a robot is still going to be cheaper in the long run

x

I’m working with people that seem to try to offload a lot of their work to AI, and it’s shit, and making the project take longer and shittier. Then they do things like write documents in AI and expect people to read that nonsense, and even use AI to send long, useless Slack messages. In short, it’s been detrimental to the project.

I don’t buy that. There’s little reason to automate those jobs because the labor is so cheap. And as someone who has worked most of those jobs in the past, most of those workers could be easily trained for different jobs; most are actively taking it upon themselves to train to get out of them.

Would be cool. I’ve tried, and was even able to get an interview with one, but was rejected :( This job market sucks; everyone’s getting many more applications than they’re able to deal with, and cooperatives are more hesitant to accept new members than regular businesses. I guess I’d have to create a new cooperative if I wanted to work in one, but I’m bad at/hate securing and negotiating contracts.

If you consider the Zapatista’s anarchist, they are a federation of autonomous municipalities that do stuff like this (along with hospitals, schools, etc).

I agree that company fundamentals don’t matter, and that the goal right now seems to be techno-feudalism.

Retail is ~40% of the stock market, and retirement is ~20%. I think it will pop whenever the next recession starts. If enough people lose their jobs, and start selling their stocks and dipping into their retirement to pay bills, these stocks will tank. It’s my theory that these stocks are held up by all the people passively investing in index funds following the SP500 and NASDAQ. During any small sell-off by active investors, a lot of people’s retirement plans will eventually automatically just buy and slowly bring it back up.

A scare, widely reported by media, could also cause people to take enough notice where a lot of people manually adjust their plans. But, yeah, the media is pretty captured now, and will avoid reporting on stuff that could cause scares.

I doubt the US would try to occupy or “nation build.” I assume they’d just bomb a bunch of people and do some small operations with special forces. The goal is to probably set their nuclear program back significantly, and try to do the same thing they did in Venezuela (cut the head off of government, replace with someone they can control, and literally steal their oil for the oligarchs).

A significant amount of the AI money is going into/coming from surveillance and “defense” sectors. Also, the ultra-wealthy obviously see it as a tool to disempower labor through automation, so much so that they’re laying off masses of people before the thing actually works. The amount of money being invested into AI only makes sense if it does take a large percentage of people’s jobs. And, automation/industrialization has indeed made people’s lives worse for multiple generations. E.g. extremely long shift work, soot-filled cities, two-penny hangovers, urban squalor, etc. “Engel’s pause” is one example of this.

I think I’d install proxmox on all machines because there is a proxmox provider for Terraform. Then, manually create the VMs, and to learn the barebones, use kubeadm to set everything up, and kubectl to manage it. Once comfortable and knowledgeable with that, start messing around with Terraform and Ansible.

I paid ~$180 for my used mint-condition Pixel 6 on Swappa. You have to look up which exact model numbers are bootloader unlockable, then filter on those.

Yeah, it is probably worse in terms of UX. I’ve been intentionally using “worse” software, developed mostly by volunteers, that’s free (gratis and libre), and doesn’t spy on its users for a long time now though. For instance, FreeCAD and GIMP is pretty bad on the UX side, and FreeCAD is even pretty buggy; but I don’t feel like I’m being exploited by using them. Cinny does look nice.

Just don’t use AI coding tools then? Studies show they make people less productive anyways.

Matrix is adequate, IMO. Some people have a really low tolerance for software that isn’t very polished. I, personally, don’t care much how polished an app is, but have known a person that cared so much they left a group over how much they disliked the UX of Element/Matrix. I’m fine with TUIs, old GTK UIs, Java Swing UIs, as long as it works, lol.

They are a threat to Europe’s manufacturing/industrial sectors. In the US, China carries out propaganda/destabilization campaigns; not sure if they do much of that in Europe… Looks like China is involved with AfD (several AfD members have been arrested for espionage), so they are probably trying to destabilize Europe too.

Mixing it up won’t fry hardware, you’d just get worse signal. IIRC, if you have circular-polarized antennas on the goggles but a linear antenna in the air, you’d lose about 1/3 of your range. If you mix up LHCP and RHCP, you’d lose something like 95% of your range. I’m not too familiar with radio physics, so I don’t really know what polarization actually means, just the consequences.

I always viewed the Internet as a kind of alternate reality growing up. But, then that started to change once “social networks” started taking off and all the normies (as some people refer to it now) started using it. Then it kind of started becoming almost “realer” than IRL, with algos optimized to manipulate people, and sophisticated propaganda campaigns. About 5 years ago, I noticed politicians started using language taken from the “gamergate” discourse. Now, the US admin is transparently trying to control discourse on the largest platforms, and official government institutions are poorly shit-posting.

So, yeah, it’s kinda disheartening how one of the greatest communication tools has turned into a tool for control. Though, in hindsight, I guess I should’ve seen this coming, even from fiction created a century ago. I think I remember some person saying that the Nazi regime wouldn’t have been possible without the invention of the radio.

I joined a Matrix group, and the UX frustrated one person so much, they just quit. Kinda surprised me some people care about UX that much. I guess I’m used to using software developed by hobbyists, lol.

Signal is ok. SimpleX theoretically has better privacy guarantees (metadata privacy, more decentralized). Matrix is ok for communities; I think it exposes a lot of metadata though (who you are talking to, not what you’re talking about).

Perhaps. I read it as the “setup” being the emphasized part (i.e. the context set by the first part of the sentence), with the states being a representative of the “people” under the political theory at the time… This was written by the elite more or less fine with slavery and indentured servitude, and only thought that white male landowners really counted. Either way, I think regular citizens should be able own firearms.

Maybe I’m just old, but suppressors seem pointless to me. If I understand correctly, you need to use subsonic ammo to get the full effect, which pretty much negates the extra “stopping power” of rifles (or higher velocity handguns). Simple foam ear plugs, like many people wear to work, can be as good or better in terms of db reduction if going to a range or popping some off in “the back 40” if you’re fortunate. If you need to run to your gun in an emergency to save you’re own life, I don’t think you’d take the time to grab your hearing protection. Hearing impaired is better than dead. And you’re definitely not going to EDC active hearing protection. Perhaps I’m not understanding the benefits though. I see the benefits if it’s like your job or something (work at a range, are a rancher that shoots vermin/predators at night). I suppose if you’re training in some kind of militia to work in a squad, active hearing protection with integrated radio would be nice, but virtually nobody is doing that.