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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

    Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

    In essence, DeepSeek — and I’ll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI’s reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of “unsafe thoughts” that might “manipulate the customer,” then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a “competitive advantage.” -Zitron


  • Since this community is for any kind of question, I’ll answer, but I get the vague sense that you don’t really want a genuine answer, based on the inherent bias you included in the question (calling someone older than 20 a hag is pretty uncool, for example).

    But here goes: people have different tastes. Different things turn on different people, and your lack of experience being aroused by older women says nothing about the legitimacy of those who are. Also being 21 for example, is still considered very young by most people. Your question presumes that everybody in the world must only be attracted to very young women, and frankly that’s a bit strange and just not how the world works.

    Try to put yourself in some other people’s shoes, and I think this question would answer itself. Your sexual preferences are not everyone’s preferences.



  • I started losing my hair when I was a teenager, so I’ve been bald for most of my life. I’ve been shaving my head for decades because it’s the only way my head and face don’t look absurd. I’m totally used to it, and long ago accepted that I’d never have hair on my head again.

    But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my hair back.

    If this turns out to be legit and works on most people, there could be a worldwide explosion of self-esteem in adults.


  • No, those stalls are reserved for people who actually need them. They’re not for your comfort or convenience, they’re a basic necessity for people who have very different daily lives than you.

    Even if all the other stalls are occupied, you should still pretend that the handicap stall is also occupied, even if it isn’t. There’s always the possibility that someone who needs it will arrive after you’ve gone in. You don’t park in handicap parking spaces, do you? Same deal, just one is based more on the honor system and basic human decency, and the other could get you a ticket.


  • Bernie has compromised on some issues, like a good politician should. Nearly everybody else has compromised their integrity and the offices they hold with corrupt behavior. There’s a huge difference.

    Effective politics/government doesn’t exist without compromise. America was founded on compromises, some of which were morally reprehensible, some of which were just about the structure of the nation and its government. A huge caveat of course, is that compromise only works when there are at least two groups equally willing to concede something big enough to reach a resolution.

    Without the ability to compromise all we’re left with is tyranny.


  • Yeah I really tried to engage with some of them before the election, and it was impossible to break through the snark and the disingenuous/naive arguments they were spouting. I would also love to have an earnest conversation with someone who withheld their vote, but based on how how they explained themselves at the time, I’d doubt there’s a ton of critical thinking going on. Which kind of makes sense at least for Palestinian Americans whose families are being slaughtered. For them the raw emotions are justified, and I can’t fault them for not voting, even if it was ultimately against their interest. But they’re the only group I’ll give a pass.


  • The umbrella is such an underrated skill. My manager is the best buffer between me and the C-suite, and I appreciate it immensely. She doesn’t involve me in any of the company’s internal political crap unless it directly impacts me. She filters out all the bullshit and protects me from our bosses getting in the way of the work.

    Some of her other excellent managerial qualities: she doesn’t cold call me (we’re remote), she doesn’t schedule unnecessary meetings, she has zero contact after COB, and she trusts me to get my shit done during the day, on my own, with absolutely no micro-managing. Some weeks I don’t need to interact with her at all, even though she’s a fun person I never mind chatting with. She’s the best manager.

    It all boils down to mutual respect. Respect leads to trust, trust leads to teamwork and a healthy work environment.


  • I wish this was all true, I really do. But there is a time and a place to be calm. This is not that time, and this is not that place.

    These systems are supposed to have COOP plans (Continuity of Operations), but not all of them do. Systems are supposed to have some degree of backups, but I can tell you from experience that this is almost never the case in any meaningful way.

    I’ve spoken to a number of feds who said their work disappeared overnight. They didn’t choose to comply, and didn’t have sufficient backups in place because of a lack of resources. Their manager or an administrative assistant somewhere most likely went on a deletion spree, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

    Sometimes when this stuff is gone, it’s really gone. And we have every right to be furious about it.

    100% agree about the media incentives, but sometimes outrage is not only warranted, but essential.


  • To clarify, this is because the arbitrary deadline for feds to accept the “offer” is Thursday, and there are a lot of frightened people out there who think this might be their best option. I’ve spoken to a number of federal employees about this, and none of them are convinced there’s any reason OPM will actually honor the severance pay promised in the email, so they’re just going to wait to be fired and potentially lose out on a ton of severance pay. I think that’s the right call though, at least for those who can afford it.

