So one thing you have to remember about Hawaii is that Hawaii didn't CHOOSE to become part of the US. The US seized the place and forced the Queen to sign some paperwork turning the country over to them. And now a bunch of people from the country that took over your country come every year to party it up, even if there's been a disaster that killed a bunch of native Hawaiians.
This is why a lot of native Hawaiians have a big problem with tourists not just now, but ALL of the time. And if you say their economy is getting uplifted by tourism you will get an EARFUL about how foreign companies are what's actually reaping the rewards of that tourism, and that the land on the island is too expensive for natives to buy BECAUSE of the tourist industry snapping it up and how they'd basically rather be poor than occupied by a party industry that encourages outsiders to come down, treat people like servants and trash the place.
Now I can't do anything to solve this and neither can any of you. Just give them a break, guys. It's not easy to live in another man's paradise.
This weekend my aunt got a room at a ery expensive motel, and was delighted by the fact that a robot delivered amenities to her room. And at breakfast we had an argument about whether or not it saved the hotel money to us the robot instead of a person.
But the bottom line is that the robot was only in use at an extremely expensive hotel and is not commonly seen at cheap hotels. So the robot is a pretty expensive investment, even if it saves money in the long run.
Public schools are NEVER going to make an investment as expensive as an AI teacher, it doesn't matter how advanced the things get. Besides, their teachers are union. I will give you that rich private schools might try it.
@Gsus4 We'll get a neat toy out of it and hopefully some laws around the use of that neat toy in entertainment that protect creative workers. Also we'll have learned some new things about what can be done with computers.
@SCB The Luddites were not upset about progress, they were upset that the people they had worked their whole lives for were kicking them to the street without a thought. So they destroyed the machines in protest.
It's not weird, it's not just a trend, and it's actually more in touch with the reality of employer-employee relations than the idea that these LLMs are ready for primetime.
@Reva "Hey, should we use this statistical model that imitates language to replace my helpdesk personnel?" is an ethical question because bosses don't listen when you outright tell them that's a stupid idea.
The solution: Amnesty and citizenship. Screw this "Everyone must suffer trying to be here." They wanna be here. There are jobs for them. Just swear them in and forget all this bullshit.
@jrburkh Thing is, you can't just tell a guy who's trying to scrape together enough for food that "We need to change the paradigm of our economic system." That's not a thing that can be done quickly or effectively right now, and writers need to protect their income NOW. The only thing that can be done is for them to aggressively protect their rights while lobbying the governments so they don't die while waiting for reform.
So THIS is the article that has all those writers on Bluesky ranting.
For me, I don't see HOW this is a useful tool at all. It's.. a word counter. It counts the number of times you use a word. Someone had a screencap of his "vividness" rankings on words, and it had placed "wintery" at a higher score than "permafrost." Why? How does it know that one word is more vivid than the other? what's the standard here? This sort of thing is very subjective.
And he starts with Vonnegut's shape of stories, but an LLM can't recognize rising and falling action so how could it do such a comparison?
Honestly, the WHOLE thing sounds like he's trying to create a formula for good writing, and you can't pin down good writing like that.
This is not a useful tool. It's a tool that will get people caught in the weeds like they do with narrative outlines like the Hero's Journey and lists of tropes. It will churn out a bunch of writers people don't like who can't understand why they don't catch on when they are following all the rules.
@Fazoo Your comment is just "The Rape of Nanking." You were commenting in response to me not wishing to comment on Japanese War Crimes. Yes, I've heard of it. Yes, I had to look up the details.
My original point was that it didn't matter what a country's government had done before when weighing the morality of dropping an atomic bomb on a city, and because I don't know details about Japan I used Britain as an example because I can list off colonization sins by the British Empire. Your response implied that I should specifically address Japan and Nanking. I did. I clarified to you that the US dropping an atomic bomb on a city had fuck-all to do with Nanking, so Nanking has nothing to do with the conversation at hand--the morality of the US dropping a bomb on an atomic city. Then I told you that war crimes in retaliation are still war crimes even if it had.
If you meant something else... What was it? That I had to be qualified to comment on Nanking? I'm actually not, because I didn't know the details until I looked it up on Wikipedia.
