What if you have it with a cup of coffee? Does that count towards the bean counter?

Except there are still 1.4 BILLION catholics in the world, and that’s just catholicism.

We may not like it, we may not get anything from it, but we should very much be concerned with what happens in the world of organized religion and what it’s representing because 3/4 of the world still believe in some kind of religion.

At Dragon Con I saw a huge Robo Rally game being played on the auditorium floor with real little robots. I was disappointed though that the conveyor belts weren’t real.

Wikipedia is not perfect, but it’s one of the best things we have ever had in the world. You should delete this dumb question, then go download it. Get it on a thumb-drive, and lock it in a safe.

Everyone should. We need to preserve the archives of information. You can hem and haw all you want about people being allowed to edit articles and the constant propaganda wars being waged through the most controversial pages, but it’s STILL the best we have.

Before this, people could just publish whatever books they wanted and that would become canon history for a thousand years. At LEAST wikipedia is largely self-balancing and so far not in the direct pocket of any one, single entity trying to control knowledge and history. For now.

Dividing it up into a cluster of biased, self-serving spaces would just harm knowledge and further atomize our world.

If you like this idea, try Robo Rally as a fun party board game. Turns are simultaneous, actions happen automatically, boards have actions that are constantly changing.

The vast majority of people who lean right are not individually as hateful as youtube and social media and most of the content algorithmically fed to us would have us believe.

Do they say horrible things around each other? Yes, they ramp up the rhetoric and make it seem like they’re absolute super-villains at times… but what we really miss in all this is how shallow their values are. They are not complicated people. They go with the popular sentiment but are so comfortable living in a state of cognitive dissonance that they will work all day with a team of black and hispanic coworkers, get along great, consider them true, best friends… then go home and upvote the most racist shit you’ve ever seen on facebook because it makes them laugh. They simply cannot make comparisons or connections the way the other ~66% of the population does, so they don’t see things like hypocrisy or inconsistency. They don’t see larger pictures. They don’t understand the concept of punching down.

As a group, they are our country’s biggest problem, a menace, a scourge upon the Earth who are enabling the worst, most malicious people to engage in plans of oppression we haven’t seen in a century.

But as individuals, we could reach almost each of them. They’re stupid enough to believe whatever we tell them and we’re afraid of them. The math is broken.

We have to get more social, we have to get more confrontational, we have to get less isolated.

I will get some rando lefties screaming at me that they don’t want to “compromise with their oppressors” and that’s fine. Don’t. I’m not making you personally, and if you get that insinuation that I’m telling you personally to do something traumatic, you’re part of the problem. For everyone else, I’ve changed the hearts of people with apparently “set in” bigotry simply by listening and talking to them. It’s not jedi mind magic, it’s just a skill that comes from engaging with people in real life.

It’s always ever been an argument for themselves, white nationalists and fascists, to have the guns, and everyone who isn’t them to not have guns.

They only ever argued from a constitutional nature to bend liberals who value law and fairness and it’s worked incredibly well.

I taught self defense to families for many years, I always encouraged learning about and owning firearms as first-line items of defense because all the eye-gouging and groin-kicks in the world won’t help if someone enters your home with a gun.

I am not a gun-nut. I believe we need stricter laws and required training to own the things, but that isn’t going to happen so the least you can do is make sure you’re not the one without a force multiplier.

I have recently been telling trans people very bluntly and directly that they need to arm up. I get a lot of pushback, a lot of it is very “online” in nature and performative, and a lot of trans girls have a hard time reconciling it with their ideas of femininity, but I am telling you all now, they may come for you. You are literally in danger in the USA. Maybe not now, but very possibly in the near future.

The only thing that will keep a fascist administration from going door-to-door to black-bag undesirables is if every home visit is a potential stand-off and bloodbath. Yes, it may come to that. It’s sad and shitty that they have put you in this position, but you have to become part of the meat-grinder, not a name that disappears off lists and census surveys.

Told you all over and over to arm up before it’s too late, hope at least some of you listened and not everyone was reflexively, performatively aghast at the idea of owning a tool of death.

