Yeah, but if they’re in a sufficiently abstracted industry, the domino chain of failing petit bourgeoise will sustain them until retirement. Especially when you’ve already got enough to live comfortably, might as well squeeze as much juice out as possible, quarter by quarter. The aftermath is someone else’s problem.

Left wing voters are not motivated by genocide, nor trying to meet those who do support it in the middle with “just a bit of genocide, as a treat”.

Since we’re adding caveats of reality, I’ll join in: the Democrats’ myriad mistakes and missteps in “motivating” left wing voters does not absolve those voters of their own responsibility.

You did the right thing

voted for Kamala, I kept these opinions to myself to not push voters away from doing so, and I pushed the harm reduction argument to anyone who was considering abstaining or voting 3rd party.

I did the same, despite my own similar lack of “motivation”, because as you said, it was the best play we had with the hand we were dealt. The criticism here is leveled at the third party voters and abstainers, because the people here are voters. If you want to criticize Democratic leadership, I encourage you to direct that criticism directly toward them.

I would love to have had a viable alternative, but without significant representation in Congress and state Governorship, it’s just not going to happen. Successful presidential campaigns don’t just appear out of thin air (unless you have a massive cult of personality). The vast majority of presidents were previously Senators or Governors, offices that they rose to after careers that began at the local level. If you want better options, actually vote in your local elections, and encourage other leftists to do the same.

Until then, red vs blue is our reality, and criticizing the lesser evil for not being good enough is a virtue signal circle jerk.

All infrastructure really.

I have a friend named Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla

To be fair, the last time I flew the jolly Roger was over a decade ago. Finding a stream/torrent that:

1. Wasn’t potato quality
2. Had seeders
3. Wasn’t shut down since last time
4. Wouldn’t give you a virus
5. Was actually the thing you were looking for (I did not have sexual relations with that woman)

was a much more time consuming process.

Back in my day, it was a much more involved process.

Once it’s on the disk it’s fair game.

Do people really rewatch stuff that often?

Piracy is a hassle, the convenience of streaming made the cost worthwhile. They’ve forgotten this. Once the cost outweighs the convenience, the hassle won’t seem like such a hassle anymore.

It was $60 when I looked

More like a studio apartment with a separate space with a separate bed.

Yeah, it’s a van. It’s cheap and it’s on the beach. Some people are into that. The reviews are great, the people who went for it knew what they were getting and were happy with what they got. It’s a fun novelty for the kind of person who’s into it, I’m not sure why people are upset about it.

There’s still the loft, which has the sole function of having a bed.

What else would you call a closed space with a deliberate, designed space for a bed?

It is described as such already, and there are multiple pictures to show exactly that. It is a camper van with 2 sleeping spaces, that is reflected in the listing

There are two spaces to sleep, the main bed and the loft. How else would you communicate that information on the site?

What’s infuriating about this? Maybe I’m biased because I’ve seriously considered van life before, but a couple nights in a camper on the beach seems like a fun novelty trip.

Unsurprisingly, both countries started in part as British penal colonies for debtors and convicts.

Gaming is an absolutely massive economic sector, driven by the escapism of virtual worlds. The functional kernel of the metaverse is a universal game lobby, a place for people to congregate while they navigate between the games they play together.

humans can learn a bunch of stuff without first learning the content of the whole internet and without the computing power of a datacenter or consuming the energy of Belgium. Humans learn to count at an early age too, for example.

I suspect that if you took into consideration the millions of generations of evolution that “trained” the basic architecture of our brains, that advantage would shrink considerably.

I would say that the burden of proof is therefore reversed. Unless you demonstrate that this technology doesn’t have the natural and inherent limits that statistical text generators (or pixel) have, we can assume that our mind works differently.

I disagree. I’d argue evidence suggests we’re just a more sophisticated version of a similar principle, refined over billions of years. We learn facts by rote, and learn similarities by rote until we develop enough statistical text (or audio) correlations to “understand” the world.

Conversations are a slightly meandering chain of statistically derived cliches. English adjective order is universally “understood” by native speakers based purely on what sounds right, without actually being able to explain why (unless you’re a big grammar nerd). More complex conversations might seem novel, but they’re just a regurgitation of rote memorized facts and phrases strung together in a way that seems appropriate to the conversation based on statistical experience with past conversations.

Also you say immature technology but this technology is not fundamentally (I.e. in terms of principle) different from what Weizenabum’s ELIZA in the '60s. We might have refined model and thrown a ton of data and computing power at it, but we are still talking of programs that use similar principles.

As with the evolution of our brains, which have operated on basically the same principles for hundreds of millions of years. The special sauce between human intelligence and a flatworm’s is a refined model.

So yeah, we don’t understand human intelligence but we can appreciate certain features that absolutely lack on GPTs, like a concept of truth that for humans is natural.

I’m not sure you can claim that absolutely. That kind of feature is an internal experience, you can’t really confirm or deny if a GPT has something similar. Besides, humans have a pretty tenuous relationship with the concept of truth. There are certainly humans that consider objective falsehoods to be Truth.

It’s also pretty young, human toddlers hallucinate and make things up. Adults too. Even experts are known to fall prey to bias and misconception.

I don’t think we know nearly enough about the actual architecture of human intelligence to start asserting an understanding of “understanding”. I think it’s a bit foolish to claim with certainty that LLMs in a MoE framework with self-review fundamentally can’t get there. Unless you can show me, materially, how human “understanding” functions, we’re just speculating on an immature technology.

I dabble in comics and manga too, so I prefer the full screen to an e-ink display. It’s also nice for videos.

I just got a foldable. The increase in functionality of reading on my phone is substantial, and that’s such a big fraction of my phone use that I consider it worthwhile. I wouldn’t be as productive if I had to carry a bulky e-reader with me all the time, it’s incredibly convenient to be able to fold it up and put it in my pocket.

It’s a bit heavier, but I got used to it quickly. My old phone feels suspiciously light now, like a toy. The expense is certainly a factor, but for me the utility is worth it in the long run. It’s not for everyone, but there are people it makes sense for.