jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

Posts

20

Comments

537

Joined

2 yr. ago

Idk about getting struck down, but it seems like laws inside your jurisdiction are going to stand in a way laws outside don't really. Where it gets tricky is going to be swaths of the country where certain people can't go for fear of being arrested. Feels like a loosening of federalism to me and more like different countries in a way.

If it's a public good the government should run it, but I seriously doubt most people think of it like roads. We don't even think of internet access as a utility.

I honestly think the only way this could work is like email. So you either take the gmail like privacy destruction and ads, or you pay for a service. Back in the day it was bundled by the ISP, but now I think it's way more likely to end up being some bundled 'online service' company that for a monthly fee provided a swath of federated content and services. But that it hasn't sprung up implies that it's not a workable model.

I am still amazed every business seems to think Microsoft cloud would be a good idea for security, availability or just stability. Nothing in the history of Microsoft bears this out. I really don't get it. For just about everything else at work, there's a company standard set by business needs.

No one takes you seriously if you bitch about the brand of pen or paper or stapler the office buys. You get the company brand of computer, chair, desk, phone, phone service, etc. But if the company tried to tell you to not use Windows and Outlook everyone believes there would be a catastrophic rebellion or failure of all staff to send and receive email or something.

This has always seemed absurd to me, but worse in government that supposedly needs security and privacy.

Maybe they can all go to an instacart model or something like Amazons auto checkout model. Or just have actual cashiers. Maybe everything is in vending machines. Idk, but the current experience in retail mostly is horrible and I want to avoid it if at all possible.

I am not an expert, but it seems like most developed countries are learning to deal with a shrinking population. The current decline hasn't had effects like loosening up the job market, so it seems to me this means it's not currently causing any problems that would be catastrophic. There's clearly enough workers for the work that needs to get done.

I think there's not yet been a article of all the 'doom and gloom' of population decline that actually explains why it's worse than overpopulation.

Honestly I have never paid for cable and found alternate sources for media going back to circa 2000. However, I find my hobbies now keep me busy so that I just don't watch much TV anymore. Like with gaming, I more feel sad I don't have the cultural knowledge than I feel like I am missing anything or really burning to see them. YouTube also keeps me plenty busy, plus podcasts, and I'm getting back into books which I have shelves of to be read to work through.

I am having more time to do interesting things and hang out with people now that I'm not spending any time on reddit, less time on lemmy, and very little time watching TV. It's like a lot of my day back.

Honestly I think the best solution would be what ISPs used to do. They would bundle basic email and usenet and web page with your monthly internet access account. You could pay extra if you needed more, either to the ISP or to a specialist provider. The ISP also helped you connect so non techies could still use email etc. More expensive providers like AOL would provide chat and forums too.

But we've stripped internet access to data access, basically web site loading. I don't think you fix it though because you have to be pretty techie to understand why you'd want a non ad based email provider, forget about why you'd want lemmy / fediverse or usenet, chat etc.

I mean, by density it seems like there just would be less unless you are claiming a much higher drugs and crime per capita in the boonies. And you can drive by at 55mph and avoid it much more IME.

I mean this is kinda the point. No one with a car wants to go into a downtown with no parking. And as people have figured out WFH, and way more people need to lower costs and stop paying so much for food. And shopping without a car is a PITA, I did it a couple times in college. Completely unworkable to go shopping once a week. I don't want to spend my life daily going to the store. And now you can get everything delivered. So shopping is down to 'event shopping' like Macys at Christmas. Similarly for eating out, no one is looking to spend 40 for 2 at a subway. So if you're spending lots of dollars you might splurge rarely and only go to high end restaurants killing off diners etc.

And people still find all this cheaper than living in cities. The rent and all other costs have been out of reach for decades. So like so much else, people need lower prices which seems unlikely, much higher wages, also unlikely, or cities continue to hollow out.

I sort of miss the more 'niche' but non techie / nerdy communities but just find myself reading books again, which is also less stressful.

Like all of the supplement industry, it will depend on a couple things. One, what are the regulations in your country? How well are they enforced?

