I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.
I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.
So if I just pour enough water on my salad it becomes a broth? Awesome!
You could say this about most standup comedians. The sober ones are the weird ones!
Part of the reason I included the link to Connections was to illustrate just how many people are involved in maintaining our critical infrastructure. But of course the show can only highlight a tiny fraction of them.
You might think “oh, we don’t need insurance companies so we could eliminate all those jobs” but even if we did eliminate the insurance industry we’d have to replace a lot of the work that people at insurance companies do.
Take health insurance for example. You might say “we should get rid of health insurance and give everyone free, public health care!” Well, I live in Canada and we have free public health care. Guess what? We still have a health insurance company: the government. They do all the same jobs: receive and process health care claims, decide which treatments to cover and which to reject, and send payments to health care providers once the treatment is approved and the work has been completed. The only difference is that there’s no profit in the government system. Otherwise they’re still doing the same amount of work, so we still need all those people doing those jobs.
You might go on to say “why don’t we just eliminate the approval process and pay for every single treatment?” but that line of thinking shouldn’t get you very far. We don’t have unlimited doctors or unlimited hospital beds. There will always be far more possible treatments to give people than should be given. In the case of older people with terminal illnesses, you can spend essentially unlimited money on treatments in a desperate attempt to prolong their life… and prolong their suffering in the process.
That environment of our evolution, like the Garden of Eden, no longer exists. We’ve created a new environment in which sitting around and vibing is no longer sufficient to thrive. Without the economic output we all die. See this first episode of Connections for details.
You mean stick the Hubble on the dark side of the moon? That’s a little difficult.
The small satellites swarming everywhere can’t be stuck out of the way. They’re communications satellites. They need to be close by to reduce latency.
The conservatives are pissed of because he’s drinking their milkshake. The electorate moved rightward (Justin Trudeau fatigue) and he moved with them, elbowing the Conservative Party further to the right into unelectable fringe la la land.
The Liberal party has a history of making these rightward shifts. It’s why they’re called “Canada’s Natural Governing Party.” They have no real ideological base, they just see which way the wind is blowing and go that way.
Just get Maxwell’s demon to separate the plasma into positive and negative charges, effectively creating a capacitor, then discharge it directly over some HVDC lines!
Yes exactly. What they really want to offer is an AI employee replacement service. If they could replace one of your employees who makes $40k/year then they could easily charge $30k/year for the service and you (the business owner and AI customer) could add $10k to your profits.
The fact is that they can’t do that. They can’t even make money charging thousands of dollars a year for basic LLM service that people use to write emails and the like.
The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.
Academic performance is about performing well on closed book written exams covering narrow subjects. The whole system is designed for 19th century teaching and testing. Using a computer does not help with that whatsoever and may in some cases hurt (by distracting someone who should be studying).
I tutor high school kids as a volunteer (next year will be my 10th year doing so). Over that time period I have noticed a sharp decline in a lot of basic academic skills: mental arithmetic (without a calculator), spelling, grammar, handwriting. These are the very skills one needs to master to perform well on closed book exams. Your ability to research a topic or get help from Google (incl. spellcheck and grammar check in Google Docs) or ChatGPT is of no benefit whatsoever when all you’ve got is a pencil and a piece of paper in front of you.
Thankfully indie game devs haven’t forgotten that 2D is the best and good stories matter.
I love VtM:B but I never had high hopes for this one. Direct sequels made by unrelated developers rarely work out.
The family destruction came first. You don’t get to that level of cynical populism with a healthy family life and outlook.
Yeah. It’s just the current band wagon he jumped on. Crypto was the previous one and gaming was the one before that.
Anything to sell more chips.
I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?
I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.
A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.
But that’s a specific optimization where you can no longer read the numbers left to right, the original intent of RPN.
Actually:
2 <enter> 5 <enter> 8 <enter> 5 - x +
10 keystrokes
I use RPN on my phone calculator for fun but it can also be annoying sometimes.
On my CASIO FX-260 Solar II calculator (super cheap, really nice and simple but also powerful) that would be:
2 + 5 ( 8 - 5 ) =
9 keystrokes
I really should just put a full block on lemmy.ml. Thanks for the reminder!
To get YouTube to work you need to curate your watch history. Any video you regret watching should be deleted from history so that it won’t be used for recommendations.
If your history is filled with these bad videos then you’re better off wiping your history entirely. Then start from scratch watching only videos that really interest you and your recommendations will all be based on those.
Like the internet itself, there is a TON of great content on YouTube. The trouble is finding it! For me, the internet has been gradually reverting to the situation I remember from the mid-90s (before Google existed). There were lots of search engines but they were pretty much all bad. I relied a lot on word of mouth (and site-to-site links) to find things.