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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 22nd, 2023

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  • I don’t know the source, so it’s hard for me to comment but logically the problem as stated is plausible. i.e. legacy debt preventing the move to more efficient methods.

    However, the conclusion i.e. therefore replace humans with humanoid robots does not. And then tacking on unionization is just a different subject altogether. You can staff some aspects of a factory with robots and the human’s work shifts from production to maintenance. I’ve talked to automation people and robots can be very problematic and something “advanced” I would imagine much more so.

    Although not recent, some referred to the robots as “Bob” blind one-arm builders. If very well calibrated and designed for a specific task, they can be ok, except when they go wrong. To think some “AI” driven general purpose robot is going to substantially replace human labor any time soon… I very seriously doubt that. Especially with that kook as leadership.


  • In my understanding, derivatives amplify the problems and risks. Underlying that are the money people who push on these systems as hard as they can and exploit every angle. Along the lines of pushing the boundaries, the practice of brokers “loaning” shares seems like another place that’s bound to cause issues at its limits. I really wish the govt would step in and impose much stricter regulation. I’d like to trust that buying stock is investing in a company rather than feeling like the stock market is a school of small fish swimming with sharks who cheat as much as they believe they can get away with. If the focus was on dividends vs growth, I think we’d be better off. Maybe I am wrong but that’s how I see it.

    I think of it like network security. Anything you do not explicitly disallow will be used, tried, and used in ways you probably didn’t think of. It isn’t a matter of expecting people to do the right (or legal) thing, most will but it’s a surety that some will not. That’s normal and why security is a process and systems have to adapt over time in response.



  • The great thing about the stock market compared to other investments like crypto is that stocks are based on the inherent value of the business they represent. Stocks are based on financial fundamentals. You can believe in those investments because they are based on something real and not simply rampant speculation. For example.

    Tesla. Worth more than most of the rest of the car market combined because… reasons?

    Paypal. Lost 80% of its value starting in July 2021 over a year and never recovered because of terrible problems? Huge losses? Nope, because it “only” grew at 8-9%.

    2008 US housing rated as “AAA” investment i.e. “good as cash” based on actual trash.


  • Calling LLMs, “AI” is one of the most genius marketing moves I have ever seen. It’s also the reason for the problems you mention.

    I am guessing that a lot of people are just thinking, “Well AI is just not that smart… yet! It will learn more and get smarter and then, ah ha! Skynet!” It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what LLMs are doing. It may be a partial emulation of intelligence. Like humans, it uses its prior memory and experiences (data) to guess what an answer to a new question would look like. But unlike human intelligence, it doesn’t have any idea what it is saying, actually means.






  • What’s the media going to report on? Outrage click bait or someone average saying average things? Not to say extremist are not real but extremists are disproportionately reported compared to majority views which skews our perceptions. How much is done on purpose or as a result of the news business, I can’t judge but biased sources pick up on the parts they like and amplify them or even manipulate them to tell the story that want to tell.

    I do truly believe that for the vast majority of people, we are closer in that the things we collectively believe than we do not. But it doesn’t take many devoted people to whip up a mindless mob.


  • I didn’t make my point clear. My question wasn’t really where the image was sourced, it was more about the value of what Google is doing matching an essentially random image next to the text it scraped from a website. Why did it choose that image? Adding a random image like that seems like what a low-grade SEO would do to tick the needed boxes not a high-quality product from a multi-billion dollar company. The image in no way enhances the meaning of what I asked. In fact, it does the opposite. It is a bit of Google becoming what it mocked.




  • SEO is of itself is not all bad. Content creators need to do certain things, which do little directly for the consumer, but help the algo understand what the content is and how the owner would prefer it be seen. For example, something simple like the title attribute of a web page tells the search engine how it should label the content in the search results. That’s SEO and generaly a good thing for everyone.

    As you say, the “please like, subscribe, comment and say a prayer to the algo” annoyance is just what we have to accept for free content on these platforms. It’s the cost of anyone being able to upload video to YT.

    Where it goes wrong imho, is filling the world with essentially meaningless machine produced content to aid in the rankings. This isn’t new with AI btw. People have been using article “spinning” or outsourced garbage content creation for years or decades to do the same and potentially even better than what AI does. In the old days building thousands of links from garbage content to your content in order to have the algo see the links as “votes” for the supposed quality of the content. Those of us who ran forums saw this all the time.


  • I’ve been in the nonprofit/ngo world for decades now, tech, tech-oriented or tech-adjacent. I started my career in corporate and let me tell you I did truly hate it beyond my ability to express. I could have found a better job in for-profit but the fundamentals would be the same and I believe for me, at best I would have tolerated it. Would I go to work each day saying to myself this is all worth because I am helping others have better lives?

    My transition to nonprofit was one of an accidental, happy discovery but that came at a cost of some personal dramatic, and traumatic events which I will not bore you with. I never knew you could work for a nonprofit, or even what a nonprofit was. So few things:

    1. There are all kind of nonprofit, micro to huge. KaIser permanente ($100B/yr) is a nonprofit. The all volunteer org down the street that distributes sanitation packs to homeless may be a nonprofit. Some churches are nonprofits.

    2. Some nonprofits are incredibly well run and others are horrendously disorganized. Generally, larger orgs are better run but more corporate in style and smaller ones less so, but that is not always true.

    3. A career in the nonprofit world is entirely possible. It is usually true that pay is less than corporate but that is not always true even. If you value money over all other factors, then you are probably barking up the wrong tree. If being a happy person is higher up on your list, nonprofit is worth considering.

    4. “The great thing about nonprofits is that you don’t have to worry about money!” hahahahaaaa hhaa cries. Most nonprofits deal with an unending battle for funding in one way or the other. It doesn’t mean they are necessarily unstable as orgs but funding comes and funding goes and most manage funding from multiple sources. For those involved with that aspect, it is a constant consideration.

    As far as how to make the jump by far the best thing you can do is you have the capacity, is to volunteer at one that has a mission that appeals to you. It doesn’t matter what you do as a volunteer. Go and see how it feels to you. What are the people like? What do you think of the work of the org? Caring about the org and its mission is the thing to assess first. Then see what opportunities there are. Many nonprofit are network oriented, so as you get to know them and they get to know you, doors may open that others are not even aware of.

    idealist.org and workforgood.org and I am sure there are many other places to explore.




  • "But the court’s decision to keep the pretrial proceedings frozen is a blow to special counsel Jack Smith’s effort to bring Trump to trial this year. "

    I hate it when the media does this. It makes it read as if Jack Smith is the one with the issue. Jack Smith represents “the people” i.e. US citizens. I suggest:

    “But the court’s decision to keep the pretrial proceedings frozen is a blow to US voters who may use the trial results to determine how they will vote. Trump is accused of attempting to disenfranchise voters by inspiring a mob of his supporters to invade the capitol on January 6, 2021, attempting to hang Vice President Pence on the gallows they constructed and delay the vote count. While this type of trial will always take time to run its course, the court has now introduced additional delay in order to determine if the US has a president or a king but will likely result in no trial before the election.”