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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If you select a sufficiently short and localised subset of data, you can show almost anything. Would I be wrong to guess tjat your opinion is heavily influenced by the current state of the US? While I agree that the situation there is complete shit and something needs to happen, I would argue (admittedly without any solid data in hand) that globally, automation is helping loads of people and is going to continue to do so.



  • lemming@sh.itjust.workstoFunny@sh.itjust.worksJob Security
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    6 days ago

    In general, it obviously is. The standard of living is rising over the last few hundred years. Many people can quite easily get things and amount and types of food that would be unthinkable just several decades ago. Many of which wouldn’t be possible to manufacture at scale, if at all, without progressing automation. Jobs shifting from production (agriculture and manufacturing) toward services are clear indication of this.

    Enriching the rich disproportionately more is also happening. But that is somewhat different story with partially different causes.



  • Research isn’t the really the expensive part. Or rather most of research is paid by governments. The expensive part is clinical trials. They are paid by the companies that later sell the drugs. Vast majority of clinical trials fails at various stages, but still has to be paid. So any drug that makes the cut has to pay for tens of other very promising compounds that turned out to be toxic, not effective in humans, or just not worth it (also including buying and shutting down competitors or discontinuing tests on drugs that might work, but would hurt company’s other business).

    That being said, there’s something very wrong with drug prices in the US.


  • I think the current very rough estimate is around ¼ of the universe being observable.

    Fun fact: smaller and smaller part of the universe is observable. As the space is expanding, it drives the furtest reaches of observable universe away faster than the light can fly. So the area, from which the light could reach us if it flew for the time since the big bang, is smaller today than it was yesterday. It really drove home for me just how big universe is.


  • So you don’t think that automating production and freeing people to do what they enjoy while improving their standard of living is a worthy goal? Yes, we are moving in the right direction, but there’s still an astonishing amount of manual labor in terrible conditions happening in poor countries to produce cheap stuff. For things that are automated elsewhere, but it would cost more than the cheap labor there. As I said, it’s sad.





  • It’s great. It doesn’t have spell check, but it’s great for writing more characters easily (no long press, just swipe slighty to the side). You can completely customise your layout (and I mean completely, I have my name mapped for easy signing, but also copy, paste, back, compose button…), has Ctrl, Fn, arrows, anything.

    Each key can have up to 9 (but realistically 5) characters - one upon clicking, the rest upon a short swipe to one of the eight directions. I haven’t seen another keyboard like this, and it’s so much faster than long press!