So if I just pour enough water on my salad it becomes a broth? Awesome!

You could say this about most standup comedians. The sober ones are the weird ones!

Part of the reason I included the link to Connections was to illustrate just how many people are involved in maintaining our critical infrastructure. But of course the show can only highlight a tiny fraction of them.

You might think “oh, we don’t need insurance companies so we could eliminate all those jobs” but even if we did eliminate the insurance industry we’d have to replace a lot of the work that people at insurance companies do.

Take health insurance for example. You might say “we should get rid of health insurance and give everyone free, public health care!” Well, I live in Canada and we have free public health care. Guess what? We still have a health insurance company: the government. They do all the same jobs: receive and process health care claims, decide which treatments to cover and which to reject, and send payments to health care providers once the treatment is approved and the work has been completed. The only difference is that there’s no profit in the government system. Otherwise they’re still doing the same amount of work, so we still need all those people doing those jobs.

You might go on to say “why don’t we just eliminate the approval process and pay for every single treatment?” but that line of thinking shouldn’t get you very far. We don’t have unlimited doctors or unlimited hospital beds. There will always be far more possible treatments to give people than should be given. In the case of older people with terminal illnesses, you can spend essentially unlimited money on treatments in a desperate attempt to prolong their life… and prolong their suffering in the process.

That environment of our evolution, like the Garden of Eden, no longer exists. We’ve created a new environment in which sitting around and vibing is no longer sufficient to thrive. Without the economic output we all die. See this first episode of Connections for details.

The conservatives are pissed of because he’s drinking their milkshake. The electorate moved rightward (Justin Trudeau fatigue) and he moved with them, elbowing the Conservative Party further to the right into unelectable fringe la la land.

The Liberal party has a history of making these rightward shifts. It’s why they’re called “Canada’s Natural Governing Party.” They have no real ideological base, they just see which way the wind is blowing and go that way.

If you give it some random address then they’ll get the food, not you?

Also why even use the app if you’re going to pick up at the restaurant yourself? Just call the restaurant and give them your order. You’ll pay less for the food because there’s no fees going to the app!

If you don’t tell them your location, how does the food reach you?

You’re ordering food delivery through a VPN? Why?

Just get Maxwell’s demon to separate the plasma into positive and negative charges, effectively creating a capacitor, then discharge it directly over some HVDC lines!

Yes exactly. What they really want to offer is an AI employee replacement service. If they could replace one of your employees who makes $40k/year then they could easily charge $30k/year for the service and you (the business owner and AI customer) could add $10k to your profits.

The fact is that they can’t do that. They can’t even make money charging thousands of dollars a year for basic LLM service that people use to write emails and the like.

The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.

Yes exactly. Hobbies can be enjoyed once a week or two weeks or even once a month! Or they can be practiced more frequently but for less time. 20 minutes a day practicing a musical instrument can do a lot for your learning in so little time. The hard part is sticking to it!

Academic performance is about performing well on closed book written exams covering narrow subjects. The whole system is designed for 19th century teaching and testing. Using a computer does not help with that whatsoever and may in some cases hurt (by distracting someone who should be studying).

I tutor high school kids as a volunteer (next year will be my 10th year doing so). Over that time period I have noticed a sharp decline in a lot of basic academic skills: mental arithmetic (without a calculator), spelling, grammar, handwriting. These are the very skills one needs to master to perform well on closed book exams. Your ability to research a topic or get help from Google (incl. spellcheck and grammar check in Google Docs) or ChatGPT is of no benefit whatsoever when all you’ve got is a pencil and a piece of paper in front of you.

It says you can teleport. Doesn’t say you can take anything with you. Maybe you arrive there completely naked?

I love VtM:B but I never had high hopes for this one. Direct sequels made by unrelated developers rarely work out.

Think of it like singing. Sing in a big enough group and it doesn’t matter what you sing anymore, the voices of the choir will drown you out.

I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?

I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.

A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.

But that’s a specific optimization where you can no longer read the numbers left to right, the original intent of RPN.

Actually:

2 <enter> 5 <enter> 8 <enter> 5 - x +

10 keystrokes

I use RPN on my phone calculator for fun but it can also be annoying sometimes.

On my CASIO FX-260 Solar II calculator (super cheap, really nice and simple but also powerful) that would be:

2 + 5 ( 8 - 5 ) =

9 keystrokes

I really should just put a full block on lemmy.ml. Thanks for the reminder!