It was a joke to lighten the tension but mine really didn't cover much of anything in Asia. All right. Let's get serious.
I can't comment on Japanese crimes, though, because while yes I am not as well-versed in the history as I am in Western history, I'm still not going to comment because I'm actually not in the group that suffered from Japanese war crimes.
I'm also not about to get into a body count contest because that way lies madness and a whole bunch of "well, this justifies this" arguments.
But if you must know what I think about your Nanking argument, it's this. The atomic bomb was not intended as retaliation for Japan's crimes against China. The uS did not have the right to retaliate against Japan for crimes done to China. Pretty sure the Chinese, if asked, would not have voted to have a nuclear detonation so close to their country given the risk of enviromental destruction.
It wasn't retaliation for anything, it was entirely about prevention. So, it can't be justified by well... ANYTHING Japan did because it wasn't a response to anything Japan did. It was, pure and simple, a show of force on the part of the United States to establish that "Hey, we will END this war."
Furthermore, if it was justified well... it wouldn't be by virtue of the fact that those are civilian cities. We all agreed on the Geneva Conventions and the other treaties making up the Law of Armed Conflict that war crimes don't justify other war crimes, and the principles of military necessity, humanity and proportionality tell us it's a war crime to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian-occupied city. All of these treaties came after World War II, of course, but they were informed by the events on the Pacific Front.
Basically, the actions of Japan and the actions of the United States in World War II were so terrible that International Law was agreed upon to make sure that people who performed any such action in the future even during wartime would be tried and imprisoned, and that any attempt to use actions like that to retaliate for actions like that would also be prosecutable.
Which is to say, the world as a WHOLE agreed that Japan's military behavior, while horrible, did not justify retaliation against civilians and did not justify the atomic bomb and so on. The entire world agreed that war crimes retaliating for other war crimes were not justified.
This did not stop the nuclear arms race, of course, because everyone involved knew from Mutually Assured Destruction no one would be around to try the guys who started a nuclear war in the end. But suffice it to say, any use of a nuclear weapon is wrong.
I didn't intend for this to devolve into Whataboutism.
I don't want to get into it with the guy from lemmygrad, but the idea that the US behavior can be compared only to colonized countries is ridiculous. We're in the tier of countries like Australia, New Zealand and such where the colonizers split off from the greater colonial power, and we're also in the tier of colonizers like Britain, Spain, Japan and France for our activities in the Pacific and South America.
I can't comment on Japanese crimes, that's for another continent, or if they were better or worse than the US's or say, Britain's. Still, if atomic bombs were dropped on two cities in Britain it would be a travesty and a crime no matter what Britain's done. Same as if we exploded a bunch of atomic bombs and poisoned the earth near where Native Americans live. Which we did.
I still don't think we're in denial. Umm, the previous poster might be. But as a whole I think we know these decisions were immoral. I just think that, as a nation, we don't have the political will built yet to make reparations. I think the left group is larger. The right is a minority, it's just a minority where the money and power is concentrated. Concentrated in many cases by generational wealth, which means the same people stopping us from enacting any meaningful reparations are the descendants of the people who made the decisions. Which makes sense, those decisions got them the power they have now. It's a hell of a thing to fight against.
But the difference between us simply may be optimism on my part.
So one thing you have to remember about Hawaii is that Hawaii didn't CHOOSE to become part of the US. The US seized the place and forced the Queen to sign some paperwork turning the country over to them. And now a bunch of people from the country that took over your country come every year to party it up, even if there's been a disaster that killed a bunch of native Hawaiians.
This is why a lot of native Hawaiians have a big problem with tourists not just now, but ALL of the time. And if you say their economy is getting uplifted by tourism you will get an EARFUL about how foreign companies are what's actually reaping the rewards of that tourism, and that the land on the island is too expensive for natives to buy BECAUSE of the tourist industry snapping it up and how they'd basically rather be poor than occupied by a party industry that encourages outsiders to come down, treat people like servants and trash the place.
Now I can't do anything to solve this and neither can any of you. Just give them a break, guys. It's not easy to live in another man's paradise.