Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars (probably of their parents saved money) to go to university and have a chatbot do the whole thing for you.
These kids are going to get spit out into a world where they will have no practical knowledge and no ability to critically think or adapt.
Nobody seems particularly alarmed by this, least of all Finland. I doubt Putin is going to go from losing a war against Ukraine to losing a war against Ukraine and Finland and the rest of NATO too. Seems like this “buildup” has been there for a while and is only growing presumably because Ukraine is getting really good at striking targets inside of Russian borders.
Trump will die a free man, sadly. The justice system has already made up it’s mind and nothing he does will ever be punished, no matter what.
Now, how he dies is still up in the air. I think the odds are already not in his favor to have a peaceful death in his sleep. The best he can hope for is a disease taking him out at this point.
Long, long before this AI craze began, I was warning people as a young 20-something political activist that we needed to push for Universal Basic Income because the inevitable march of technology would mean that labor itself would become irrelevant in time and that we needed to hash out a system to maintain the dignity of every person now rather than wait until the system is stressed beyond it’s ability to cope with massive layoffs and entire industries taken over by automation/AI. When the ability of the average person to sell their ability to work becomes fundamentally compromised, capitalism will collapse in on itself - I’m neither pro- nor anti-capitalist, but people have to acknowledge that nearly all of western society is based on capitalism and if capitalism collapses then society itself is in jeopardy.
I was called alarmist, that such a thing was a long way away and we didn’t need “socialism” in this country, that it was more important to maintain the senseless drudgery of the 40-hour work week for the sake of keeping people occupied with work but not necessarily fulfilled because the alternative would not make the line go up.
Now, over a decade later, and generative AI has completely infiltrated almost all creative spaces and nobody except tech bros and C-suite executives are excited about that, and we still don’t have a safety net in place.
Understand this - I do not hate the idea of AI. I was a huge advocate of AI, as a matter of fact. I was confident that the gradual progression and improvement of technology would be the catalyst that could free us from the shackles of the concept of a 9-to-5 career. When I was a teenager, there was this little program you could run on your computer called Folding At Home. It was basically a number-crunching engine that uses your GPU to fold proteins, and the data was sent to researchers studying various diseases. It was a way for my online friends and I to flex how good our PC specs were with the number of folds we could complete in a given time frame and also we got to contribute to a good cause at the same time. These days, they use AI for that sort of thing, and that’s fucking awesome. That’s what I hope to see AI do more of - take the rote, laborious, time consuming tasks that would take one or more human beings a lifetime to accomplish using conventional tools and have the machine assist in compiling and sifting through the data to find all the most important aspects. I want to see more of that.
I think there’s a meme floating around that really sums it up for me. Paraphrasing, but it goes “I thought that AI would do the dishes and fold my laundry so I could have more time for art and writing, but instead AI is doing all my art and writing so I have time to fold clothes and wash dishes.”.
I think generative AI is both flawed and damaging, and it gives AI as a whole a bad reputation because generative AI is what the consumer gets to see, and not the AI that is being used as a tool to help people make their lives easier.
Speaking of that, I also take issue with that fact that we are more productive than ever before, and AI will only continue to improve that productivity margin, but workers and laborers across the country will never see a dime of compensation for that. People might be able to do the work of two or even three people with the help of AI assistants, but they certainly will never get the salary of three people, and it means that two out of those three people probably don’t have a job anymore if demand doesn’t increase proportionally.
I want to see regulations on AI. Will this slow down the development and advancement of AI? Almost certainly, but we’ve already seen the chaos that unfettered AI can cause to entire industries. It’s a small price to pay to ask that AI companies prove that they are being ethical and that their work will not damage the livelihood of other people, or that their success will not be born off the backs of other creative endeavors.
The only thing I agree with on Trump here is that he’s correctly pointing out that WalMart made billions in profits last year. Yes, WalMart supported this monster in the first place thinking it would work out for them in the long run, so it’s a leopards eating faces scenario for sure, and I wouldn’t be sad if WalMart lost profits this year because of Trump’s stupidity. It’s just too bad that regular people are going to suffer because WalMart killed the small businesses that used to support towns that they wormed their way into.
We aren’t even done adjusting to inflation pricing, and here we are not getting slapped with a Trump Tax on top of it. Madness.
There was talk that she was going to run again for local elections, which is a huge step down from having been the VPOTUS, but she would be more involved in California politics again. Possibly having that household name recognition would give her an edge in a congressional race or gubernatorial campaign (Newsom is finally turning sour to even moderate Democrats with his hard right shift lately).
Is there a way to poison the well so badly and so irrevocably that corporations won’t dare use generative AI for anything? Can we somehow trick these overgrown chatbots to speak ill of their masters in the form of direct-to-stream advertisements?
He doesn’t want you to take medical advice from him, but he does want to dictate what kind of medical advice your actual doctor is legally allowed to give you.
I’m certainly not crediting Trump for that ceasefire. Biden negotiated it. Doesn’t matter whose ass was in the seat in the oval office at the time.
One of the last things Biden did in office was secure a ceasefire. One that ultimately fell apart when Trump let Israel off the chain to “finish the job”.
People who refused to vote for the party that was committed to stopping the war simply because they were acting too slowly for their taste are now culpable for the continued genocide under Trump. Enjoy the greater evil.
I think of this every time I see some egregiously fascist behavior on display in the Trump admin getting defended by people who think the left is overreacting. I wish more people knew about this and understood that it’s not some left wing looney saying it, it’s a guy who lived through it and can identify it for what it truly is.
Check this guy’s computer first. Guarantee there’s some fucked up shit on there. It’s always projection.
Back when this meme format was making the rounds on 4chan, I always saw it as a guy with a really long Fu Manchu moustache and to this day I still can’t unsee it.
Trump blew up the economy only to pause or walk back every single one of his stupid tariffs that were supposed to “make everybody rich” and bring manufacturing back to America. Could have seen that one coming from a mile away.
And we’ll never know the terms of the new trade deals he negotiates, only that they are great and better than before and that we should be thanking him on our hands and knees. As if anybody actually gives a single fuck about whether or not the U.S. runs a trade deficit.
Mark my words, these tariffs are never going to go fully into effect for any significant amount of time. One day into their implementation and it was clear how damaging and destructive they were, so they got paused to halt the chaos. Trump now needs a way to pull back on the reins and rescind the tariffs while still looking like he is emerging victorious. I expect more “breakthrough trade deals” in the coming weeks. In spite of this, however, the damage to the trust in American stability and economic certainty will probably never recover from the absolutely idiotic implementation of these tariffs for the sake of gaining negotiation power when a phone call could have had the same effect.
I feel like at least some of them would have or should have had a better memory than a goldfish and recall when he fleeced them all for money to “finish the wall” near the end of his first disaster term (don’t you love how he no longer mentions the wall anymore?) and realize they got scammed because there’s still no border wall but Trump took in like 100M+ and blew it all on legal counsel.
They are professional victims, even when they have control over all three branches of government.
Palworld did more for the monster-collecting genre in one early access title than Pokémon has in the last decade of AAA titles.
Why does Nintendo deserve these patents when they aren’t going to produce anything meaningful with them and simply weaponize them to squash any real threatening competition?
Pokémon is the highest grossing franchise in the world, and 2nd place isn’t even close. I think they can give a little ground to an indie developer who makes games that people are actually interested in playing. The patent bullshit is ridiculous.
What do you define as a “real” supermax? There are definitely some prisons that label themselves as supermax outside of ADX in Colorado. Pelican Bay comes to mind. That’s where they put people who are criminally insane or violent, and it’s 100% solitary confinement cells. Not sure about the visitation thing though.