loobkoob @ loobkoob @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

My advice is don’t look to date

I think, even if you have the long-term intention of finding someone to date, this is the best approach. Not only does it mean you totally avoid coming off as desperate, but I think if you're actively looking to date then it can result in you holding them to ideals or standards they're not looking to or necessarily able to meet. And it can limit the connections you can form - both people to date and just new friendships - because you find yourself dismissing people who don't meet your pre-established idea of what you're looking for.

The fewer expectations you can place on someone, the more chance you have of forming a connection.

My thoughts exactly. I wish it'd been stolen instead, or something else just generally less environmentally damaging.

I don't think AI will be a fad in the same way blockchain/crypto-currency was. I certainly think there's somewhat of a hype bubble surrounding AI, though - it's the hot, new buzzword that a lot of companies are mentioning to bring investors on board. "We're planning to use some kind of AI in some way in the future (but we don't know how yet). Make cheques out to please"

I do think AI does have actual, practical uses, though, unlike blockchain which always came off as a "solution looking for a problem". Like, I'm a fairly normal person and I've found good uses for AI already in asking it various questions where it gives better answers than search engines, in writing code for me (I can't write code myself), etc. Whereas I've never touched anything to do with crypto.

AI feels like a space that will continue to grow for years, and that will be implemented into more and more parts of society. The hype will die down somewhat, but I don't see AI going away.

Thanks, I'm glad you found it useful! Unfortunately, I don't have any specific recommendations for further reading - it's the sort of thing I've just picked up over the years of paying attention to politics and economics rather than from any specific sources.

However, after a quick search, the US Treasury actually has a pretty good page about it.

The key graph to look at on that page is the one that shows the debt to GDP ratio (which, as it explains, is the most useful way to measure debt because it shows the country's ability to repay its loans). And you can see, despite the fact that Biden's administration has hit the highest ever raw national debt number, they've actually done a pretty good job at stabilising this ratio after the disaster that was Trump's term.

(To be fair to Trump, COVID was responsible for some of that big upwards spike. But you can see it was trending upwards - ie, bad - under Trump before COVID started.)

Which means that, yes, the national debt has continued to rise in real numbers under Biden, but the US economy has also been growing at a similar rate, meaning nothing's got any worse in real terms.

The BBC also has a pretty good overview of national debt. It's relating to the UK but the principles are still the same.

The significant thing, which is harder to gauge, is how much return the country gets on its borrowing. If you borrow $1B for some infrastructure project, to be paid back over 25 years, but over those 25 years the infrastructure project generates $1.5B in taxes, job opportunities, time saved, etc, and then it continues to generate more money even after the debt has been paid off, then taking on the debt was a good thing in the long run. Sure, the national debt went up, and generally owing money is seen as bad, but it was profitable overall and the country's GDP maybe have increased at a higher rate than its debt over that period.

And it gets even more complex when you consider less tangible results like the happiness of the population. If the country breaks even on its borrowing but the population's happiness is increased, I think most people would consider it a success, but it's hard to measure that.

A lot of the people who get overly panicky about national debts don't tend to understand them. They treat them like household budgets, or like businesses, where you absolutely need to balance your books every year or you're in trouble. With national debts, as long as the country can keep paying back its lenders and as long as they continue to grow (economically), national debts aren't that big a deal at all.

Generally, left-wing economics tends to lean towards borrowing as an investment into the future, and isn't too concerned with the actual debt number increasing as long as things are improving at a good rate. Right-wing economics tends to lean towards being loud about the national debt increasing and lean towards austerity and other cuts in order to "balance the books", often calling the left-wing approach "irresponsible". Personally, if it's not obvious, I favour the left-wing approach.

It absolutely is. Although, putting aside the obvious ethical debates, I will say that least AI has some practical uses. Crypto-currency and NFTs felt a lot like a solution looking for a problem, and while that can be true of some implementations of AI, there are a lot of valid uses for it.

But yeah, companies rushing to use AI like this, and making statements like this, just screams that they're trying to persuade investors they're "ahead of the curve", and is absolutely indicative of a hype bubble. If it wasn't a hype bubble, they'd either be quietly exploring it externally and not putting out statements like this, or they're be putting out statements excitedly talking specifics about their novel and clever implementations of AI.