While I get the concept, it’s kind of as realistic as Star Trek. We have a long, long way to go before people will voluntarily want to live in a system where your government owns the land, starting with developing a government that can be trusted and a society that doesn’t feel insecure about where they live or what safety nets they have. I don’t see that happening in the next several thousand years.

Should buying and selling homes be completely removed as a private institution then? What about land ownership entirely?

edit: when land ownership is controlled by a position of authority who decides who gets to live where and move where, congratulations, we’re back in monarchy. We can do this smarter without holding completely delusional values.

What a completely obtuse way to misread my comment.

I know insurance adjusters, they are under strict rules but whenever they get a chance they do try to approve benefits if it comes to a matter of personal decision making. It’s not that often, but it does happen in the loads and loads of cases that pass through every day.

Few people realize the scale of these operations.

An AI system can process all those claims in moments and not only follow guidelines to deny as many as possible, they will do it without feeling a twinge of conscience, and this seemingly small margin of extra denials will likely save the insurance company vast sums of wealth, and all it will cost us, the paying customers, is needless death and suffering.

That’s the best possible outcome.

The more likely outcome is a lot of people are going to die or suffer needlessly.

These don’t count because they’re just software and the designers can feign complete innocence because of the black-box nature of AI decision-making.

There are reasons they want AI in charge of so many things. It’s not because they think AI can do a better job.

And also, AI makes pictures of Trump riding tanks and fist-bumping Jesus so it has to be perfect and awesome, right?

No, it’s fine and makes total sense if your goal is to incentivize your company’s suppliers and affiliates to KILL PEOPLE.

There are a lot of things I hope I’m wrong about, but I have seen over and over as far back as the earliest days on the internet, companies like AOL have given users the illusion of choice, the feeling that they have control over what they’re looking at and “installing” and that effect has been played with back and forth, from apple giving users a lot of control while also outsourcing app development to third parties to platforms like Steam who have remained stalwart allies to consumers. But even those spaces are somewhat gated and those gates got taller and taller as time went, and I think a lot of platforms would be very happy if they had absolute control over the content users have access to, and have tried to exert this control in many ways.

We wouldn’t have so many legal challenges and issues around monopolization, right to jailbreak, etc. if this wasn’t still a burning problem, so I don’t expect AI is going to be much different, especially since it’s so abstract and “weird” and not even programmed but almost shaped and grown and can still barely interact with computer apps outside of itself.

I guess time will tell if we get a whole a generation of people locked into corporate matrix worlds where they know the steak isn’t real but love it anyway, or if people find ways to train their anime catgirl companions to download, interact with or even simulate 3rd party apps and custom content and they actually become the tools we hope which help us, not just feed us advertisements.

I’m not saying it will be good, but it will be pushed as the next big thing and it will work enough to get people who are already locked into their ChatGTP waifu fantasies or using the thing to supplant their missing social lives in some way to jump over to it, bugs and all. Which is still millions of people.

I think actual AGI is years and years away, but the things the major companies will release in the near future will “simulate” general intelligence in a few clever ways, and as we’ve seen, the public doesn’t have the attention span to care about the nuance, they just want something that makes them feel special.

It will happen when the major companies produce some kind of magical formula that literally everyone wants and are willing to sacrifice freedoms just to have it.

THIS is the reason they are chasing AI so hard and trying to make it to AGI before anyone is ready or prepared. They want everyone to have their magical fairy whispering product placements in their ear and charming them into simulated relationships so that the users abandon all thought of having personal control and freedom to train the things themselves, to install their own upgrades, etc.

The next major “thing” we all carry is going to be some kind of AI that can see through your view of the environment and can whisper to you privately various simulated thoughts, observations and relevant info about the things around you. As well of course as “Hey look, Kohl’s is having a 35% off sale on jackets, didn’t you need one?”

This is their dream, this is why they have put so much into the tech. People are going to gobble it up if they can ever get there, and with that goes all semblance of autonomy, freedom or independant thought.

Easy, enforce the porn ban via lethal force.

Also, everything is porn now.