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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • This article is giving them too much credit, frankly. Saying Republican support dropped from “majority to minority” is misleading, bordering on clickbait.

    All that happened was support dropped from 55% to 46%. They were only ever barely a majority.

    Saying “Nearly half” or “over half” of all Republicans don’t support gay marriage is splitting hairs. They all support the candidates that are against it.

    The real story here is that even support among Democrats and Independents dropped a bit in the last 2 years. Meaning the fear mongering is pervasive enough to affect everyone.


  • You can see their strategy at work here.

    It is possible to keep individual files on the local hard drive with different settings (that in my experience never seem to stick past updates).

    The default, though, is to take everything on your computer off of your computer, put it into the cloud (their computer), and recommend you pick and choose which ones stay on your computer. In essence, they want you to think of your computer as secondary to their computer. An extension of it.

    There is no “your computer”, it’s just the computer you happen to be logged into at the moment.

    The cloud is not something you take advantage of, the cloud is where you live now.








  • Sure, but she’s also his mother, not a random family member. I’m not going to fault a mother for standing by their child, no matter what he did.

    She didn’t let him buy anything, but she couldn’t make him get rid of it because it wasn’t in her house. It was locked up at a friend’s house in a different town.

    She was also ill, poor, dyslexic, and a single parent dealing with a difficult child. She doesn’t seem to have much in her life but her children, I’m not going to condemn her for not banishing him from her life. It’s not an easy thing for a mother to do.






  • I’ve seen people defend using AI this way by comparing it to using a calculator in a math class, i.e. if the technology knows it, I don’t need to.

    And I feel like, for the kind of people whose grasp of technology, knowledge, and education are so juvenile that they would believe such a thing, AI isn’t making them dumber. They were already dumb. What the AI does is make code they don’t understand more accessible, which is to say, it’s just enabling dumb people to be more dangerous while instilling them with an unearned confidence that only compounds the danger.



  • So it’s helpful for saving time typing some stuff

    Legitimately, this is the only use I found for it. If I need something extremely simple, and feeling too lazy to type it all out, it’ll do the bulk of it, and then I just go through and edit out all little mistakes.

    And what gets me is that anytime I read all of the AI wank about how people are using these things, it kind of just feels like they’re leaving out the part where they have to edit the output too.

    At the end of the day, we’ve had this technology for a while, it’s just been in the form of predictive suggestions on a keyboard app or code editor. You still had to steer in the right direction. Now it’s just smart enough to make it from start to finish without going off a cliff, but you still have to go back and fix it, the same way you had to steer it before.


  • Another friend of mine was reviewing software intended for emergency services, and the salespeople were not expecting someone handling purchasing in emergency services to be a hardcore programmer. It was this false sense of security that led them to accidentally reveal that the service was ultimately just some dude in India. Listen, I would just be some random dude in India if I swapped places with some of my cousins, so I’m going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you’re an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

    This aspect of it isn’t getting talked about enough. These companies are presenting these things as fully-formed AI, while completely neglecting the people behind the scenes constantly cleaning it up so it doesn’t devolve into chaos. All of the shortcomings and failures of this technology are being masked by the fact that there’s actual people working round the clock pruning and curating it.

    You know, humans, with actual human intelligence, without which these miraculous “artificial intelligence” tools would not work as they seem to.

    If the "AI’ needs a human support team to keep it “intelligent”, it’s less AI and more a really fancy kind of puppet.