I'm not sure if The Expanse (TV series) ruined Foundation (TV) for me, if it's just not a good adaptation, or if the books are just not particularly adaptable (or all three), but I agree. I only made it through the first two episodes before I gave up. I've heard the second season is better, but I don't know if it's worth it to force myself to sit through season 1 for.

The Expanse is just spectacular when it comes to realising its world but also, with how much depth there is to the characters and politics, Foundation immediately felt very shallow in comparison. Obviously The Expanse books lay a lot of the foundations for the TV series to build on, but I think the TV series did a great job of adapting it to a new medium without much being lost in translation, and it even added to it in its own ways. Foundation's world-building, characterisation and politics all kind of just felt like it was going through the motions and showing surface-level stuff because it felt it had to rather than because it actually had any substance to work with. Which wasn't helped by the fact that the books don't provide much in that regard to work with.

Ultimately, I don't think the Foundation books aren't particularly well-suited to being adapted to the screen. It's so focused on the "bigger picture" - on civilisations rather than characters, on philosophical and sociological concepts rather than particular plot points, on macro-narrative - while TV needs characters and micro-narrative.

I will say that the TV series' idea to use three different-aged clones of Emperor Cleon, and to keep the actors persistent through the ages, seemed like a great addition. It's good to try to keep some recognisable faces while jumping across such long time periods.

I think it's good that they asked here. The way the fediverse is structured means there can be plenty of people who use an instance - posting to it, browsing posts from it, etc - without being registered with that instance. If Beehaw says they're contemplating leaving, only to be met with a "NO, DON'T GO" response from the rest of the fediverse, then that might give them reason to rethink their position. And if everyone just says "eh, whatever" or "yeah, go away" then it may reinforce their position.

Obviously the opinions of the people who've registered there should hold more weight, but I think putting the question to everyone is a good move.

Not to defend Amazon, but my assumption there would be that they're covering themselves for podcasts that include sponsored ad reads in the podcast (ie, not inserted by amazon themselves). If it's anything other than that, it seems like misadvertising.

Option 1 also isn't necessarily as bad as they make it seem. If you suddenly gained super speed and your perception of time altered over night then, yes, you're suddenly going be spending a lot more time in your own head relative to before and it's going to take some adjustment as best, a lot of therapy at worst. But if you're born like that, surely it'd just be normal for you and you wouldn't necessarily know anything different?

The other option that wasn't mentioned is that you can "turn on" your powers and the world feels like it goes into slow motion around you, and then you turn them off again afterwards and it's all back to normal.

The GTA 6 leaks were in September 2022, so a little more than two weeks ago!

I don't think consumers were the target of the scam; if they were, I don't see a reason why they wouldn't have accepted pre-orders for the game. In fact, I think they know that accepting pre-orders would have left them open to false advertising lawsuits which is why they didn't go for them, and I think they were well aware that people could just refund the game so trying to scam consumers (in this instance) was probably not worth attempting.

Instead, I think the investors were the target. The brothers who own(ed?) the studio have been living off investor money for the last few years, and which how suspicious their finances are (their ludicrously high travel expenses, in particular) I'm sure they've hidden away a bunch more money.

The game that exists is a shameless, cheaply-made asset flip that I suspect only exists at all because it makes it much harder for investors to sue for fraud when there's an actual product. If they'd just tried to take the money and run without releasing anything it'd be obvious fraud, but now they can claim they tried their best, expectations were too high, etc, and it's difficult for the investors to prove otherwise.

Would you kindly?

That one appears to have turned out to not be the case, fortunately. He wrote up a very long post with a lot of receipts (which is worth a read). He filed a libel suit against his two accusers, which ended up being settled out of court with a large payout in his favour and with the accusers retracting their accusations, categorically saying he had never sexually abused either of them (or any other women to their knowledge).

It was satisfactory enough for me, personally.

Ideally, OP's crawlers will just come from their own instance that other instance owners can defederate from if they want to opt out.

There's no inflation in space, just explosive decompression!

You felt much more strongly about it than me then. I just found myself not caring about it in the slightest; the only thing I really felt was boredom. Which is arguably the worst possible outcome for any work of art.

I'm pretty sure the opposite of "critical thinking" is "free thinking", at least based on all the "free thinkers" I've spoken to. I assume it's short for "free-of-critical-thought... thinking".

The last thing I saw regarding him was him being unable to comprehend how secret rooms in Metroid work. It was painful.