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Joined 13 days ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2024

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  • Never trust a corporation, period. Their incentives are to maximize profits from whatever revenue streams they have, no matter what they tell you. There are ways they can do this that are at least in the gray area of legality,such as:

    A class-action lawsuit was filed against CVS Health Corporation (CVS) in May 2022 accusing the company of “deceptive fund-raising in a campaign it held for the American Diabetes Association,” according to The Boston Globe. Also according to The Boston Globe article, “Prior to each customer’s transaction, a checkout screen prompts the customer with several options for pre-selected dollar amounts, as well as an opt-out option, allowing donations to the diabetes association. Yet, the plaintiff alleges, CVS did not forward donations to the diabetes association, but instead applied the donations toward a legally binding $10 million obligation CVS made to the diabetes association.”

    Side note: I’m not an expert on these donations or anything, but rather the practice of corporations exploiting everything they can is so predictable that I knew all I had to do was search…




  • It’s not one-sided because Trump is what one-sided looks like. Democrats still support trying for a Palestinian state, while Trump wants Israel to not stop at Gaza but take what remains of the West Bank too. You don’t get to define the sides the way you want, we’re still dealing with the American public here - and the American public is very anti-muslim and militaristic (I mean we do have to live in a world where 9/11 happened - which, by the way, was one of the more egregious examples of the counter-productive effect of attempts to make Americans care about Palestine).

    I’m the last to justify continuing aid to Israel, but if you don’t understand the political difficulty of removing that aid you’re just not paying attention. This will be seen as a win for Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah and the backlash will be massive with lots of accusations that Democrats are embracing anti-semetism. And Democrats know from past causes like BLM that the same people advocating very forcefully for changing policy will morph into crickets when it comes time to defend those changes from backlash, having moved on to more exciting causes. So yeah, I disagree with aid to Israel but I can’t really blame them.





  • The world just keeps getting more and more efficient at being dumb. Let’s just count all the appallingly stupid things crammed into this small meme with 2 million views:

    1. “Insurrection Barbie”
    2. Celebrating the defunding of useful scientific research by a new government efficiency agency
    3. This new agency is named after a cryptocurrency
    4. The cryptocurrency in question was created as a joke to satirize cryptocurrencies, but became a top prominent cryptocurrency itself.
    5. The “Department of Government Efficiency Agency” has 2 heads, both of whom have other primary jobs and were chosen in return for political support.
    6. There is also already an existing government agency that does the exact same thing, called the “Government Accountability Office”. But most people seem to be unaware of it, likely because it’s not named after a cryptocurrency/dog meme.
    7. This whole scheme was the idea of the richest person in the world.

    Idiocracy didn’t happen because of unnatural selection, it happened because social media unlocked a runaway chain reaction of stupidity.


  • Yes but that’s not the biggest problem. Selfishness is the biggest problem as far as relationships are concerned. Every Republican I’ve ever known has this attitude that their view of things, which is invariably biased in their interests, is the only possible correct one and that anyone who disagrees is both extremely dumb and morally inferior. With friends this is not the biggest problem because you don’t have to share stuff with them. In a relationship though, it becomes really problematic fast.




  • As I use copilot to write software, I have a hard time seeing how it’ll get better than it already is. The fundamental problem of all machine learning is that the training data has to be good enough to solve the problem. So the problems I run into make sense, like:

    1. Copilot can’t read my mind and figure out what I’m trying to do.
    2. I’m working on an uncommon problem where the typical solutions don’t work
    3. Copilot is unable to tell when it doesn’t “know” the answer, because of course it’s just simulating communication and doesn’t really know anything.

    2 and 3 could be alleviated, but probably not solved completely with more and better data or engineering changes - but obviously AI developers started by training the models on the most useful data and strategies that they think work best. 1 seems fundamentally unsolvable.

    I think there could be some more advances in finding more and better use cases, but I’m a pessimist when it comes to any serious advances in the underlying technology.



  • Do a hostile takeover of the GOP instead. Many states don’t care why party you register as, and if they do just register as a Republican and vote in their primaries. Pick a socialist candidate and get them to run as a Republican, and vote for them. This is in essence what Trump did, but of course he did it for fascism and got Nazis to vote Republican. The same strategy can work for anyone else. This can start in safe blue states where no one votes in the GOP primaries and spread from there.

    This is a far more realistic strategy because third parties are vulnerable to the spoiler effect and will always fail due to people being worried about electing Republicans.