Tbh I don’t think Microsoft’s fault-rate has actually gotten noticeably higher post-AI.

They were already putting out bad patches causing widespread issues with regularity for well over a decade. They slowly transitioned from “customer experience is key” under Ballmer to “move fast and break things” under Nadella.

I do love what Microsoft has been doing for Linux adoption though - more slop, please!

That’s a false dichotomy. Reasonable responses are framed as either “kid has low blood sugar so I’m packing him a banana”, or “sorry, we’ll beat him with jumper cables”. There’s like 50 reasonable responses between those extremes.

Do you think that if you were teaching a class and one of the students punched you in the face so hard that they broke your expensive prescription eyewear, that you would actually just dust yourself off and go, “oh dear, you poor thing - are you acting out due to low blood sugar? I can go get you a banana”.

You really think that’s a reasonable response for any human?

Cognitive bias affects all classes and education levels. But in my experience conservatives are the most flagrant, “the only moral abortion is my abortion” for example.

Thanks for your story. I’m a misfit nerd also, so it resonates with me.

I’m sure its something we can fix at large scale with government-funded mental health care, social programs, funding for community centers, and integrating mental health and social science studies into education, amongst many possible solutions that would get us to a society where everyone can find somewhere to fit in, and everyone has better options than the snake-oil salesmen when they seek help or are angry at a personal situation.

Unfortunately we presently live in the era of the techofeudalists, and eyeballs on ads and keeping users consuming are pretty much all they care about - not only do they not care if the media they promote and put ads alongside happens to be divisive alt-right hate media, they also benefit from the conservative (anti-regulation, small government, anti-tax) parties being pushed to power by these groups. It’s a frustrating feedback loop that we need to break free of, and governments worldwide seem ill-prepared to broach it.

Ugh. For context, I’m currently trying to steer a younger family member out of the alt-right pipeline and angry about how hard it is to beat constant access to thousands of videos / talking points pushed into their feed daily, with the couple hours I see them a week to attempt to ‘deprogram’ them… without trying to come across preachy or put them off learning alternative viewpoints (evidence-based reality). Its a struggle.

I’m guessing this is mostly rhetorical… But my 2¢: They failed at everything since kindergarten: education, socialisation, relationships, career, finances; everything they’ve tried they failed or they feel like they failed.

They need therapy, but that costs vulnerability and money, and their parents or peers told them it was for the weak. So instead, they get angry, and look around and on the first page of Insta, YouTube, and Facebook they find people like Shapiro, Fuentes, Petersen, Crowder, Southern - all telling them that someone else is to blame, not them, and then pointing at immigrants illegals, blacks inner city youth, and Jews globalists.

So now they’re looking for that someone else to punch down on to soothe their extreme insecurities, shame, and anger at the world (and themselves), but they’re still that doughy, insecure ‘failure’ that they haven’t done anything to change.

Oh yeah my bad, i meant rutorrent. The site is in Russian but easy enough to navigate as it uses the same forum template as a lot of sites, band names are all in original language so searching is simple enough. I sometimes use a translation browser extension to help.

Another perspective:

1. You can own your own music in many more formats than just vinyl.
2. CDs are still being made, and cheap. Second hand CD trade is huge, and they are always cheaper than vinyl to buy and ship. Digital ownership is even cheaper (eg Bandcamp), and the same or higher quality.
3. RuTracker has an enormous collection of FLAC well-seeded, as do other sites (but they require invites). Soulseek has an enormous collection and requires no account.

Regarding equipment just get some good speakers and an amp, you’ll need that regardless of what format you end up getting your music in.

Vinyl is often a trap. Expensive, fragile, degrades, difficult to resell unless you live in a big city (postage & packing), and the quality is ultra subjective and varies wildly between pressings. Just look up a couple of popular albums you know on Discogs or rateyourmusic and browse the comments see what they cost and how many people bring up complaints on pressings.

I’m all CD and FLAC and loving it. Bandcamp is my first port of call, then CD (new or second-hand), torrent if rare or OOP or unavailable anywhere I frequent.