In the US, there is next to no regulation or enforcement, so often these things don't contain what they claim to, or not the amount claimed. So you're looking at third party testing groups or just trusting the manufacturer. Mostly the adulteration isn't harmful, but generally inert. So if there's very little or nothing there, it's most likely placebo.

Next - even if you do get the dose of what it claims - I think it's still very likely placebo, extremely weak or extremely variable effect. "alternative medicine" that has consistent effects on most people every time even when they don't know what they're taking isn't usually alternative anymore - we just call it medicine.

All that said - I personally don't see any issue with using a placebo for psychological issues - "it's all in my head" so applying a "just in my head" fix seems reasonable as long as it's working for me.

I suppose a newer supertelephoto lens for my camera. I don't use it enough to actively look for it, but if someone got me an RF 100-500 as a present I wouldn't say no. Or even a EF Tamron 150-600 G2.

A side by side ATV kind of thingy for going out on the trails in our woods.

I suppose a newer supertelephoto lens for my camera. I don't use it enough to actively look for it, but if someone got me an RF 100-500 as a present I wouldn't say no. Or even a EF Tamron 150-600 G2.

A side by side ATV kind of thingy for going out on the trails in our woods.

I can see this sort of thing being interesting - but the article says they still need an employee to pick up drink glasses it knocks over, and top up drinks it doesn't properly fill. For now, it's more a novelty, and one that I'd guess might wear off sort of fast.

This doesn't seem like new automation - we have had all sorts of drink vending machines for decades, and I believe we've had cocktail ones for at least a few years. And if it sold, people would have already been using it. This seems more like the automatic fountains and such that's as much the "show" as the practical effect.

The other issue IMO has always been age checking - so there's probably a legal challenge to just replacing all bartenders with one of these. What it might eventually do is replace bartending as a skill in so much as making the drinks, but it'll need integrated facial recognition and ID parsing, as well as a lot of speech to text and back via a likely better / tuned ChatGPT to really take over. Though anyone who's going to a bar to interact with the bartender probably won't for these.

I am very pro learning, but I also have basically seen that our society doesn't value it. We're anti expertise to our detriment. I like figuring things out and learning... But I am not sure that that's any more than an opinion I hold. If the learning doesn't help you in life, I have a hard time defending it as more than a preference.

I guess what I'm trying to say is - my values and motivations aren't the only ones, and I can't prove them as the right ones. If someone is primarily motivated by making money, learning is a little correlated with that, but it's not overwhelmingly so. More specifically - writing ChatGPT style essays are something I believe plenty of people have lucrative careers without ever doing.

I not even convinced college has positive ROI anymore. In that context, the output is the issue. In the context of most jobs it is also the issue.

Maybe this analogy will help - do you feel that all the people taking better pictures than ever thanks to AI in their cellphone cameras and automatic post processing have missed an important skill of working out ISO, aperture and shutter speed? Do you think they would mostly agree those skills are useful? Are there a lot of jobs for "camera technicians" where the manual settings are what they're hired for?

Now, I agree that in my analogy - if you know how the settings relate to freezing motion or background blur or whatever, you can take better pictures and likely have a higher hit rate. But I don't think the world prioritizes that, and I am not sure in the bigger picture they are wrong.

I would like to know how you know who's using ChatGPT though. A gut feeling doesn't work for many good reasons.

If someone can use the tool to do the job successfully, I don't see if that learning was actually necessary. Like I learned to use a phone rather than a telegraph. I learned how to drive a car rather than ride a horse. I learned a calculator rather than a sliderule.

Of course we're still at the stage where you need to double check the tool,but that skill is maybe more like supervising someone rather than directly doing the task.

I can imagine prompt engineering will actually be a thing, and asking the AI to fix parts that don't work is the short term. We already can ask the AI to look over it's own work for mistakes, I have to imagine that's going to be built in soon...

The worse thing is if the student can actually ootimize the learning away with the AI, so too can employers optimize away the potential employees.

Seeing family and playing D&D.

I really don't see why you couldn't attack wayland if you're running code locally. Wayland is going to need keyboard hooks anyway to enable important productivity tools like anykey and clipboard managers.