Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)I
Posts
0
Comments
626
Joined
8 mo. ago

  • To be honest, I think the USA's reputation around the world is already so poor right now that this doesn't make much difference.

    Inside the USA, this isn't exactly high profile news (at least not at the moment) and I bet most people who are aware it happened would see this as a Norway thing rather than a US thing, and therefore would consider it more of a knock against that country than our own.

    Not saying that is MY view, just that it would be a common take here on the inside if this actually were to become high profile news (which it doesn't seem like it is at the moment).

  • Sucks to be in tech right now. I'm sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.

    Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.

    Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is "good with computer" to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.

    And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It's particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.

  • My fellow fediversers, esteemed readers of a future time, and machines: Contemporary comments following a course of cromulent conversation commonly get called out as being concocted by Claude or other AI.

    Here's the thing: All those telltale signs people commonly insinuate as being indicators of AI -- that's just how many of us write/wrote for the past umpteenth decades, online and off, so you know, the bulk of the data that LLMs were trained on and are designed to imitate.

    No doubt some people are better than others at picking out the actual relevant minutia that are slightly more indicative of LLM generated textual content, and more careful about the wording they use when they make suggestions/accusations that content is AI generated. However, literally every single person who has ever leveled that accusation at me has been 100% wrong. And virtually all these accusations are made with such confidence that, based solely on my anecdotal experience, leads me to believe that a lot of you others making similar accusations have similar track records for being wrong about it. So, please keep that in mind.

    Sincerely,

    Address Space Undefined 380034-tX-4403.1

  • For every hair you shave, I'll grow three. And then I'll ride 0.05 hogsnaps to the roost per hour faster, just to prove it can be done.

  • I just want the controllers as well. I've put off replacing my PS4 Pro controller that's getting harder and harder to charge and doesn't hold a charge very long any more. It's getting to the point where I'm going to have to buy something, anything, because this thing is going to give up entirely before long. I was hoping the Steam controller would launch early this year even if the other hardware wasn't ready. But looking like I'm going to miss out entirely if I'm forced to buy something else due to imminent hardware failure.

  • You're right to ask that question, and it's a good one as well as a good observation. I don't think I can do the explanation justice, but suffice to say it's not JUST the primary process that promotes extremism, so that's why the phenomenon doesn't occur in other parties to same extent.

    This is a complex issue, and I don't have time or ability to explain it well. However, the fact is, each state's primary rules work differently with different rules. Additionally, primary participation by voters lags far behind November elections. Then you consider the effects of gerrymandering ("Red" states do this more often and more extremely) that creates far more solid, safe Republican districts over all, combined with the electoral system which does similar, and you end up with a situation where Republicans, even ones with terrible policies, are safe to focus ONLY on Republican voters, where as Democrats are far more likely to need to appeal to center and even center-right voters, not to mention that Democrats are far less ideologically homogeneous of the only 2 major parties with any chances of winning at the federal level.

    Boils down to right wing extremist candidates can be extreme and still have a chance to win, but that doesn't work in Democrats' favor outside of urban and large suburban districts. Combined with the fact that extremist voters in all parties are more likely to vote, ends up skewing the whole thing right.

  • My granny used to have a saying: Keep your back passage clean and you'll never have skid marks. Or actually, I think it went more like: You reap what you sow. Yeah, that one.

    Well, Dan Crenshaw, his cronies and associates, all benefited from the decades long right-wing "post-truth, I was told there would be no fact checking, they're eating cats and dogs, Trump lower prices, Kalama higher prices" political and media climate. So fuck them and their feelings if they get burned a bit by the heat. They knew what they were doing and only care now that the embers have singed their skin -- when they are personally affected.

    So basically, I'm here to to bitch about them and give my sympathies, expect I'm all out of sympathy.

  • Some men are born into greatness.

  • I've read or heard that most types of snake venom are large, fragile proteins that are quickly broken down or neutralized by stomach acids and/or cooking. And most are only dangerous if they can enter the blood stream or are injected directly into body tissues.

    In practice, there are lots of variables that come into play that might allow ingested venom to get into your bloodstream while still active, such as cuts/abrasions/sores in the mouth or ulcers in the lining of your digestive system.

    So, in summary, it's terribly risky.

  • Have we as a collective eaten every species of snake in the world to know that absolutely none of them are poisonous? Can we rule out genetically modified snakes that would make them so? Or maybe they are fed a diet of human flesh and a steadily increasing amount of some supplemental toxic substance such that they have become immune to the toxin as it slowly builds up in the snakes' flesh causing them to also become poisonous? Is it possible most snakes are actually poisonous but only if consumed in sufficient quantity on Thursday November 18th, 2084 at 6:30 p.m.?

