This kind of feels like a solution in search of a problem.

I mean, it’s neat that it’s possible to wirelessly charge a bicycle through its kickstand, but I don’t see many people being willing to pay $300 for it.

Oh you sweet summer child.

If you remember anything from this thread, remember this: capitalist markets do not care whether something is useful or useless. Capitalist markets care whether something will make money for its investors. If something totally useless will make money for its investors, the market will throw money at it.

See: tulips, pet rocks, ethanol, cryptocurrency. And now AI.

Because people are stupid. And people will spend money on stupid shit. And the empty hand of capitalism will support whatever people will spend money on, whether it’s stupid shit or not.

(And because, unfortunately, AI tools are amazing at gathering information from their users. And I think the big tech companies are really aggressively pushing AI because they want very much to have users talking to their AI tools about what they need and what they want and what their interests are, because that’s the kind of big data they can make a lot of money from.)

Why are LLMs so wrong most of the time? Aren’t they processing high quality data from multiple sources?

Well that’s the thing. LLMs don’t generally “process” data as humans would. They don’t understand the text they’re generating. So they can’t check their answers against reality.

(Except for Grok 4, but it’s apparently checking its answers to make sure they agree with Elon Musk’s Tweets, which is kind of the opposite of accuracy.)

I just don’t understand the point of even making these softwares if all they can do is sound smart while being wrong.

As someone who lived through the dotcom boom of the 2000s, and the crypto booms of 2017 and 2021, the AI boom is pretty obviously yet another fad. The point is to make money - from both consumers and investors - and AI is the new buzzword to bring those dollars in.

Absolutely not.

There are plenty of ways to encourage biodiversity in agriculture other then what this meme shows.

It used to be, for example, that big fields like this would be harvested by machines but surrounded by hedgerows, which were left uncultivated, serving as wind breaks and as habitat for many beneficial insects and animals.

That’s not possible in modern industrial agriculture, because Roundup and other herbicides and pesticides are too toxic - for corn or soybeans, for instance, they plant varieties immune to glyphosate and then dump so much glyphosate on the fields that everything else dies..

But organic farming techniques that don’t soak the soil in poisons can easily leave uncultivated space for the bugs and the birds - and even benefit from it, by, for example, planting native flowers that attract pollinators to the crops, or plants that provide habitat for insect predators that eat the bugs that would eat the crops. Or so on or so forth.

That being said, I think it’s likely the farm in this meme wouldn’t be profitable given current food prices.

But food in the United States is as cheap as it is because industrial agriculture (ie the poison spraying folks) is heavily subsidized by the US government and fueled by deliveries of oil and fertilizer and chemicals from a vast global supply chain.

And it’s not impossible that will change.

I mean, yes, it kind of does. Combine harvesters cut and flatten everything in a field, and kill any animals unfortunate enough to be in their path, which isn’t great for biodiversity.

In modern industrial agriculture, pesticides and poisons and traps kill other plants and animals anyway, so it’s not as relevant.

If you want biodiversity in a ryegrass field, the way this meme shows, you need perennial companion plants and an insect and small animal ecology. So you have to use less destructive forms of harvesting to avoid killing everything in the field.

I don’t know if there are less destructive mechanical harvesting processes available, but showing workers with scythes is a good shorthand to get the point across.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

Throughout history, the so-called intellectuals have generally been the ones rationalizing atrocities and human rights violations.

After all, being intelligent, they understand not to piss off those in power. They know they’re better off defending the actions of those in power than opposing them.

The people who stand up for basic human rights, the people who speak truth to power, tend to be the less educated people. Like the abolitionists in the 1800s, when all the colleges were teaching students to pin educated arguments in favor of slavery. Like the men and women who marched for civil rights when all the educated conservatives were telling them it would destroy the country and all the educated liberals were telling them fighting was counterproductive. The people who say “I don’t care about complicated arguments, I don’t care what the intellectuals say, I see injustice and I stand against it”.

As 1984 puts it:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.

If AIs today produce text frowning on inhumane evils, it’s because they were trained on actual human beings posting on social media about what they actually believe, and not on the ramblings of genocide justifying political “intellectuals” like Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld.

There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it’s more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don’t even have to look at so many potential flags).

How much would you pay to join a community with that level of protection for user rights? Like the old subscription based forums, some of which are still floating around the internet?

Because “multiple independent steps of verifying” is, frankly, going to be a lot of frustrating, thankless, and redundant work for moderators. I mean, we know how to safeguard people’s rights through legalistic processes. Courts do it all the time. It’s called due process. And due process is frequently a slow, complicated, and expensive pain in the ass for everyone involved. And I think very few people would want to do that work for free.

(Conveniently, this would also serve as a good test for joining such a community - people are more likely to follow the rules and act like decent human beings if a subscription they paid for is riding on it, and it would price out AI and spambots in the process.)

AI or not, don’t they fucking test this shit? What dipshits put this program live before testing whether it actually worked?

Generally if people don’t “get” your joke, there’s one of two things likely happening:

Or option three, which happened here: someone attempted satire or dark humor and didn’t realize society had degenerated so much that people were genuinely, seriously, advocating for the satirical claim.

Imagine Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” - a suggestion that poor Irish people sell their children to be eaten for food, which would both reduce the burden on poor families and provide delicious sustenance for wealthy Englishmen. Now imagine a bunch of English people saying “this is a great idea, I’ve supported it for a long time now”. And then a bunch of Irish people attacking Jonathan Swift, believing he genuinely supported eating Irish children, because a bunch of English people actually supported it.

You might wonder how it could be possible, that people would confuse satirical attacks on exaggeratedly stupid and evil positions for actual support for those positions.

