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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Seeing technology consistently putting people out of work is enough for people to see it as a problem. You shouldn’t need to be an expert in it to be able to have an opinion when it’s being used to threaten your source of income. Teachers have to do more work and put in more time now because ChatGPT has affected education at every level. Educators already get paid dick to work insane hours of skilled labor, and students have enough on their plates without having to spend extra time in the classroom. It’s especially unfair when every student has to pay for the actions of the few dishonest ones. Pretty ironic how it’s set us back technologically, to the point where we can’t use the tech that’s been created and implemented to make our lives easier. We’re back to sitting at our desks with a pencil and paper for an extra hour a week. There’s already AI “books” being sold to unknowing customers on amazon. How long will it really be until researchers are competing with it? Students won’t be able to recognize the difference between real and fake academic articles. They’ll spread incorrect information after stealing pieces of real studies without the authors’ permission, then mash them together into some bullshit that sounds legitimate. You know there will be AP articles (written by AI) with headlines like “new study says xyz!” and people will just believe that shit.

    When the government can do its job and create fail safes like UBI to keep people’s lives/livelihoods from being ruined by AI and other tech, then people might be more open to it. But the lemmy narrative that overtakes every single post about AI, that says the average person is too dumb to be allowed to have an opinion, is not only, well, fucking dumb, but also tone deaf and willfully ignorant.

    Especially when this discussion can easily go the other way, by pointing out that tech bros are too dumb to understand the socioeconomic repercussions of AI.


  • I think more than one party can be at fault at the same time, but it also depends on the situation.

    For example. Google maps kept taking rideshare drivers to the wrong entrance of my apartment complex. When I say “wrong,” I mean “nonexistent.” So multiple uber drivers were literally pulling over on the side of a busy street near a freeway on ramp with no bike lane or shoulder. They’d hit their flashers and stop in the middle of the road, blocking the on ramp lane. I’m in the actual parking lot, not tracking them in the app, so I don’t know they’re around the corner. I had two drivers just leave. Did they let me know they were going to cancel and drive away? Fuck no. The actual parking lot and driveway is only a few yards away. If they don’t pass right by it, they can at least see the driveway. I mean, come on. Use your brain.

    After the first time this happened, I tried to move the pin in the app, but it just kept sending drivers to the same place. I started texting them after they accepted the ride, but not all would see it. I contacted google and the pickup spot did change - to a back entrance on the opposite side of the complex that has no parking lot or place to stop unless you have a gate opener. For fuck’s sake.

    Anyway, it’s both of their faults.







  • They definitely have it in other California cities too. And not just in restaurants.

    A chain resale/consignment hipster shop in NorCal started adding a percentage service charge years ago with the same excuse, and you’d only find out about it if you looked at your receipt. The fucked up part is that they also raised their prices so high that I couldn’t shop there anymore. It’s one of those buy/sell/trade clothing stores, so the whole point was to pay less for decent clothes. But if they’re already raising prices significantly, why the fuck do they need yet another charge to pay their workers.

    I also think they really must believe it makes them seem “progressive” somehow. Like “oh look, we’re on the workers’ side!” and they hope no one eating/shopping there will think about it any more deeply than that.


  • Here’s a somewhat tangential counter, which I think some of the other replies are trying to touch on … why, exactly, continue valuing our ability to do something a computer can so easily do for us (to some extent obviously)?

    My theory prof said there would be paper exams next year. Because it’s theory. You need to be able to read an academic paper and know what theoretical basis the authors had for their hypothesis. I’m in liberal arts/humanities. Yes we still exist, and we are the ones that AI can’t replace. If the whole idea is that it pulls from information that’s already available, and a researcher’s job is to develop new theories and ideas and do survey or interview research, then we need humans for that. If I’m trying to become a professor/researcher, using AI to write my theory papers is not doing me or my future students any favors. Ststistical research on the other hand, they already use programs for that and use existing data, so idk. But even then, any AI statistical analysis should be testing a new hypothesis that humans came up with, or a new angle on an existing one.

    So idk how this would affect engineering or tech majors. But for students trying to be psychologists, anthropologists, social workers, professors, then using it for written exams just isn’t going to do them any favors.



  • https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/

    By far, the biggest category of discretionary spending is spending on the Pentagon and military. In most years, this accounts for more than half of the discretionary budget. In 2020, because some discretionary spending passed through supplemental appropriations went to pandemic programs, the share of the discretionary budget that went to the military was smaller – even though the amount that went to the military was just as high as in previous years.

    Most “welfare” falls under discretionary. Medicare, medicaid, and social security (also “welfare”) fall under mandatory spending. Social security and medicare make up the largest categories. This organization explains how “welfare” spending increased in recent years due to pandemic spending on things like stimulus checks and increased unemployment.

    The bottom line thoughis that people pay into it for years so that it’s available when it’s their turn to need it. If they never do, then great. It can help someone else, god forbid.



  • That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.

    That’s the thing. No one I’ve ever heard who says this kind of shit has ever lived here for any length of time or knows anything about the state beyond what the “news” has told them to believe. There are issues here like there are issues everywhere. So people want to focus on homelessness. Of course we have more homeless people, we have more people. We have two of the largest and most well known metro areas in the nation with an up and coming third.

    The bitching takes away (maybe intentionally) from the homeless issue that is rapidly increasing throughout the rest of the country. This is an issue of inflation and greed masquerading as inflation. Of corporate property owners buying up rentals and raising rents. Of workers not being paid a living wage. Of food and essentials becoming increasingly unaffordable by the month. Of course people are losing their homes and stealing from walmart. But this is a national problem. It gets worse all over the country for the same reasons and at the same time that it gets worse in California.

    But what I will say is, we do have reproductive rights. Reasonable firearms regulations. More tenant regulations that most places, though still never enough. Some cities have social worker response teams instead of sending cops to kill people having mental health problems. We have homeless outreach and a statewide homeless census. Our schools and colleges still have diversity programs and sex ed. The state provides tuition waivers and grants for low income and marginalized students. We have drag shows and pride parades. And our libraries aren’t being purged by fucking nazis. So there’s that.