• 2 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I am not sure they have to reach AGI to replace almost everyone. The amount of investment in them is now higher than it has ever been. Things are, and honestly have been, going quick. No, they are not as advanced as some people make them out to be, but I also don’t think the next steps are as nebulously difficult as some want to believe. But I would love it if you save this comment and come back in 5 years and laugh at me, I will probably be pretty relieved as well


  • I read an article once about how when humans hear that someone has died, the first thing they try and do is come up with a reason that whatever befell the deceased would not happen to them. Some of the time there was a logical reason, some of the time there’s not, but either way the person would latch onto the reason to believe they were safe. I think we’re seeing the same thing here with AI. People are seeing a small percentage of people lose their job, with a technology that 95% of the world or more didn’t believe was possible a couple years ago, and they’re searching for reasons to believe that they’re going to be fine, and then latching onto them.

    I worked at a newspaper when the internet was growing. I saw the same thing with the entire organization. So much of the staff believed the internet was a fad. This belief did not work out for them. They were a giant, and they were gone within 10 years. I’m not saying we aren’t in an AI bubble now, but, there are now several orders of magnitude more money in the internet now than there was during the Dot Com bubble, just because it’s a bubble doesn’t mean it wont eventually consume everything.


  • While I do not think they were in the right to have the users “unmasked”, my understanding is that the users in question were talking about how the Austin internet provider, Grande, was good for torrenting, so the attempt to unmask the users wasn’t meant to get the users in trouble but to show that Grande benefitted financially from a lax policy towards pirating, so them not mentioning piracy in their comments wasn’t necessarily the end of the conversation, if they were willing to say now that it was in reference to piracy. I do think it sounds like grasping at straws, but I imagine the potential value they were hoping to get from Grande was worth that grasping to them














  • I’m a former smoker, so, I might not count, but if I do - no. Quitting smoking was the hardest addiction I ever managed to stop. If a friend wants my advice on stopping, I’ll give it to them, but, I know how hard it is to stop, and for most people the pain of going through stopping just isn’t worth it. Anyone who smokes for long enough with other smokers knows that there is no shortage of people who are embarrassed by the addiction, and worry about being looked down on by others. Making judgements on others for consequences of a choice they made when they were most likely a kid is just not something I want to be a part of.

    I haven’t smoked in 15 years, and I still have times where I miss it. Hell, I have a dream about once a month where I take up smoking again. I am really glad I stopped, but, I really got super lucky by what was going on in my life when I successfully quit, I had the support of friends and family, and everything was going right for me at that time. Had things not gone “just right” for several months in a row I am pretty sure I would have convinced myself to go to a gas station and torch all of that progress.