

Kings of ashes are worth less than the ground they stand upon.


Kings of ashes are worth less than the ground they stand upon.


Or, to return to reality for a moment, China has invested in new technologies and education for the prupose of having new technologies and an educated population while the US has long engaged in innovation only if it will make money(while actively stifling new things if it means competition) and in dumbing down its own population so that they’re easier to control. The US exists as a machine to enrich, in the short-term, a handful of people and anything that does not work to that end is seen as a waste. No public infrastructure, no investing in science for advancement’s sake, no education poor people, no nothing.
The US has failed because of deliberate effort by itself to shoot its own feet and legs before diving head-first into an intellectual wood-chipper. It is 100% voluntary and you cannot hide behind “it must’ve been inevitable!”.


Microsoft has had a lot of resources for decades and sucked at the most basic stuff the whole time. Not taking a stance on AI usage here, just saying that the idea that a company having more money is rarely connected to the quality of the product they create and, in fact, chasing profits often leads to products being worse.


Sure, but we’re acting like self-driving cars will save us and not like they’re a neat little extra thing. Yes, some people donneed assistance moving, but there are entire para-taxi services that could receive better funding. In Ottawa, for example, the public transit service has a whole program called “ParaTranspo” with soecialized buses and everything. People who have trouble moving, in our society, are very not going to be able to afford self-driving cars and even if they did many will not be able to get themselves into them without assistance anyway. Also, in well-built neighbourhoods, people with disabilities can get around on their own on scooters and such, even in the winter; I see this in my own neighbourhood all the time and they are so mich more free than if they were tied to a car.
Self-driving cars aren’t much more than cheap propaganda that people slurp up so they can keep pretending that cars are a viable form of personal transport outside of edge cases. As someone with a sportscar who mostly just takes public transit and walks I can assure you, cars are largely stupid and we’re kinda dumb for wanting them.


We should just build walkable cities. It doesn’t even require any new knowledge, we can start right now and there are even many places in the US, the shittest of us all, where there’s honestly nothing really stopping us.
Self-driving cars are dumb because they are a tonne of work to ultimately solve zero problems when we could do basically nothing special and improve everyone’s lives within our lifetimes.


Does that make Bezos special? The bar is so low that someone doing the bare minimum of what most regular people are actively for is somehow an intelligent thing. His big thing to make money was to undercut local bookstores, that’s what he really did, and even that wasn’t new.
His “income” is around $2,500 per second. He “makes” more than most people do in a lifetime in a matter of minutes(single digit minutes) and what you described is not anything that requires special intelligence to pull off. What made him special was a silver spoon and the willingness to hurt others for personal gain.
Even Steve Jobs’ main quality that made him a standout leader in so many ways was that he simply allowed the people to he was paying to do a job to do that job without being micro-managed, and he told people who tried to get him to chase short-term gains to fuck off. Again, not genius level stuff unless you’re comparing him against the truly stupid and evil, which is most rich people.


“Unique” here refers to the fact that every other car is built pretty much the same way in as much first responders are concerned, and that makes them predictable and fairly easy to get out of while cybertrucks are strong enough and door-handleless enough to be incredibly dangerous(while also not being strong enough to do most of what they promise).


Pay a person?? Give a real human being money?!?
These people would rather burn a million dollars in front of a homeless person than give that person $1,000. It’s extra cruel when you realize that society would make that $1,000 back and then some if it were to help that person escape their poverty cycle.


I don’t get the use of “and yet” here. They untouchable because they exist in a system that supports them and has supported them since monarchies were a thing and probably before. They didn’t setup an intricate series of protections, we just willingly gave them a handful of grenades and now we have to, or feel we have to, dance around them whenever they have a temper tantrum so they don’t blow us all up. It’s the same mentality behind “too big to fail” where we could super easily actually let them fail or otherwise punish them but unfortunately we also elected similarly moronic and selfish people to be in charge and they want to pretend that they’ve been fooled or forced to cede to the rich.


