plan to. It’s only normal when you normalize it. If something will no longer allow me access without verifying my age, I will either find a way around it or I will no longer use that thing. If Youtube is not going to let me watch age restricted videos, so what? I will not watch age restricted videos on Youtube. I will instead use an addon to find them on odysee or peertube instead if possible, or I’ll just live my life accepting that video probably wasn’t one I really needed that contained the only key to living a happy life. It’s not that important, certainly not important enough to verify my age to the surveillance police.
If they try to make me age verify my home internet connection, well then I’m gonna have to get real creative, sure, but rest assured I will (with the help of the rest of the privacy-oriented community) find ways to obfuscate the fuck out of all traffic in and out of my network so thoroughly it won’t even matter if they know who owns my internet connection because it won’t even be relevant anymore. VPN everything. Become an open relay. Join the I2P project. Embrace mesh networking. Fuck them, they can’t stop us all.
These are the good guys, when we land in cyberpunk dystopia hell, these will be the guys I’m joining up with.
Don’t worry they’ve got a plan for that. They’re going to let most of humanity die off and kill each other fighting for the scraps they’ve left behind, while they use money to live as close to forever as they can get, while hiding in their bunkers and protecting their own descendants. Once humanity is down to a few million people at most, the environmental problems should stop getting worse and their army of robots can clean up the rest.
This could’ve been regulated decades ago. We chose not to regulate it, because we were told it would hurt the economy, and we always choose benefits to the economy, whether they are real or imagined, over environmental regulation. Always have, always will. We’re still doing it today. We could regulate it today too. But AI is now the foundation of our economy, so we will choose what we imagine will benefit the economy, even if it is completely imaginary, over the real impacts to the environment, yet again. Because we always do. The cult of capitalism has brainwashed us all and there doesn’t seem to be any escape. The capital in the economy must grow, forever. The people who benefit from it will make sure to tell us so when they tell us what decision we must make for the sake of the economy that benefits them. And we will listen to them, because they have lots of money so they are ideal successful people whose success we rely on for our own meager lives.
You can get an AI to plagiarize a bunch of open source projects that people have volunteered time to create, bypassing the licensing of those projects and mashing them together into something that sort of resembles what you want it to do on a basic level and is full of horrifying security holes and feature gaps that may not matter for your particular usage.
So, yes, you can vibe code. That’s what vibe coding is. Enjoy.
If I was paying for it, hell naw. But if my employer not only is willing to pay for it, but considers it a performance metric? I’m going to use it for fucking everything. These are the incentives they give me, I’m going to follow the incentives. Talking to Claude is what they pay me for, apparently.
But like the article says, if I don’t continue practicing on my own code in my unpaid off-work hours, I imagine I’d be regressing in my skills too. I do that because I enjoy it as a hobby, but if I didn’t, I could see myself and probably a lot of other people getting rugpulled by this.
Financial censorship is a useful tool for people who want stuff censored.