As a general vibe in life, I try not to punch down. Antivax kids through no fault of their own are at a disadvantage in life (and make life for immunocompromised folks harder). Wondering if they’d be okay with a cootie shot as a question seems snarky and punching down to me.

You could not answer this question categorically anyway. It would depend on the age, how much autonomy they already have over their body, and to how much RFK junioring they’ve been subjected. So the answer is care and individual attention for each kid, not a generalization.

I don’t know where you get the idea I suggested we hunt them down from. But I think you’ve correctly picked up on my critical opinion on this question.

These kids have a bad enough lot in life by being born to and probably being negatively influenced by irresponsible parents. They probably deserve more care and individual attention than a throwaway question like this.

Were you dancing at the time?

I imagine it’s not as easy in terms of producing the template video to match your body type (and maybe agility) and then to set up the projection just at the right distance. Conventional wisdom might also say that you learn dance moves better by copying others and that’s why you get floor to ceiling mirrors in dance studios.

Bluesky is merely a stepping stone between Xwitter and Mastodon. Facebook can just die with them boomers.

Any other answer than professional therapy runs the risk of making it worse. But I know that it can be a luxury.

Out of sight hopefully leads to out of mind eventually. Actively avoiding these a-holes is one thing, having a good emergency plan when it can’t be avoided is another. I don’t know your life so you have to figure this one out yourself. In my experience, people that have a certain power over you in your mind immediately lose a lot of it if you imagine them naked, tickling the tip of their nose with a feather.

Are you reacting rationally when you’re confronted with them? If you can control yourself enough to imagine the nose tickling, start there and see how it goes. If you can’t get there and therapy is out of the question look for a fresh start somewhere else. Different part of the city, different city, different time zone. We are conditioned to think we mustn’t run from our problems, which isn’t bad advice but isn’t universally true IMO. There are cases where you’re allowed to just move away in the night, secretly flipping the old life off in the process. If after careful consideration going through all the pros and cons you arrive at this conclusion, don’t deny yourself this option for dogmatic reasons.

A therapist, after disagreeing with me, would probably add that you should make sure you don’t repeat past mistakes by creating new dependent relationships that could lead to new abuse. So keep that thought in the back of your head.

How does confidence factor into this? I’ve been confident in stuff before and it turned out that confidence was misplaced. Pride cometh before the fall shit. Confidence alone risks cockiness. Cockiness may lead to somebody testing your Golden Shield. Didn’t work. You now don’t have a country any more.

If the Golden Shield really worked it’s a question of capacity. If you had enough juice in it to repel all nuclear weapons you could throw at this country in a worst-case scenario, you’d have a powerful defense against the most powerful weapon on Earth that’s ready to deploy this minute. It may not save you from conventional attacks. It may not shield you from chemical or biological weapons so gruesome they aren’t currently shelf-ready. But development of those would suddenly become a viable prospect. I fear it just turns the spiral of development of more destructive weaponry one more rotation. Extrapolating from the last 6000 years of history, we’ve gone from sticks and stones to vaporizing people into thin mist by harnessing the power of the atom. We’re already in the narrow bit of the spiral. Paradoxically, developing a Golden Shield against nuclear attacks may lead to wiping our species out for good.

Why did she have to go and make things so … complicated?

Thank you, I’ll be here all week.

Thank you for your eloquence.

Glad to hear it! I thought I heard a sigh of relief so massive it circled the world twice.

My LLM says you’re an enlightened one! May the builders of the universe bless your path.

This sounds to me (fixed typo) like the same percentage of people are susceptible to cult crap. It’s just the availability of gurus is broader because you can have your own personal bs whisperer in your pocket. Kind of like how social media helped isolated village idiots to network and exchange views on DC pizza places. We wouldn’t see them as a problem if the ability to scale hadn’t become suddenly available.

Ironically, I think ChatGPT can help reverse some some of these troubled souls’ convictions. It just needs to gently and repeatedly tell them they’re not Jesus or a disciple of the builders of the universe.

My LLM always says I’m beautiful and always right. So no downvotes on this comment.

Ich sach ma so es wär mir lieber er wär der Chef von den Verein und nicht mehr dran an die Atombombenknöppe.

What you need is help, not AI. If paying a designer is out of the question, look for the most design savvy person in your family, friends, or in your neighborhood. Maybe you can comp them a meal in exchange for making this look good.

You can use AI image generators to make background images. Just check the licenses if you’re okay to use their stuff in a commercial setting. AI is still largely dog shit at handling real text in images. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend going this route for you here. You have a lot of text.

What do you want to do with your poster? Will this be used as a meme or will it actually go to a printer or be displayed on a high-res screen? If it’s just a meme thing, any image creator AI will do. Most of them have free options.

If this will actually go to a printer, you’ll need high resolution images and would do well to design it in a vector format, SVG for open source software: Inkscape is free to install on computers, vector-ink is a thing for mobile and the web as well. Adobe Illustrator for the corporate expensive route. Big file sizes work better on a good computer so YMMV.

I get why the feelings sucks. You’re in your head and somehow only the worst possible outcomes ruminate. You’ve called the cops, good on you.

You’re not in charge of the world, there ought to be others who are charged with taking care of that girl. Their failure in preventing her from showing up on your porch is not your fault either and she’s their responsibility, not yours. Keep repeating that in your head.

I think there are a couple of reasons. STIX and STX were failures, one so bad it ended the franchise. Also, IIRC Avery Brooks wasn’t happy about the Sisko ending and he has pretty much stayed out of the limelight since DS9. While it was on the air the viewing figures weren’t extraordinary. Worf was thrown in to get more TNG fans interested in the same way Jeri Ryan was put in a catsuit on VOY. DS9’s last two seasons were binge TV before we knew that existed, it was ahead of its time, which explains why it’s a sleeper hit and fan favorite. But not a great financial success at the time.

It’s time to get concerned about Forbes. As a journalistic standard I would’ve expected to read about all the jobs some of these companies created during pandy times. There’s been a trend towards layoffs long before OpenAI burst onto the scene. Also everybody is going to espouse the same streamlining bullshit in their PR even if layoffs are business-driven and not so much AI’s fault. A best of press releases is not good enough journalism.

It’s also not critical by reporting on some of the failures of the pivots to AI that have made the rounds.

New technology displaces workers in some areas and eventually creates demand in others. For time immemorial. All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. That’s why I regret having driven traffic to the Forbes website to be able to read this.

I know. What you have hit upon here is my obviously unsuccessful attempt at making these people look more ridiculous than the OG death cult.

I think this USSR quote is a good answer:

We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

In any authoritarian system where indoctrination starts young you’ll probably have a fifth of the population that’s high on the coolaid or never questioned anything due to ideology or intelligence (or both). The rest know they’re lying, etc. And keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to go to Siberia or El Salvador.

The guy was asked if they hypothetically would be interested in buying Chrome. What’s he supposed to say? No? No! They’re interested. But they’re interested in the same way I’m interested in buying a 12-bedroom mansion. None of us will probably make it to our dream board goals. The rest is speculation and clickbait.

I feel this article is making a lot of something out of nothing. There are plenty of other reasons to bash OpenAI in particular. This ain’t one of them.