BertramDitore @ BertramDitore @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Same here! I was pretty skeptical but it ended up being a lot of fun. I wish it was longer. It definitely has strong TNG vibes, and you can really feel the weight of being captain in some of the scenes. Highly recommend this for any Trek fan, despite the super janky mechanics.

Not only is no help available, but the Dept of Ed has been pestering borrowers to re-certify their Income-Driven Repayment plan, since Biden’s SAVE plan is blocked by the courts leaving the shitty IDR as the only option for those who can’t afford their full payments (most people, I’d assume). But if you go to the page where you do the recertification, you’ll find that the forms have all been taken down.

It’s purposeful, to cause the maximum amount of pain to the most number of people who are the least likely to be able to handle it. I think a lot of them actually do want to burn it all down, and screw all the people who are harmed in the process. That’s what they want their legacy to be. They don’t want people who aren’t already wealthy to benefit from education.

I generally agree, but credit card debt in my experience is very different from student loan debt. I don’t make a ton of money, but I make enough to pay off my credit cards every month, which I use for all my purchases and most bills.

But I also have hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt, which only ever goes up even when I make all my payments. That debt will never realistically go away even if I make really high payments above the minimum, unless I win the lottery. Oh and I actually use my degrees at work, so college and grad school were a huge benefit to me, that I’ll never be able to pay off.

Credit cards, when used properly, are easy to stay on top of if you use them within your means and always pay them off every month. Student loans, even when used properly, are essentially designed to keep you in debt. So I’m 100% in favor of boycotting student loan payments, but I don’t think it’s necessary to boycott credit card debt unless you’ve been scammed or seriously taken advantage of. But more power to you if you do!!

Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.

Fuck, I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s ridiculous that every victim of their fraud wasn’t at least made whole, but in addition to the people who should have gone to prison, you and all their victims honestly should have been given a modest fortune as proper restitution for these crimes.

Damn straight.

No doubt. If fines and settlements are all we can muster, then there needs to be real personal consequences for those responsible as well as the corporation taking responsibility. Until we fully decouple money and politics, I have a hard time imagining that kind of proportionate punishment ever being doled out.

Totally. It wasn’t close to being enough. The entire board should have been arrested for fraud, at the very least. At least it wasn’t some laughably low amount like we’re used to, I’m surprised it was even this high.

Reminder that Wells Fargo was caught opening millions of accounts without permission. This company should not be trusted with anything.

One of the rare cases where a company actually paid a huge $3 billion settlement.

That’s an interesting article, but it was published in 2022, before LLMs were a thing on anyone’s radar. The results are still incredibly impressive without a doubt, but based on how the researchers explain it, it looks like it was accomplished using deep learning, which isn’t the same as LLMs. Though they’re not entirely unrelated.

Opaque and confusing terminology in this space also just makes it very difficult to determine who or which systems or technology are actually making these advancements. As far as I’m concerned none of this is actual AI, just very powerful algorithmic prediction models. So the claims that an AI system itself has made unique technological advancements, when they are incapable of independent creativity, to me proves that nearly all their touted benefits are still entirely hypothetical right now.

The article explains the problems in great detail.

Here’s just one small section of the text which describes some of them:

All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.

(I originally put this as a top-level comment, my bad.)

100%

That’s why it’s so dangerous for Democratic leadership to keep ignoring and actively pushing against AOC’s popularity. The ideological distance between Democratic leadership and the voters that put them in power is vast. That’s a serious problem that they don’t seem to be reckoning with.

Sure, go ahead and demean one of the most popular and beloved politicians in office. That‘ll totally make people listen to you. AOC is the single best communicator the Democrats have on their bench. Other Democrats need to be learning from her and making more space for her style of leadership, not talking shit about her. That’s yet another thing they failed to learn from the 2024 election.

I think it’s pretty telling that to much of the progressive and leftist base, Slotkin comes across as a Republican from the 1990’s (with all her Reagan-worship crap) and is generally not a particularly popular politician outside of neoliberal DC power circles. While on the other hand, AOC is incredibly popular across the nation, and is widely liked and respected not only because she comes across as a real genuine human being, but because her ideas and political approach appeal to almost everyone, including many Republicans. I heard some interviews with Trump voters where they were asked how they felt about AOC, and a surprising number of them said they agreed with a lot, but not all of her opinions, but they consistently said they respected her because they believed she meant what she said and that she seemed to genuinely care about the right groups of people.

From the end of the article:

Ocasio-Cortez “best reflects the core values” of the Democratic Party, a CNN poll of voters recently found.

Charred fatty goose breast.

Blew my mind.

Cool. Then I’ll just go ahead and ignore all those emails from the Department of Education telling me my student loan payments are about to go way up.

That’s one good-looking plate!

Fuuuck this is infuriating. Thanks for the extra details.

He required medical attention at some point during the interrogation and he was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, Senior said.

What the fuck?!

So “interrogation” just automatically means physical violence to ICE?? Not sure if there’s a better way to read that. I doubt he coincidentally came down with a bad cold in the middle of an interrogation. Fucking thugs.

Your description of those desks totally knocked some of my old memories loose. I remember going to a friend’s house in the late 90s when the first smallish “all-in-one” PCs started coming on the market (before the iMac claimed that space in ‘98). They had their new all-in-one PC set up on a tiny desk in the hallway outside their office. It was there so everyone in the family could use it, but I remember being shocked at how small it was, and so impressed that it didn’t need the whole corner of a room.