I was just told today that ai usage is a factor in hiring and promotion. They didn’t say the AI usage had to be smart.

My boss, to his credit, reportedly said something like “well, if someone is already good at python they might not need as much AI to do a task than someone who isn’t”. I don’t think management cared.

Conservatives want small government when it’s stuff they want to do, and big government when they don’t. In-groups to protect, out-groups to bind. Bad people. Cartoon villains.

Glad this judge seems sensible.

People are stupid emotional creatures. They don’t calmly evaluate if the thing is useful or practical. They see the in-group doing it and don’t want to be left out.

This was probably an advantage in pre-history. Our brains haven’t kept up with our changing environment.

Usually they have

• multiple approaches
• reactive world and NPCs
• the world is more interactive than decorative

So the game might say “get the laptop from the 2nd floor office”. An immersive sim will try to allow as many things as you could imagine doing in real life to achieve this

• talk your way in. Convince them you work there or something
  • maybe forge or steal some ID
  • or hack their network to give yourself creds!
• find a back entrance
• find a back entrance directly to the 2nd story
• just shoot everyone
• sneak in and take people out like a ghost
• sneak in and don’t get seen
• set off a fire alarm and go in when people are outside
• do any of the above after hours

Contrast this with a more traditional game like Mass Effect. There’s typically going to be like one path, with maybe like one choice. You go in where they want, shoot the baddies, and get the thing.

I see this sometimes from a distance, even with children. The boys are wild and loose, the girls on a tight leash.

Unfortunately, trying to address that with the sledgehammer of The State is not easy to do safely.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of sprinting through NY Penn Station around midnight to get the last train home, back before I lived in the city. Was a deciding factor in me moving. Had to leave my friend’s Halloween party at like 10 to get the last train.

But public transport won’t make a handful of people rich, so that’s a non starter for many.

And you might have to reckon with living in a society, with other kinds of people. You’d really ask someone to ride a bus with a {slur of your choice} just sitting there, like they’re entitled to peace and dignity?

In other words, conservatives are fuck heads who make the world worse for stupid reasons.

Edit: fix autocorrect mistake

A lot of people died to get the pittances we got from the ownership class. Decades of

• labor: we want to paid in real money, and work less than 12 hours a day 6 days a week
• owner: no
• labor: then we’re going on strike
• owner, to the state: HELP
• the state: sends police and troops to do violence to labor

The idea that peacefully asking for stuff on its own is effective is largely ahistorical. A happy myth sold by the people who would be receiving violence.

Also your local public library has a lot of stuff

I (a man in his 40s) pronounced Lathe wrong the other day in a meeting when referencing the le Guin story “the lathe of heaven”. Someone privately messaged me after to say “great book. BTW, it’s pronounced…”

That sounds like something out of Idiocracy. Just… it can’t all be highlights. Some things need to build!

I expect that’s some people, yeah. Accepting that climate change is real means accepting uncomfortable ideas. Like that they’re responsible, at least a little.

Some people can’t accept that they’re everything less than a saint. You tell them that walking to the store is better for them and the environment than driving and they go berserk. Can’t handle the implication that they’re not perfectly faultless.

I’ve encountered a surprising amount of seemingly intelligent, successful, people recently who of their own admission don’t read books. They just watch short videos, maybe a movie, and read social media.

I’m not a researcher but I expect that their vocabulary is stunted as a result.

But they’re so weirdly proud about it. Like a defiant 12 year old who doesn’t want to do his homework.

Many people would rather everyone suffer pollution and climate catastrophe than those people have a nice life.

That and some people take excessive resources, and some people are willing to back them up in exchange for table scraps.

Some people are just… not okay. Something in them in broken. Perhaps it could be fixed, but we live in the bad place.

Trying to date someone who’s not interested in me sounds miserable.

Dating someone that I’m not into sounds cruel to them. Unless it’s clearly a, like, casual or otherwise non-invested situation, and they’re aware, but that also sounds hazardous.

My cat will go under the blankets in bed when it’s cold out. He figured this out after many years of living here. Some nights it still takes him a while to figure it out. He’ll jump on the bed. I’ll lift the blankets. He’ll peer under there like he’s never seen this scenario before in his life. After several cautious minutes he’ll usually settle down. If I try to speed up the process by putting the blankets on him, he’ll run out of the room

They won’t learn. They can’t learn. Their ego is too fragile and too wrapped up in disinformation and nonsense. Accepting that conservative policies are bad actually would break their shitty little minds.

Conservatives will say anything to align with the in-group, to hurt the outgroup, or for personal power. They have no internal beliefs beyond those.