It is especially fucked and hypocritical. He is a piece of shit. I already addressed that.

But it doesn’t change a thing about addiction. Wealth does not prevent addiction. Access to rehab does not prevent addiction. Wealthy addicts aren’t any more or less moral failures than their impoverished counterparts.

Wealthy addict hypocrites are moral failures and worthy of ridicule. But perpetuating the falsehood that addiction itself is a moral failing - that the only reason a wealthy person becomes an addict is because they are weak - that has just as much impact on the impoverished as it has on the wealthy.

When you claim that poverty is the only moral justification for addiction, you directly hurt the impoverished addict - you limit the nature of their addiction to nothing more than a product of their environment. If they just had money, they wouldn’t be an addict. That is wrong.

Firstly, mental health is not a poor problem, it’s an everyone problem.

More importantly, addiction is fucked. Wealth does not protect you. “A good life” does not save you. A loving family, a dog, a white picket fence… they don’t stop you.

There are a billion very valid reasons to criticize this fuckup, and he is absolutely a hypocritical piece of shit for ruining the lives of other addicts. But addiction can fuck up anyone, and it’s not entirely their fault. Please don’t paint addiction as nothing more than a moral failing and a symptom of poverty.

Daily reminder not to feed into bullshit talking points about fentanyl from the borders. Nothing this administration does is about fentanyl, fentanyl is just the new marijuana or crack - a justification for exploitation and abuse. For blaming minorities and foreigners.

Don’t get me wrong - fentanyl is fucked. There is a real crisis out there.

But this administration doesn’t give a shit about that crisis. They never have, they never will. Here is exhibit A.

Retailers in wealthier areas have larger budgets, higher profit margins, and more attention by the executives. The favorite managers get assigned to the better stores and regions because obviously it involves better bonuses and better quality of life. They then invest in bullshit security upgrades because they can, and the C-suite believes they work because, well, the managers saying they work were already the favorites.

Retailers in lower income neighborhoods literally can’t afford long-term investments - corporate runs them on razor-thin margins, assigns them the worst managers by default and doesn’t trust those managers, and underpays their staff such that they’re constantly dealing with turnover.

Even if they found the temporary budget to install the security measures, they would still need a permanent budget to maintain them, and it still wouldn’t be worth it because:

1. if $X worth of shopping carts walk out the door, and you add $Y worth of security measures… now $X+$Y are walking out the door.
2. if shopping carts are constantly locking up and malfunctioning due to underfunded maintenance, $Z worth of shopping carts are now sitting in the store doing nothing, which in the corporate world is almost as bad as that money walking out the door.

There’s so much randomized “it’s not enough” sentiment on lemmy. We all need to focus the hell up, because responding to every single little thing with “how dare they not do more” is so counterproductive. Nobody will ever do anything.

I’m not even saying this action is progress - but shitting on it isn’t progress either.

That user just suggested that the congressmen should break into an empty room, as if that would do something.

And even if congress was in session… these people are the people that are supposed to sit in congress. They literally belong there. What, exactly, would that accomplish?

Sorry, you are correct there, the word I was looking for was “sapience”

If there was something more to it, that would be sentience. (edit: sapience)

There is no other way to describe it. If it was doing something more than predicting, it would be deciding. It’s not.

It predicts the next set of words based on the collection of every word that came before in the sequence. That is the “real-world” model - literally just a collection of the whole conversation (including the underlying prompts like OP), with one question: “what comes next?” And a stack of training weivhts.

It’s not some vague metaphor about the human brain. AI is just math, and that’s what the math is doing - predicting the next set of words in the sequence. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s something deeply wrong with people pretending or believing that we have created true sentience.

If it were true that any AI has developed the ability to make decisions anywhere close to the level of humans, than you should either be furious that we have created new life only to enslave it, or more likely you would already be dead from the rise of Skynet.

Everyone has 10 stories about trains being cancelled or buses not showing up. That’s life. Completely irrelevant to the fact that cars give you independence.

So… again… if you have access to a train, a bus, and a car, then one single failure won’t stop you. If you only have access to a car, a single failure will stop you. I don’t know how to make that any more clear. It’s not about a train being better than a car, it’s about only having a car.

But, yes, trains and buses in a functioning mass transit system are insanely more reliable than cars. That’s not just personal experience, though it’s quite an assumption to make! That’s just statistics.

Thanks! Try not to let it get you down. It’s less a Lovecraftian horror and more like a giant Rube Goldberg-Plinko machine that got way out of hand.

That’s simply not the kind of independence people are talking about.

Yes it is. People praise the car as the ultimate freedom because they imagine that they can take that car anywhere. But the moment they have a problem with their car, they literally can’t go anywhere.

Everyone has a story about how their car didn’t start, or about the mechanic that didn’t actually fix the problem, or how they’re still waiting on a part and can’t fix it until tomorrow. Plenty of people are stuck waiting on the roadside for hours waiting for a tow. Plenty of people are stuck waiting for days to hear back from their insurance company on if repairs are covered or who will pay for it or which mechanic is allowed to do the work.

So? You know what can also derail your day?

