Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Any other answer than professional therapy runs the risk of making it worse. But I know that it can be a luxury.

    Out of sight hopefully leads to out of mind eventually. Actively avoiding these a-holes is one thing, having a good emergency plan when it can’t be avoided is another. I don’t know your life so you have to figure this one out yourself. In my experience, people that have a certain power over you in your mind immediately lose a lot of it if you imagine them naked, tickling the tip of their nose with a feather.

    Are you reacting rationally when you’re confronted with them? If you can control yourself enough to imagine the nose tickling, start there and see how it goes. If you can’t get there and therapy is out of the question look for a fresh start somewhere else. Different part of the city, different city, different time zone. We are conditioned to think we mustn’t run from our problems, which isn’t bad advice but isn’t universally true IMO. There are cases where you’re allowed to just move away in the night, secretly flipping the old life off in the process. If after careful consideration going through all the pros and cons you arrive at this conclusion, don’t deny yourself this option for dogmatic reasons.

    A therapist, after disagreeing with me, would probably add that you should make sure you don’t repeat past mistakes by creating new dependent relationships that could lead to new abuse. So keep that thought in the back of your head.


  • How does confidence factor into this? I’ve been confident in stuff before and it turned out that confidence was misplaced. Pride cometh before the fall shit. Confidence alone risks cockiness. Cockiness may lead to somebody testing your Golden Shield. Didn’t work. You now don’t have a country any more.

    If the Golden Shield really worked it’s a question of capacity. If you had enough juice in it to repel all nuclear weapons you could throw at this country in a worst-case scenario, you’d have a powerful defense against the most powerful weapon on Earth that’s ready to deploy this minute. It may not save you from conventional attacks. It may not shield you from chemical or biological weapons so gruesome they aren’t currently shelf-ready. But development of those would suddenly become a viable prospect. I fear it just turns the spiral of development of more destructive weaponry one more rotation. Extrapolating from the last 6000 years of history, we’ve gone from sticks and stones to vaporizing people into thin mist by harnessing the power of the atom. We’re already in the narrow bit of the spiral. Paradoxically, developing a Golden Shield against nuclear attacks may lead to wiping our species out for good.






  • This sounds to me (fixed typo) like the same percentage of people are susceptible to cult crap. It’s just the availability of gurus is broader because you can have your own personal bs whisperer in your pocket. Kind of like how social media helped isolated village idiots to network and exchange views on DC pizza places. We wouldn’t see them as a problem if the ability to scale hadn’t become suddenly available.

    Ironically, I think ChatGPT can help reverse some some of these troubled souls’ convictions. It just needs to gently and repeatedly tell them they’re not Jesus or a disciple of the builders of the universe.

    My LLM always says I’m beautiful and always right. So no downvotes on this comment.


  • What you need is help, not AI. If paying a designer is out of the question, look for the most design savvy person in your family, friends, or in your neighborhood. Maybe you can comp them a meal in exchange for making this look good.

    You can use AI image generators to make background images. Just check the licenses if you’re okay to use their stuff in a commercial setting. AI is still largely dog shit at handling real text in images. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend going this route for you here. You have a lot of text.


  • What do you want to do with your poster? Will this be used as a meme or will it actually go to a printer or be displayed on a high-res screen? If it’s just a meme thing, any image creator AI will do. Most of them have free options.

    If this will actually go to a printer, you’ll need high resolution images and would do well to design it in a vector format, SVG for open source software: Inkscape is free to install on computers, vector-ink is a thing for mobile and the web as well. Adobe Illustrator for the corporate expensive route. Big file sizes work better on a good computer so YMMV.




  • It’s time to get concerned about Forbes. As a journalistic standard I would’ve expected to read about all the jobs some of these companies created during pandy times. There’s been a trend towards layoffs long before OpenAI burst onto the scene. Also everybody is going to espouse the same streamlining bullshit in their PR even if layoffs are business-driven and not so much AI’s fault. A best of press releases is not good enough journalism.

    It’s also not critical by reporting on some of the failures of the pivots to AI that have made the rounds.

    New technology displaces workers in some areas and eventually creates demand in others. For time immemorial. All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. That’s why I regret having driven traffic to the Forbes website to be able to read this.



  • I think this USSR quote is a good answer:

    We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.

    (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

    In any authoritarian system where indoctrination starts young you’ll probably have a fifth of the population that’s high on the coolaid or never questioned anything due to ideology or intelligence (or both). The rest know they’re lying, etc. And keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to go to Siberia or El Salvador.




  • I think you need to be more specific with the query. If I’m the only passenger plus crew, yes. If the plane is full of people going to a place to help out, no. If this flight could be done by train without multiplying door-to-door travel time more than 2.5 times, yes. If my blood type or bone marrow was so rare I could save a life, I think I’d be okay again even if I was a lone passenger. There is plenty of gray here to consider.


  • I feel this is a nothing burger. The outrage is only proportional to their level of honesty. Every company is looking to implement cost savings with this crap. These guys are just most honest and public about it. And have already started using AI in their courses, which has not improved them. So they’ll use AI to help with hiring decisions on contact workers? They’ll only hire new people if they cannot automate stuff? I think that’s pretty standard now whether we like it or not. They are not looking to reduce permanent staff, at least not right now. So let’s watch them fail with their AI strategy but we’re no closer to the sky falling.