good policy gets you voted out of office, and makes everyone hate you. You don’t get rich from pursuing a broad-based policy that improves the lives of your constituents. a lot of people i met… were smart and open about this. there was no reason to be a ‘good’ politician because nobody pays you for it, and the voters tend to vote you out for it.
I feel like this effect could be ameliorated by restricting political advertising to direct, verified facts only.
That wouldn‘t be very democratic now, would it?
I TOLD you, we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune! We take it in turns, to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions OF that officer must be ratified at a special biweekly meeting, by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, or by a TWO-THIRDS MAJORITY in the case of more immediate…
I’m curious. Economically speaking, what would happen if Nvidia pulled a “Steam” and had a “February sale” where some models of video card were discounted enough to lead to a massive spike in sales numbers? A big enough discount to generate a greater total net return on sales for the quarter despite the fact that they were sold at a lower profit margin per individual sale? Assuming limitations like “you must create an account with a residential shipping address that can receive no more than x cards at the discounted price per street address” or some such to limit scalping, would simply showing increased profits do them any good?
Or is the problem due to a lack of product quantity?
If nobody can afford anything with more than 8 gigs of ram for their office workers, they’ll all just pay for more AI tokens because otherwise the 900ms keystroke latency in MS Word would make it impossible to work, right?
I would be shocked if that wasn’t on some AI company’s brainstorm board as a positive side effect (for them) of all of this.
Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.
Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.
You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?
Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.
I would be doubled over laughing for a good ten minutes if I accidentally smacked some NPC and got “randi ke beej” yelled at me.
Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.
Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.
Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.
Failed Fact Checks
None in the Last 5 years
I want to marry this rag.
More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”
I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.
Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.
When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.
Some of it is about the "Why"s.
Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.
Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.
The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)
Why is it the opposite with AI?
Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.
And that’s just for one side of the debate.
Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?
Why do you think a different word is needed?
Because the word has been largely washed of all negative connotations, at least across the minds of the majority of the populace in the U.S.
If you are trying to convey what the word settler means in a dictionary by using it in casual conversation, you are likely to find that it is not carrying the full weight of its intended meaning in the mind(s) of the listener(s).
This makes it a FUNCTIONALLY inadequate word despite being a technically correct one.
The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.
Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.
That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.
WTF were they thinking?
This is definitely a play they’re considering.
The only defense against it that I’m aware of is to get the popular vote SO FAR in favor of Harris/Walz that Congress won’t be willing to risk their vote being so blatantly opposite and misrepresentative of the will of the people, lest it lead to reform they don’t want.
Yeah, I saw “Gay student says coach” and went “oh no, not AGAIN?!?!” Then saw “Tim Walz” and was briefly all “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck” until I read the rest.
How bad is it that headlines about terrible abuse are so much more common than positive stories that my brain just went to bad first thing.
One day I want to see news as something other than filler to grab ad revenue.
I’d like institutional reform in the athletic sector too, but I can’t decide which is less likely to actually happen.
The word that’s the first four letters of a country’s name is that serious of an insult now?
I’m a yank so I’m pretty out of touch on this but I was under the apparently mistaken impression that it was no more serious than calling an Irishman a mick or a paddy (neither of which are awesome but don’t approach the derogatory ferocity of the T- word for Roman Catholic Irish).
Huh.
Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.
I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.
Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.
Seriously.
Like, the Democrats finally learned ONE EFFECTIVE THING with “weird”.
It would be super cool if we didn’t ONCE AGAIN torpedo the ever-living fuck out ourselves by saying PROVEN STUPID SHIT THAT ALWAYS GUARANTEES THE SAME RESPONSE.
We have at least ten more years before talking about gun control will have the opposite effect it does now.
Currently even mentioning it does nothing demonstrable FOR the person who says it (because it’s typically hand waving instead of problem solving) but it sure as hell drives up ammo sales and gun afficianado panic levels.
It’s a footgun, not a soapbox.
Right now they’re just waving fistfuls of money in Trump’s direction and he gets to pick up whatever falls out of their hands as they’re waving. It’s definitely big money that he’s getting, but it’s ultimately castoffs to the people who attempted to BUY GOLF ON A PLANETARY SCALE just because they felt like it.
Right now any mumbling about climate change is status quo for them.
Drawing direct ire would be an INCREDIBLY STUPID CHOICE right now. Get into office FIRST, then go after the oil barons.
Publicly call out poorly designed cities, under funded public transportation, and corporate resistance to working from home.
Do not publicly call out the oil barons by name.
Not right now.
Do not summon what you cannot banish.
For those wondering about the upswing here:
If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.
“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.
I wonder who made the list of “don’t touch these repos, they’re propping up our proprietary software sans attribution” for the LLM injectabots to avoid.
I realize that the end game here is SUPPOSED to be “erode all trust in free software” but the ineptitude of those profiting off of proprietary software is such that they WILL fuck this up in such a way that it hurts themselves too, it’s just a matter of when.