Fake kids to real kids is very different than some crazy fucko thinking same-sex marriage would lead to fucking animals. Are you for real?


That doesn’t make them intelligent, and you need to re-read my comment until you understand just how many failures these people experience that they can simply ignore. In many ways you could even argue that what they’re doing isn’t intentional, they’re just reacting in the moment and we can all see how the furthest they can really look ahead is about a couple days.
Look at Musk, there have literally been whole teams of people who made it their job to distract the stupid child so he couldn’t fuck up their company. Jeff Bezos is making terrible decisions and his creativity was “bookstore but online”, yet it looks like success the same way a toddler with a shotgun will get all the cookies they want.
“Intentional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. These are some of the dumbest, most over-confident people alive right now and they are nothing without their ability to ignore major financial failures.


No one truly intelligent is seeking their own personal profit over everyone else. The simple fact is that these people are just lucky and have never had to ever consider the consequences of their actions. They aren’t happy, their lives don’t change between a few hundred million dollars and a billion dollars, they just chase a bigger number because the highest level their brains function at is like a monkey that wants all the fruit to itself.
I think about it this way: Neurodivergent are usually considered bad at communicating, except the worst communicators I’ve ever met have been neurotypical people. They live in a world built for them, where anyone not following the script must be broken so it not their fault. You look at these billionaires and they aren’t behaving like this because they’re smart, because there’s a plan, it’s because they refuse to admit they’re lucky and any failure was someone who just didn’t listen to the enough. It’s not their awful planning, it’s the employee who was unable to follow their bullshit.
These people are not intelligent, they just have enough money to be wrong a thousand times and only think about how smart they were that thousand and oneth time. They throw a million darts at the board and claim the single bullseye was all their raw skill.


At my first job, I was told I couldn’t be paid more despite the fact that I was getting the same pay as someone in my position was about 20 years prior. The boss? Massive house in the richest neighbourhood with two elephant statues out front that cost $50k each. He spent his days falling asleep in meetings and generally doing less than nothing. All the department heads were disgustingly rich, everyone else could get fucked.


No one is dumber than a rich person, except perhaps the people who are actively being screwed by them and who still believe that having money means the rich person must have earned it.


Except that what your comment misses is that the right thinks that the left wants to use the government to control their lives and the left in places like the US and Canada is not authoritarian just because they want the most basic government regulations on the practices that we can all see are screwing us over. The problem with your comment is that it acts as if both are operating within the same reality but we can see very fucking clearly that that simply isn’t true.
Conservative ideology is historically always authoritarian, it has to be. It is an ideology which exists to protect the system of a few people on top who own everything else, with a good bit of hating anyone who isn’t a straight, cis man because that helps get the voting base riled up.


I had been paying for it a while ago since, to be fair, the service is free otherwise and often times it pays the creator more. Then Youtube decided to give about $45mil or so worth of energy toward making pro-Israel content and suddenly I didn’t mind the ads so much anymore. Now they’re making it a lot worse and my solution is going to need to be an adblocker.


Right? If I don’t otherwise pay for the service then sure, some ads are fine. Problem is that at this point I’m seeing ads every few minutes, and if the video restarts in a weird spot and reloads funny after I reopen my laptop I might even get the same ads looping after literally two seconds of video.
Also, I was paying for the service and then they gave a fuckload of support to Israel to spread propaganda so I stopped.


Do hallucinating LLMs, that have done such things as convince a child to commit suicide before, really count as “information machines”? The Mayo clinic website might take a single whole other braincell to read through but at least it’ll be written properly.
I mean, the fact that you consider these programs to have enough credibility to be called “information machines” is exactly why they’re so potentially dangerous.
A large parking lot takes in heat from the sun and the releases it when the surrounding air becomes cooler. It heats the air, the air rises, new air comes in. A data centre produces heat all on its own, all the time, without ever stopping. It’s the difference between putting a cast iron pan in the sun and just straight up lighting a fire and keeping it burning day and night.