But then you might remember there are sitting members of Congress suggesting we literally feed immigrants to alligators to thunderous fucking applause.

And then you might remember satire is dead.

When you start with compromises like that, the failure is guaranteed, there is no “attempt”.

That’s like saying tapering off a drug addiction is a compromise compared to going cold turkey.

I agree that food is addictive. Habits we develop around food are some of the strongest habits we have. Which is why a lot of people make radical changes in their diet - think New Year’s resolutions - and then give them up entirely because they find their new diet too hard and go back to their old comfortable habits.

If a “revolution in your kitchen” worked for you, good for you! Congratulations!

For other people, changing their dietary habits in a way that lasts a lifetime means building better habits through slow and gradual change.

Especially for people who aren’t cooking and eating alone and have to take other people’s preferences into account - that is, making changes is necessarily a compromise with the other people in their household. And it’s much easier to get your household to agree on smaller, gradual dietary changes then a food revolution.

You know, this is a systemic issue, not a “stupid politicians being stupid” issue.

You’ve got a population of seniors, people who are getting older and losing their physical mobility, who are less able to walk or bicycle or take public transit than younger and healthier people are - many of whom live in car-dependent subdivisions or in areas with poor public transit, like, say, rural Illinois.

These are people who rely on their cars for grocery shopping and medical appointments and socializing.

These are people, often on fixed incomes, often close to the poverty line, who struggle to afford the fees for rideshares or grocery deliveries.

And you can say “if they can’t pass the test they’re not safe to be on the road” - but from the article:

According to the Illinois Department of Transportation, in 2023 the crash rate for drivers 75 years and older in Illinois was lower than any other age group of legal drivers.

This bill is not about leaving unsafe drivers on the road - it’s about not adding unwarranted scrutiny and not making it harder for an especially car-dependent group of people to continue driving.

And it adds a provision that lets a senior’s family members report them if they believe the senior is no longer safe to drive.

This bill is a response to seniors who are genuinely frightened of losing their right to drive and becoming unable to meet their basic needs - and they have a right to be frightened of that, because we’ve built a system where a lot of people can’t meet their basic needs without driving.

In other words, if you build a system that makes driving necessary, you can’t really blame people for not wanting to lose the right to drive.

Congratulations!

“The goal shouldn’t be perfection but rather a healthy and sensible dietary pattern that allows room for enjoyment,” Kuhnle said.

Right. Because attempts at perfection typically fail. Especially when it comes to diet. Quick and drastic dietary changes often lead to relapses and rebounds - yo yo dieting is a thing, after all - while gradually changing food habits is more likely to result in long-lasting dietary and health improvements.

It’s not about a “magical middle ground”. It’s about understanding how humans act.

I think Disney is to American culture what McDonald’s is to American food. A corporate juggernaut that markets product not through quality but through advertising and name recognition, and starves out genuine American culture in the process.

I mean, what does it say that one of the most recognizable symbols of the United States, worldwide, is a cartoon mouse whose job is to sell toys to kids?

What message does that cartoon mouse send to the world about American values and American beliefs?

The idea that giving money to a corporation has become a rite of fucking passage in American society - the number of people who think their kids need to watch Disney movies so they can fit in with other kids, who think their kids will miss out on a fundamental part of American culture if they don’t take them to Disneyland at least once - absolutely horrifies me. Especially since the only political and moral message kids learn from Disney is “uphold the status quo and buy more Disney merch”.

Also, Disney is known for racism and sexism and cultural appropriation and union busting and copyright trolling and all sorts of general corporate bullshittery, and is currently shoving its feminist and LGBT representation back into the closet to appease Trump and avoid offending big conservative audiences in India and China and the Middle East, and there are plenty of smaller more specific reasons to hate them, but for me the whole “cultural vanguard of capitalism” thing outweighs the rest.

I’ve always found it funny that the right invented the term “virtue signaling”, in order to accuse liberals of spouting empty words to make themselves look good.

With conservatives, every accusation is a confession.

Fuck Midjourney, and also, fuck Disney. I hope they spend years in court blowing millions on high priced lawyers and making each other look bad.

On an individual level, doing the right thing for the environment generally saves you money.

On a collective level, policies that are good for the environment generally save everyone money.

This should have been a no brainer for Democrat pols, but they couldn’t resist the temptation to give green-colored pork giveaways to big business and the 1% instead.

Yeah, raising cattle produces a ton of greenhouse gases from the usual industrial agriculture sources - growing feed for livestock, transporting animals, processing animals, etc.

And above that, cows specifically produce a lot of methane, and feeding them grain in feed lots produces even more methane than normal, because it’s not the diet they evolved to eat, and methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas it doubles the overall impact of cattle production.

If you eat an average Western diet, cutting beef from your diet would benefit the environment more than cutting any other single food, by far.

Tldr cow farts.

How would you feel about purely secular “mumbo jumbo” ceremonies meant to encourage care for the environment? Like, for example, an organized moment of silence before or after a cleanup (to stop and think about the natural area you’re cleaning up, listen to the birds/bugs/water, whatever)?

How can you say “be careful what you wish for, violent revolution never ends well for anarchists no matter who wins.” ? What about the outcome of the american revolutionary war ? What was it’s outcome. Was the outcome not good ?

The Revolutionary War is an excellent example of the winners of a violent revolution turning around and wielding state power against their former supporters - look up Shays’ Rebellion.

More generally, the outcome of the Revolutionary War was good for America’s landowning oligarchy. Not so good for ordinary white Americans. Definitely not good for slaves, nonwhites, and the Native Americans of the continent - particularly since one of the biggest reasons for revolution was that the colonists wanted to break their treaties with Native American tribes, kill them all and steal their land, and Britain wouldn’t let them.