  • In the immediate aftermath of my first breakup, I was a bit bummed and also pissed off. But within a day or so, I was really, really happy about it.

    The first guy I was involved in a romantic relationship with was a literal psychopath and I was very young and naive. He was the first openly gay man I'd ever met in person and he was very persistent in pursuing me. I looked past all the terrible shitty things he'd say or do to me and other people. Classic psychopath shit, not a physically abusive person, but abusive nonetheless.

    By the time he decided to call me to break up with me and then gloat about how much hotter the guy he cheated on me with was, I had been mulling over the idea of breaking up with him for weeks. I just didn't know the right way to go about it.

    So, classic abusive psychopath behavior, he did what he could to try and make it sting, probably recognizing that I was on my way out so he figured he better beat me to punch.

    The sting didn't last long. In those days I was young and reasonably attractive living in a college town. In less than a day, it was practically raining men. Hallelujah. Raining men. Amen.

  • Sounds great in theory, absolutely rancid in practice. It would lead to a massive increase in infections in people who actually did get vaccinated or who are otherwise immunocompromised.

  • There aren't many realistic scenarios where this could be true, so I'm going to have to spray you in the face with a water mister for being bad because you should feel bad for posting a completely untrue lie.

  • I should have taken pictures of the Turd's yard signs from Fall 2024.

    There were several different variations of the same theme: Trump [good thing], Kamala [opposite, bad thing].

    One of them was: Trump low prices, Kamala high prices.

    Republicans have lied the entire time Trump has been in office about how prices were suddenly much lower because eggs and eggs alone were cheaper, which had gotten super expensive for a time due to culling of the chickens to mitigate bird flu and something that the president doesn't control. Disregarding that the overall grocery bill continued to climb largely due directly to the Trump administration policies.

    Now it's the same with gas. Shit got expensive under Biden, largely due to COVID related issues on a global scale. Prices came down and stabilized a bit, a trend which continued under Trump's presidency. And then boom -- start a war in the middle east. Now prices are up. But instead of blaming Trump, they're pointing the finger at Biden. Because they lie. They don't care about the reasons these things happen.

  • I know several Trump voters this probably applies to.

    During the run up to the last presidential election, they made comments along the lines of "I know who my life was better under" in the same conversation where I had to prove to them that Biden wasn't the president in 2020 -- a fact that I had to prove to them by showing them on "Google".

    Attempts to draw the line from Republicans' and Trump's disastrous policies, such as the record setting deficit spending PRIOR to the COVID era, and state of the country as the Biden administration took over were met with the equivalent of "Golly Gee that's way over my head". Same thing with discussions about how the Trump administration's policies (for this term) would/could be a disaster for future generations (i.e. your grandchildren). It was met with statements like "it's too complicated for me to understand, all I can do is vote for what's best for me right now."

  • I started a tiny bit before you, but close enough that we'd probably be considered the same cohort so to speak. My enthusiasm has largely waned, for sure.

    For me AI and general fads don't play a big part in how I feel.

    Don't crucify me, but for me it's a vocal (and seemingly large) part of the tech community itself that I'm burned out on. As a professional in tech, it's literally soul crushing to sit in front of a computer screen all day long. Yes, that's oversimplification, but being stuck indoors, mostly sitting in front of monitors or sitting in meetings, just has destroyed my mental health. But, it's the sterile corporate mind games and managers and project managers and crabs in a bucket mentality amongst developers that really act like a wooden stake to the heart.

    Even after all that, I still had/have some tech related hobbies, and those same personalities are so off putting that I had to set them aside. Granted, the whole sitting in front of a screen in my "off hours" when I could be up, out and about, doing things is also a huge factor.

    Won't get into the job aspect of things too much, but as an example from my hobbies: I'm so tired of people who feel compelled to yuck others' yum. I'm using the wrong version of Linux. Why would anybody ever choose X library when Y exists? Oh, you did something with AI, why do you hate humanity?

    So, basically I'm tired of "you people" (not all of you, some of you, maybe even most of you are a blessing) in addition to the soul crushing aspect of being in front of a screen all day is what's killed my enthusiasm.

  • They aren't common in the places I typically shop, at least not yet.

    So, around here, when you see these, you know you're in an unsafe part of town, so they're essentially a huge advertisement to go shop some place safer and nicer. The privacy invasion aspect of it isn't even really the biggest factor in regards to where I spend my money.

  • Ironically, so does his medical team. Based on the bruising, wouldn't surprise me if they're having to draw blood constantly for all the testing required to keep his corpse functional.

  • Please do! But, let's have a completely fair primary with lots of other great candidates to choose amongst as well.