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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I think the Democrat strategy this cycle is pretty much this on even a larger scale. The right wing says they’re timing trump’s trials to interfere with the election, but the thing is I think they’re right in the exact opposite way of what they expect.

    Trump caught the US by surprise and now people are sick of him, so suddenly he and every other scumbag in his party are the best ammunition the dems could ask for. The dems want to keep them all around and actively give them more chances to be obnoxious in order to scare more voters toward voting blue while splitting the GOP’s votes.







  • They’re pretty good, but the problem I always have with waffles is that the moisture on the underside of a waffle builds up/condenses onto the plate, which creates sogginess. I always prefer my waffles to be very crisp, so this sogginess undermines that and introduces that awkward “crunchy but also ew soft” factor that screws up later waffle sections. I can fix this a little by putting a paper towel under them on the plate, but this feels wasteful and sometimes draws confusion from friends or family who don’t seem to care about this issue.

    By this merit, I usually find pancakes preferable since they completely cover the plate under them, leaving no air for moisture to condense from, and they’re porous enough to just absorb any such moisture without a meaningful change in consistency anyway.

    Anybody else experience this? Got tips for waffle technique?



  • Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of “Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?”

    Took a while to digest because there’s a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:

    “We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn’t have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves.”

    Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can’t justify letting people live unless they’re necessary to society in some way - which might’ve made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn’t really necessary at all.

    New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn’t actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you’re out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making “life” easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn’t how things should be at all!

    Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we’d have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.


  • The dream would be that they manage to make their own glorious free & open source version, so that after a brief spike in corporate profit as they fire all their writers and artists, suddenly nobody needs those corps anymore because EVERYONE gets access to the same tools - if everyone has the ability to churn out massive content without hiring anyone, that theoretically favors those who never had the capital to hire people to begin with, far more than those who did the hiring.

    Of course, this stance doesn’t really have an answer for any of the other problems involved in the tech, not the least of which is that there’s bigger issues at play than just “content”.





  • I’m expecting a much messier “resolution” that’ll look a lot like YouTube’s copyright situation - their product can be used for copyright infringement, and they’ll be required by law to try and take appropriate measures to prevent it, but will otherwise not be held liable as long as they can claim such measures are being taken.

    Having an AI recite a long text to bypass copyright seems equivalent in my mind to uploading a full movie to youtube. In both cases, some amount of moderation (itself increasingly algorithmic) is required to not only be applied, but actively developed and advanced to flout efforts to bypass it. For instance, youtube pirates will upload things with some superficial changes like a filter applied or showing the movie on a weird angle or mirrored to bypass copyright bots, which means the bots need to be more strict and better trained, or else youtube once again becomes liable for knowing about these pirates and not stopping them.

    The end result, just like with youtube, will probably be that AI models have to have big, clunky algorithms applied against their outputs to recalculate or otherwise make copyright-safe anything that might remotely be an infringement. It’ll suck for normal users, pirates will still dig for ways to bypass it, and everyone will be unhappy. If youtube is any indicator, this situation can somehow remain stable for over a decade - long enough for AI devs to release a new-generation bot to restart the whole issue.

    Yaaaaaaaaay