There’s a difference between ‘a person’ and ‘every person’. A person can definitely do things better than any chat bot. But not every person can. And depending on the situation, a person who can may not be available.

Even then, there is a place where the AI beats all persons and is better in one way: speed. If the task at hand does not require a better result than what the AI outputs, then the time savings is big, because there are no situations in which any human will work faster.

At 77 I think it’s gone past normal and into a completely different weird niche.

Elon certainly talks a good line, but his actions don’t really follow. Like, I agree with this, eliminating intellectual property would be great. I am sure that whatever actions he tries in regards to this won’t actually follow through and will instead somehow be twisted to benefit him at the cost of others.

That is absolutely not a free feature on Steam. Some publishers like Paradox leave old versions as ‘beta’ branches to allow us to reinstall them, but Steam as a whole is very against you playing anything but the latest version.

You cannot instruct Steam to not update a game. When you launch a game, Steam will update regardless, unless you have gone offline, or you launch it in a way that bypasses the Steam client. If you ever forget to go offline before launching a game, Steam will forcibly update it

Ai can combine two things. It can train on completely normal pictures of children, and it can train on completely normal adult porn, and then it can put those together.

This is the same reason it can do something like Godzilla with Sailor Moon’s hair, not because it trained on images of Godzilla with Sailor Moon’s hair, but because it can combine those two separate things.

Hey, don’t stop at Garland. Who was Garland’s boss, who could have told Garland to do his fucking job or be replaced by someone who will?

Never forget that failure to deal with Trump is ultimately on Joe Biden and no one else.

There’s a good chance it wouldn’t stick depending on many factors, but it’s extremely expensive to fight in court, and courts have shown themselves to be very hit or miss with technological things. Especially when trying to apply rules that were not written with things like software in mind.

I mean, it’s still accurate as to whether you like performing murder. You might not like murder as an idea or as a thing that people do, but until you try a murder, you don’t know whether you will enjoy the act of murdering.

One problem is people can’t keep secrets. This involves too many people who would have to keep the secret. And when it comes out that it’s just a marketing ploy, some portion of the customers would be even more upset.

Too much light for it to be a grue, it has to be pitch black for that.

Exposing kids to sex too early isn’t good for their development.

Depends on what you mean by this. If you mean involving them in it, then yes, probably (qualified because I know of no actual research on the matter; nor do I know of any way such research could be conducted so we will probably have to settle with ‘yes, probably’ as the closest answer to accurate).

If you mean allowing them to be aware of it as something that adults do, and occasionally seeing adults engaged in sexual activity, then no. The behavior of shielding children from both even having knowledge of sex, and witnessing it performed by adults, is relatively new, largely taking hold after the Reformation based on my relatively surface-level dives into the subject in the past (I have learned that going deep into this is difficult, the scholarly texts are long and difficult to read for laymen). In medieval times and before, children were aware of adults having sex; they often could not be kept unaware because there was no place for the adults to gain privacy. The modern view of the past is bizarrely anachronistic in that we project prudishness and avoidance of sexuality to a time period centuries before it actually became that way.

Thus, it becomes clear that the avoidance of children being aware of sex existing and happening is a very specific cultural phenomenon that does not paint an accurate picture of actual harm to children, and is based primarily in christian moralizing.

Frankly, these are really bad laws. It is a good thing that he appears not to be inclined to even try to take advantage, but those laws explicitly encourage remaining at war in order to maintain power, so a worse person would definitely be trying to maintain a forever war situation.

There certainly wouldn’t be any regrets (because you would not have time to do so before death).

Frankly I find bikes stupid as a proposed method of transportation.

I would love to see cities designed around everything needed being in walking distance, with a supply of inexpensive rentable cars for the things that aren’t, like meeting friends that live elsewhere, so we can travel between walkable locations, but at no time do bikes seem a reasonable option.

They have so many inconveniences and problems attached, and don’t provide enough transportation utility to make up for it.

A car provides shelter, climate control, a comfortable and relaxing ride, and enough cargo space to transport most things we could need to transport on any sort of regular basis.

A bike meanwhile provides no shelter from the elements or outdoor temperature, an uncomfortable ride that digs into your ass, requires you to exert yourself significantly, and has between zero and very little cargo space; certainly not enough to do something like shopping for groceries.

Pushing for using bikes as primary transport is ridiculous; there’s a small number of people for which that would work, but for most it doesn’t and never will. For most people, things are either in walking distance, or you need a car, so it’d be a lot better to restructure our living spaces around walking.

Since at least the 1970s and probably much earlier, any and all non-heterosexual people have been painted as pedophiles by right wing / conservatives.

Indeed, a lot of the pedophile panic these days is driven by those people, because it is one of the few things they can get everyone to hate, and that hate often shuts down nuance and reason, and while real pedophiles are a problem, they want to expand that unthinking hate, that knee jerk ‘burn the heretic’ reaction to more people.

This is the reason we now see people attacking even completely fictional media, because they’re trying as hard as possible to slippery slope it.

Now show me where they’re paying attention to what they can’t do.

Like, how nobody can just access secure government systems without proper clearance, which the President can’t actually just give without procedure.

Or even more simply, the fact that Trump is not in fact currently eligible to be President in the first place due to his part in the events of Jan. 6.

I do not have confidence that they will be stopped by the fact that something is not permitted, because they aren’t being stopped by things that are not permitted, and if this continues for 4 years…there will be nothing left of the system that is supposed stop them.

It would mean that whatever the US might hope to gain from invading Canada would be dwarfed by what the US would lose in the conflict.

The problem is this is already the case. Nuclear weapons may make it even more lopsided, but the country is already losing more than it stands to gain from an invasion purely on the economic results.

“Every time we use a lever to lift a stone, we’re trading long term strength for short term productivity. We’re optimizing for today’s pyramid at the cost of tomorrow’s ability.”

Remember when people were posting articles on how stupid and ridiculous DOGE is because it wouldn’t have the authority to do anything?

Something I’ve been thinking a lot lately is that democracy is a process. It is a means by which we attempt to ensure a just and fair government for all. It’s not an end in itself; we don’t want democracy because democracy, at least not once people really think about it.

Which leads me to a saying. “The ends do not justify the means.” This is a commonly held statement. However, it also works the other way:

The means do not justify the ends.

That means it doesn’t matter if something was done by the rules, using the process, it doesn’t matter if we voted for it, it doesn’t matter what process was used to achieve it. If the ends are wrong, going “well, it’s what was decided democratically” isn’t an excuse.