Andy

I really love your analogy. I’m imagining early 90s Windows and AOL bombarding folks with pop ups that say ‘want to take this with you? Print it!’ and ‘Did you know you can print anytime you like with our new dedicated keyboard print button?’ and ‘Try our new cassette music player, now printer-powered to give you the best sound you’ve ever heard!’

all I keep wondering is why I didn’t try this sooner.

I think your experience is the most common way people first try Linux: most people first try Linux when they have a computer that is no longer valuable to them.

That was what happened to me. I had a Windows laptop that was running too slow for use, and a friend suggested setting up a Linux partition before I bought a new one. I did, and got another two years out of the laptop.

Now I see a lot of libraries and hackerspaces offering folks help doing this.

Yeah. You kinda had to be there for it to make sense, but after Obama became president the right wing media went absolutely bonkers creating a five-alarm fire every day over any and everything. One of these was that one day he didn’t wear a standard boring white-guy suit in dark blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controversy

Oh that’s right!

And now I’m remembering his scandalous tan suit!

Yeah.

Although I recently heard him on Marc Maron’s podcast, and was rather disappointed.

He’s still far, far more lucid than most other politicians, but he came off as wildly out of touch, which I didn’t recall him being 10 years ago.

Oh well, that’s the match of time for you.

This is an interesting observation, but I watched Daredevil like a decade ago and I’ve never seen Superman & Lois so I don’t really know what you’re talking about.

Deal removes constraint on OpenAI’s ability to raise capital

I think they mean “raze”…

I think the question is easier to answer if you remove the specific reason this coworker is annoying.

How do you deal with someone who bothers you with annoying, unwanted conversation about job satisfaction? The same way you deal with someone who bothers you with annoying, unwanted conversation about CrossFit or astrology. You answer every question with some version of ‘Huh, I don’t really know. I’m really busy, though, so I can’t talk. Have a good day.’

The whole careerism element seems largely immaterial.

I don’t think his strength is within an order of magnitude of theirs. I don’t think his durability is either.

Granted, I wouldn’t be surprised if you showed me a comic showing otherwise. There’s probably a comic where he goes inside a star or something stupid, because there are always those kinds of writers. But based on his typical portrayal, I think he’s more of a brush off a car crash and pick it up guy than a survive a nuke and crush coal into diamonds guy.

You know, sometimes when the Avengers announce a new inductee I’m like, ‘Really?! You think that’s a good strategic addition?? This feels more like a popularity contest!’

Their choices kind of look to me more like a publisher’s idea of what will sell books & toys than a cooperative of gifted public servants. But I’m probably just being silly.

Agreed. His comments are so bizarrely stupid on so many levels.

They’re not just “wrong”: they’re half-right-half-wrong. And the half that is wrong is idiotic in the extreme, while the half that is right casually acknowledges a civilizational crisis like someone watching their neighbors screaming in a house fire while sipping a cup of coffee.

Like this farmer analogy: the farmers were right! Their way of life and all that mattered to them was largely exterminated by these changes, and we’re living in their worst nightmare! And he even goes so far as acknowledging this, and acknowledging that we’ll likely experience the same thing. We’re all basically cart horses at the dawn of the automobile, and we might actually hate where this is going. But… It’ll probably be great.

He just has a hunch that even though all evidence suggests that this will lead to the opposite of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, for some reason his brain can’t shake the sense that it’s going to be good anyway. I mean, it has to be, otherwise that would make him a monster! And that simply can’t be the case. So there you have it.

It’ll be terrible great.

100%.

Peter Frase deconstructed this in an article a decade ago (and subsequent book) “Four Futures”.

It’s really not complicated. Saying 'the rich want to make us all obsolete and then kill us off ’ sounds paranoid and reactionary, but if you actually study these dynamics critically that’s a pretty good distillation of what they’d like to do, and they’re not really concealing it.

Uh… @[email protected] ?

I think it sounds like you might be a danger to yourself.

I don’t know your situation, but I just want to point out two things:

1. The belief that those around a depressed person secretly don’t want them around or would appreciate them more when they’re gone is wildly untrue. It kind of sounds like your brain is trying to convince you of this, and you should know that your brain is almost certainly lying. Lots of people know folks who are depressed that we love very much and are grateful to have in our lives.

2. People who survive suicide attempts consistently experience enormous regret and relief that they survived. They typically describe the experience as terrifying, and report that it felt like someone else was trying to kill them.

I know that during depression, negative thoughts can make a convincing case that you cannot expect anything to get better, but there are A LOT of people alive today who enjoy their lives who felt the same way at some time in the past. I hope that with support you can perhaps be one of these people.

I appreciate this answer, because it at least tries to reason from first principles. You can’t, imo, have this conversation without actually defining what we consider to be the problem.

I think the key concern is that age – particularly during teenage years – typically correlates with a power imbalance. And the concern is that the younger person could be exploited and/or suffer harm. However we need to remember:

1. It’s possible for relationships to have a power imbalance and no one is harmed or looks back with regret.
2. It’s possible for relationships between people of the same age to be very harmful/regretable.

So the questions I have are: how correlated is a specific age gap with severe harm? And what would we advise in this situation?

I think that a 16 year-old probably has around a 50% of getting badly hurt in a relationship with another 16 year-old, and probably a ~65% chance with a 19 year-old. Because a 19 year-old can probably manipulate a 16 year-old better than their peer, but they’re also presumably a bit more experienced and mature, which can be a good thing.

I’m making these predictions presuming that they’re sexually active, btw. Which I think is probable. But if they’re not, I think that the risks go down to around 10% chance in both cases. This is just my gut impression. So I’d just advise any 16 year-old in a relationship with a 19 year-old to move VERY slowly physically, and talk frequently to an older friend or sibling. And if your partner wants to do anything you’re uncomfortable talking about with your older friend or sibling, that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it.

If you follow that rule, I think 16 and 19 is no big deal. Because I really want to emphasize: a lot of the risk already exists when a 16 year-old dates someone their own age.

I love buses too, but a van pool is materially different. Buses travel fixed routes. A van pool can act as a shared taxi that shuttles people directly between points of immediate departure, transit stations, and final destinations.

This article is a little light on thesis, but legit.

Personally, I’d like to tie a vision of autonomous vehicles to a broad rethinking of transit and public ownership. What if training data was shared, so instead of allowing Google to create another monopoly we deliberately cultivated a diverse market? What if we designed roads to accommodate autonomous van pools and also bikes and more light vehicles?

We can dream better than this.

Researchers following the adoption of AI predict around 92 million jobs are projected to disappear by 2030, even as roughly 170 million new roles are expected to emerge, McKinsey & Company has found.

What in the fuck does this mean?

Return? /s

Also: from a practical perspective, how on earth does one keep this a secret?

‘Alright sweetie. Dinner is on the counter. If you need anything Becca next door said to just knock. Promise me you won’t stay up to late, okay?’

‘Sure Mom. But where are you going?’

‘I’ve told you sweetie: don’t ask questions. Bye!’

That makes no sense.

Most people tend to overestimate how universal their own experiences and reactions are.

And to clarify, this applies to you AND to the people you’re disagreeing with (and myself as well!).