Collecting? Yes.

Paying back out to the government? Not at all.

I am a professional designer with two decades of experience and I gotta admit, you’re smoking crack if you think GIMP (the project that is almost entirely held back by its stupid name) is superior to Photoshop.

It might be able to get the job done for small tasks, but it is not a serious tool for serious people. I’m sorry. I’m as pro-FLOSS as anyone can get, and even I recognize that right now there’s just no competition in the design department. Affinity is Mac-only, and comes with its own problematic aspects.

I’m not sure why you put AI in scare quotes — image recognition is a form of AI, and one that predates any LLM or generative technology. OCR A was invented in 1966.

Driving is honestly very stimulating for me. I have AuDHD and it is one of the few times I feel calm because I can actively engage all of my senses. Something about keeping an awareness in your head of what’s around you and your car really keeps me occupied.

I have been wondering for years why drone bombings aren’t more common with terrorism groups now. They even have off-the-shelf drones that can fly entirely through vertical flow sensors and AI image recognition.

Makes sense when even adults use phones as a means to escape even a moment of boredom. How many adults use their phones while driving? That’s one of the most mentally stimulating things I can think of, and people get BORED.

From now on, you can’t trust any statement the government puts out. Governments have always lied to save face, but this is a new level where they don’t even have to pretend to have an argument or a spin on things. It’s “Oops! All Lies!” because it’s easier.

Why bother coming up with a plausible scenario when all anyone wants to know is the shit that already makes them feel good?

It’s not the most relevant to THIS guy, but in general, a government purposefully separating parents from their children with no means of reunion is one of the named conditions of cultural genocide.

Literally, it’s part (e) of the UN Resolution, the ‘Genocide Convention.’

… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
*(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[5]

We spent so long discussing the legitimate genocide in Palestine, and yet, so little on the damn genocide that has been happening within our borders since 2016.

I feel like it’s an eventuality that during a forest fire, misinformed hunters will just be firing rifles at firefighters trying to save their land.

checks notes

Wait… That already happened?

For anyone too lazy to read, ChatGPT does have guardrails for this kind of thing, but if you continue a conversation anyway, eventually it will stop giving that information and start just being agreeable. It basically gave the kid instructions, and actively discouraged him from any cries for help, because it might keep him from his goal.

My friends, I understand the notion to use an LLM as a cheap replacement for therapy, I genuinely do. But, please don’t use them for that, they cannot give you good advice, and they usually can’t even remember anything except the 128,000 token window it has open right then. A human therapist takes notes and remembers them.

Oh, nice. That covers anyone who leaves a flag out at night without a lamp shining on it. Or anyone flying a flag that has any tattered pieces.

Might not be what it was designed for, but OpenAI claims their newest model is “PHd-levels” of intelligent. I feel like if that were true, it would do that reliably. Instead, sometimes it ignores the tool it’s programmed to know how to use and just, y’know, wings it.

Which, fair, but that’s my job and it’s taken!

Minnesota is such a land of contrast. Rural parents will accept a gay son no problem but the second someone mentions a non-Christian, it’s World War 3.

so the media doesn’t know where they’re going and report on their treatment or conditions, or, hell, who was even in the groups deported.

i think that these tools will probably be foundational to discovering more about the human mind and how words or images are received, stored, and assembled in the brain, but people like sam altman and elon musk are convinced that there is nothing else to a ‘person’ beyond that.

‘humanity’ is an emergent phenomenon, and that is what makes it special. a few other animals have the beginning of it, but none have all of it like we do. you don’t need a god or any kind of religion to understand this. as far as we know, we might be one of the least likely things to ever happen in the universe, ever.

Congressperson: “Okay, so, let me get this straight. Your company has spent over 20 billion dollars in pursuit of a fully autonomous digital intelligence, and so far, your peak accuracy rate for basic addition and subtraction is… what was it, again?”

Sam Altman: leans into microphone “About 60%, sir.”

[Congress erupts in a sea of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, as Sam Altman is carried away on top of the cheering crowd of Congresspeople wearing a crown of roses and a sash reading, “BEST INVESTMENT”]

You still need states to ratify what was passed during the convention anyway, and even then, it has to be ratified in 3/4s of states, and 9 of the top 10 earners in the US economy are solid blue states with strong blue state governments. 🤷

Not a stupid question. Our government is confusing. It’s basically still being carried out verbatim, and the entire thing was built and architected in an era when the fastest anyone could travel is by speed of wind.

In the US, government is generally federalist, meaning, each state is its own independent entity (legally speaking) with the autonomy to describe, create, and manage laws specific to their culture in their state. This boils down even further with municipal zones, which are typically related to city or township governance (covering shit like local police, trash, fire, streets).

Each state has the power to define both its voting districts, as well as the way they vote. For example, states in the West traditionally had fewer people over sparser distances, so traditional paper balloting was foregone in lieu of ‘caucusing,’ which is literally about measuring the amount of bodies or the scale of voices.

In the early 1800s (roughly 40 years after the founding of the country we know now), a man named Eldridge Gerry figured out that it was technically legal under federal law to flip the way districting happens on a per-state basis — instead of people choosing their district, the district chooses its voters.

So, over time, Gerrymandering proved to be one of the only successful ways to gain an edge in a population where conservatism was shrinking and leftism and socialism were building in popularity. It has continued simply because it is a foundation of power in our bicameral (two parties) system.

Just FYI, it is so named “Gerrymandering” after Eldridge Gerry, as well as the fact that his resulting districts looked on a map like a slithering salamander.

Not for nothin’, but there is an entire college discipline dedicated to this called “Conflict Resolution.” People trained in it are the ones who tend to get sent by the UN to an accord meeting to negotiate for peace or for mutual use of a contested resource.

It’s a whole corner of Sociology with journals and everything.

It is beyond disgusting to me that this is the society we want, not just tolerate.