    There was no legal foundation for this “fork,” but agencies can’t reject it since it came from their HR overlords. All the communications about this “offer” have been extremely vague with no specific instructions, guidance, or guarantees. I’m willing to bet they’ll renege on the deal (why wouldn’t they?) and everyone will have to wait and see what the Supreme Court ultimately says about it months after the damage has already been done and careers and livelihoods have been ruined.


  • Perfectly. I’ve never encountered a codec my Apple TV couldn’t play smooth as butter. Been watching a lot of AV1 anime lately, never needs to transcode. I use Infuse Player for its Dolby Vision support, because that’s the only format the native Jellyfin app has trouble with, but Infuse is also just a really solid app in general, and for me is the perfect way to consume my Jellyfin server. But the native Jellyfin app is also solid, and there are some other players which would definitely meet your needs (MrMC for example is very good, but not as polished as Infuse).


  • I was responding to the comment above (and lots of other chatter like this), which said “people voted for Musk” which is just not true. And like you said, the people don’t vote for the cabinet, they vote for the person who nominates cabinet members. It’s useful to point out because these distinctions have real-world consequences. Musk is a what’s called a “Special Government Employee,” which is an unelected position.


  • I don’t want to be pedantic, but okay I will. Musk wasn’t on any ballot. Not a single person voted for an individual named Elon Musk. It wasn’t an option. Enough people voted for Trump and Vance for them to win, but they were the only two on the ballot. It may seem like a distinction without a difference, because Musk functionally has an insane amount of power and influence, but that power was delegated to him by the person that people actually voted for, which is how our government works. People might have voted for Trump hoping he would use Musk in this way, but they still only voted for Trump.

    I feel silly writing all that out, but these kinds of distinctions matter imo.


  • My entire team and I work remotely (since before Covid), and it has never been an issue. Nobody puts any extra effort into their appearance, everybody wears sweats and loungewear and women don’t wear makeup. Most of us blur our backgrounds so nobody can see our spaces, but this does not imply anything about our homes other than the fact that we all like our privacy. I can even hear my manager’s breast pump going during meetings (it’s out of frame, obviously), and nobody cares, she’s got a baby to feed after all.

    We’re all people with different lives, different homes, and different bodies. As long as we all get our work done, nobody cares what we look like, sound like, or how our homes are decorated. If you’re feeling undue pressure from your employer about what your personal appearance or spaces are like, I don’t think that company is a good fit. If there are genuine mental health issues at play, then a good company will make a reasonable accommodation to ensure your work doesn’t cause any undue harm.


  • I firmly believe everyone should have the right to burn whatever symbol they want, be it religious, national, or otherwise.

    After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a friend and I burned an American flag to express our anger at being lied to and our disagreement with going to war in general. People we knew well came by and called us traitors, which we expected, though it was still intense. To us, burning the flag did exactly what we wanted it to. It shocked people into actively coming up to us and asking us why we were doing something so extreme. Our answer was “because it’s often the only way we can get people like you to pay attention and engage with us. You need to be shocked into realizing what we’re doing is actually patriotic.” We would then often get into a serious discussion about 9/11, Saddam Hussein, and WMDs and people would leave more or less agreeing with us, but still angry about the flag. Mission accomplished.

    I can understand that the Quran might be a bit different, but it’s still just a book that holds significance for some people and not for others. If someone’s faith can be that shaken by such a simple thing, then I think they might have larger issues.


  • This is a pretty big disappointment imo, and shows that the party didn’t really listen to its voters or learn from the election in any meaningful way. He was the least interesting and compelling candidate. I wish they had gone for someone with an actual ideology and values that they’ve lived and acted on for years—like Faiz Shakir. This role is very important, and it would have been a great way to show us that Dems actually care about us, and not just the money. But nope, they’ve taken yet another opportunity to give power to a bland vanilla fundraiser who almost nobody has heard of.

    The race hinged more on the candidates’ organizing and fundraising resumes than on their postures regarding the ideological soul of the party, as it did in 2017, after President Donald Trump’s previous election win.




  • It’s a pattern of behavior. If a user spends their time nitpicking every minor detail of a comment, but seems to be incapable of understanding that other people have different ideas, or worse purposefully parses someone’s language incorrectly just to continue an argument back and forth without any progress or even a desire to see a resolution, only wanting to have the last word, I consider that to be trolling. Nobody has benefited from the interaction, and everybody leaves frustrated, annoyed, and only further entrenched in their original position.

    I think people have pretty different ideas of what behavior counts as trolling, but simply disagreeing with a user or not liking their posts doesn’t make them a troll.