Something else that may help - if you really think vinyl will sound better, enormous FLAC rips (2GB+) of popular high quality pressings in 192kHz/24-48bit rips are not uncommon on torrent and Slsk - vinyl enthusiasts often make a high quality digital capture of their purchases while the vinyl is new, so that they have a near-new copy in case their vinyl ever degrades with wear - or simply so they can use digital for convenience, but keep the analog hiss and increased frequency range of vinyl pressings. Best of both worlds.

(Edit: rutracker, not rutorrent)

Thanks for the mental eyebleach

Yep, the “strapped the head of a whale he chainsawed off to the roof of his car to drive it home as a souvenir” guy.

I still cannot get over Kathleen Kennedy (his daughter) recounting her vivid memories of this from when she was six.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kathleen Kennedy recalls. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Sounds like a very fucked environment for a child to grow up in.

Its chin all the way down, baby.

The fries are vegan in Australia ever since they stopped cooking them in beef tallow - around early 2000s iirc.

However, their own website says they offer no menu options certified as vegan or vegetarian, due to cross-contamination being something they don’t wish to deal with.

Understandable as additional prep areas would be quite expensive, but also it’s a pretty weak copout when they could go to the effort of labelling their vegan/vegetarian items (with the asterisked proviso that they may have cross-contam)… I suspect it’s really to allow them to change up menu item suppliers to cheaper alternatives whenever they like, because they also do not bother to label any menu items with allergen info - and that’s very standard across even small cafes nowadays. To find allegen info you have to dig through a PDF that they update every few months.

My thoughts are that the USA is in a far worse position now to shoulder and recover from the coming bubble pop, crash, and financial crisis that the mass implementation of AI is about to cause than they were in 2008-2009 when the last crash hit.

Could be wrong though. Maybe all the datacenters will get built on time, and be powered by a sudden breakthrough in nuclear fission, and maybe ~44% of people on the earth will sign up to paid plans with OpenAI so that they can become profitable.

“The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government is to live under the government of worse men.”

– Plato, Republic book 1 (translated) circa 375 BCE.

Its a CIA-style listening device that people pay for and proudly install and display in their home, gathering data on them, sharing it with Amazon and anyone they care to sell or make that data available to - including police.

Ostensibly all to provide short voice answers and actions they could do privately with their phone in seconds.

Reminds me more of The Purge.

Conservatives:

• change: scary
• complexity: confusing (scary)
• amygdala: enlarged*
• grey matter: reduced*
• lead: delicious

Impact in this scenario: gay different. Gay scary. Only straight - no other. Gay wrong. Read study hard. Consider thoughts hard. Listen YouTube easy - confirm gay wrong, confirm gay scary. Make feel smart.

This is an overstatement of course, but yeah. Empathy and learning are hard, and you can pretty much count on people taking the easy path most of the time, so cons will always look for an easy out. Solutions are improved education and fact checks, rigorous reporting and broadcasting laws, and anything you can do to make things that are different less ‘scary’ to cons. As you will no doubt be thinking: none of that is what the current US govt and conservative leadership are doing, they are utterly captured by grifters who hijack their fear 24-7 to keep them in line with their causes and to keep them easily manipulated, and they attack any groups doing the opposite.

*source: https://archive.is/20240730020034/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/

I think it’s saying you can’t escape Twitter posts being reposted everywhere.

Like this utterly valueless reply from @vincedmonroy, when we could have just had a quote of Marc Ruffalo’s statement from the Oscars, which other commenters have posted.

Unironically this behaviour is just “pivoting to a run for office as a Republican” vibes nowadays.

Its no longer even ‘weird behaviour’ for a US CEO.

It is a four year contract. OpenAI is hoping they’ll be able to suppress their competitors long enough to regain their lead and firmly establishe a dominant position in the market.

I’m not too worried though for two reasons. First, I’m confident they’ll eventually be in breech of their memory contracts for being unable to pay - as the whole AI market is a house of cards, and has no real path to profitability beyond hopes and dreams. Banks and angel investors will eventually start asking ‘where are the profits’ and begin pulling out the rug. Second, the chip suppliers began ramping up production (as you suggest) some time back, so the current crazy price increase should only be temporary once they have increased supply output in a year or so. They would have to sign new contracts to get their ‘40% deal’ again, and the memory giants will have much higher price demands for any such deals in future, and I don’t think OpenAI will have the money.

I know, tbh it’s only 50-50 I wash my car - but hey, new year let’s be optimistic.

Wishing you a good one.