I overheard one of my coworkers yesterday telling someone else that companies making everything into a subscription service was a result of the country “becoming more communist”. I don’t know where to even begin with that one.

While I suspect a lot of lemmy would say yes just by virtue of having both socialist politics and an anti-AI stance, strictly speaking I don’t think AI inheritly has anything to do one way or the other with socialism (though the way and by whom it is owned probably would be different), so really that would depend more on how the culture of a given country treated that tech than it’s economic system.

There’s also not a lot of willingness to roll things back whenever the Republicans lose power for a time. Like, for the sake of argument, lets say Trump and his allies fail to sufficiently gerrymander or rig or cancel or just win the next couple of elections, and manage to lose control of both congress and the presidency. Does anyone really expect all those new ICE agents they hired to be suddenly fired, rather than just continue to do what they’re doing without as much media attention driving public ire against them once the president isnt going on rants about deporting people all the time?

Ive noticed a general tendency, which exists to a pretty large degree in every place and group to be fair- but which I’ve noticed even more than usual on lemmy, to treat everything as if it exists on a moral binary. Like there’s only good things and bad things, and all bad things are equally bad things with no room for “X is bad and Y is worse than X, therefore X is better than Y despite both being bad”, and if something is opposed to a bad thing it must be good regardless of whatever else it involves, or conversely, if something apparently opposed to a bad thing is also worthy of criticism, then it must not truly be opposed and is only pretending because they’re both on the side of bad things. I’m sure there’s a word for this kind of thinking, but I’m too sleepy at the moment to recall or look into it.

I would assume that, since humans sometimes pretend to not be human, that would simply be a subset of human behavior, and so what would make the comment make the most sense wouldn’t be “looking for behavior atypical for humans”, but rather " looking for behavior that humans arent able to engage in no matter how hard they try". What that would even be in a text based system though, I’m not sure. Typing impossibly fast maybe?

I just think that dying is unethical in general and represents a maximal state of suffering (well, more a minimum of non-suffering, since you have no capacity to experience anything when you dont exist anymore, not maximal suffering in the “hell” sense. I know many or most people would disagree with me on that point, but its not something I feel like spelling out my reasons for at the moment.) I also do not believe in the concept of deserved suffering (that is to say, in my view suffering as punishment only has value in its capacity to rewire a person’s future behavior, and that once you have achieved that so as to cause them to live without continuing whatever harms have led to the punishment, anything more is wrong, no matter what they’ve done, even if they were literally the most heinous person of all time). If you’re actually in a position to execute them, then youre in a position to take their money and power too, pointing out that they rarely face justice isnt actually relevant to this, because if your legal system is too corrupted to hand out a jail sentence and make it stick, its also going to be too corrupted to hand out a death sentence and go through with it. These people arent wealthy because they’re inherently good at making money, they’re wealthy because wealth begets wealth and they either started with some or lucked out somewhere or have relations that have it, so if you both take their wealth and the wealth of their friends and relatives, how are they going to get it back?

Hard to get into politics without having a lot of money, hard to get a lot of money without being (or becoming) terrible.

Emotions aren’t entirely rational with a clearly thought out process to justify why one should feel them. In any case, its common enough for people to assign the general actions of people within a group to the group as a whole (which isnt really fair or a reflection of reality, but can be pragmatic at times and requires less thought and information than judging on an individual basis, so it makes sense that people’s brains are wired up to do it even if its not always desirable). This can get extended to the groups one is a part of oneself, to include those whose membership one did not choose. And the US at the moment has even worse than typical leadership, has a great deal of power for that leadership to abuse, still has free enough media for people within it to stand a good chance of knowing about at least some of it, and if youre here on lemmy youre probably running into people with a somewhat higher than normal awareness of a lot of the historical abuses previous Americans have perpetrated just because it leans left and anti-establishment and those things get talked about a lot in such spaces.

You misunderstand, I am not saying “make sure he spends it responsibly”. Nobody has has “made” him do this at all, and I didn’t advocate for a policy of doing so. What I’m saying is that I don’t think this particular use is worthy of condemnation the way his other actions are, because in the long run I think that this specific thing will end up benefiting people other than him no matter if he intends for that to happen or not (even if the American healthcare system prevents access, which I’m not confident it will do completely, not every country has that system, and it’s statistically improbable that the US will have it forever, and research results are both durable and cross borders). That sentiment isn’t saying that it excuses his wealth, just that I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism. The concept is just as valid with him funding it as it would be had he been condemning it instead.

The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.

I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?

Microbes are still made of chemicals, it’s just different chemicals

At some point the smear campaigns go from frustrating to somehow funny.

“Ah yes, the “working people need to be able to afford housing and food and transportation” guy. He’s the literal reincarnation of the entire Soviet Union. Don’t ask us to explain how, something something socialism.”

and not to mention, the tools required to create it (maybe not the best examples, but still) are already in the possession of virtually everybody.

The majority of humans that have seen nipples have died. Clearly an extreme infohazard /s

Shouldn’t Spanish have the same problem? I’ve seen them abbreviate it to EEUU though, which I assume must help prevent confusion?

I once found a random food court bathroom that has hand dryers that work amazingly well, and I was genuinely surprised by that when I stumbled on it. I’m guessing it probably is just more expensive or uses more power or something and places cheap out on them.

This is why, for all that getting up at 5 in the morning sucks, I’m glad my job has an early schedule. Having a closing shift effectively erases all the free time that exists that day

As someone pretty new to linux, what’s wrong with snaps? I’ve seen a lot of memes dunking on them but haven’t run into any issues with the couple that ive tried (even had a problem with a flatpack version of a program that the snap version fixed, though I think it may have been related to an intentional feature of flatpacks rather than a bug).

Saying that the lesser evil is less evil has nothing to do with liberalism or any other ideology, it’s a tautology, it simply must be true by definition but doesn’t actually add any new meaning. The trouble in the scenario presented isn’t a voter’s attempt to take the least bad option (since taking the other would just get you to the same place but faster), it’s having a system that creates only two viable options in the first place, such that “not evil” either isn’t even on the ballot or may as well not be.