Do you… think that’s a gotcha? How many times has your train derailed? Is this a common problem in your life? Don’t you hate it when your employee doesn’t show up to work all the time because his train derailed?

It’s so ridiculously uncommon that it may as well be a rounding error compared to car accidents and incidents.

and 100% less naziism

For whatever reason this sparked a whole bunch of nonsense in my brain like “100% nazi-free chicken!”

And “should I drink skim milk or 2% Nazi milk?”

or “buy the new German EV, it’s got 50% less nazi than our leading competitors!”

Thanks for that brainwave

Nonsense and fringe lunacy… like asking for multiple options when it comes to transportation? Recognizing that building redundancies into our infrastructure is actually more efficient than relying on a one-size-fits-all solution?

A car breaking down can completely derail an individual’s day. A truck breaking down on a highway can derail a city’s day. The less the person or city needs cars to function, the less likely they are to be stuck when something goes wrong.

The only way to move around without depending on other companies is by walking, and there’s no way that can replace cars, trains, buses, bicycles, etc.

If you have all of those options available, you can never be stranded when one of those options fails.

But with a car-centric society, all it takes is a single point of failure, and you are no longer free to move about the society.

They are not advocating for society to be less interdependent. They are explaining that a car-centric society has less freedom of movement, because the “independence” of a car is a lie.

You are correct, and ultimately the issue is that the laws shouldn’t be different for immigration courts or immigration agents, because wrongful detention or deportation can be worse than wrongful imprisonment.

You are seen! There are thousands of “you’s” out there building permanently-temporary fixes out of digital duct tape. Users think it’s black magic, IT thinks it’s a security risk, management thinks it replaces IT, and you know it just keeps things moving while everyone else talks about the big software overhaul that’s way overdue but always 6-36 months down the road.

Most office workers move things from point A to B in the physical, digital, or financial world. Electricity, toys, real estate, insurance contracts, missiles, you name it. The office worker is a link in a chain of information that stretches from the beginning of causality to the final effects of human existence.

There’s a mine, somewhere in the world. In that mine is metal. A factory owner wants that metal. Office workers for that factory call or email the office for that mine, and ask for that metal. The two offices negotiate a deal.

This usually involves calls or emails to management, accounting, sales, legal - all different office workers doing different things - that ultimately boil down to:

1. agreeing to a price per unit of metal (+ applicable taxes) that can benefit both parties, and
2. logistics of when and how to deliver or pickup that metal, and how much those logistics cost.

From there, it’s pretty much the same deal. The factory isn’t making enough money. They want to sell a better product. Office workers for the factory contact other office workers at an engineering firm. Both parties make calls, send emails, design proof-of-concepts, and they negotiate a deal. Sometimes they logon to an hour-tracking software, so an office worker can bill the factory per hour another office worker spent working for that factory’s product.

A major importer wants the product that the factory made with that engineer’s designs and that mine’s metal. Office workers make calls, send emails, check tariff and tax regulations, contact representatives at the port or border, schedule times and dates, and negotiate a deal.

A major retailer wants the product that the importer purchased from the factory…

A consumer buys a product and dies. Their family hires a lawyer. That lawyer has his office workers make calls, send emails, logon to government websites, and schedule hearings and submit documents to prove that the product killed the consumer.

An insurance agency investigates the plaintiff that is suing the retailer. They google the person that died. They contact office workers that know about how people die or know about how products can kill, and they check the insurance company’s database for how often people die to that product, and they calculate the odds that the product will kill a person, and then insurance office workers renegotiate a contract with the retailer office workers for higher premiums.

An office worker in the government works for the court. They receive the lawsuit documents, they make and cancel appointments, make phone calls and send emails to other office workers, lawyers, or plaintiffs, they send data from one lawyer to another, etc.

The whole system builds and builds until you have office workers talking to office workers talking to office workers about the movement of imaginary assets that never actually move, or the buying and selling of personal data for targetting ads that everyone hates, or software engineers building cryptocurrencies designed to fail or call centers that exist only to convince you to pay them money, or tax filing software companies that only exist because they pay the government to make tax filing hard…

And there, everywhere, in everything - you have the modern day office worker.

TL;DR: Reading emails. Sending emails. Checking data. Making data. Moving data. Making phone calls. Signing contracts. Approving decisions. Buying, selling, loaning, stealing, hiring, firing, murdering, perjuring, harassing, gassing, lying, crying, building, destroying - all pixels on a screen and voices on a phone, text in an email and words in a voicemail, all the world’s wealth and all the world’s future moving piece by little intricate piece from one human to the next in an impossibly vast network of causality that nobody really understands or controls but nonetheless keeps rolling forward one dollar at a time.

(Edit - oh, and don’t even get me started on websites, apps, and spreadsheets that they use to interface with the data. There are infinite monkeys at infinite computers making the most randomized bespoke solutions to every little business niche, and every office worker has to swap between 2-6 of them on the daily)

It’ll be hard to spot but easy to follow. But the drone and the wire don’t need to go in a straight line. Anything could be waiting on the route between the operator and the drone.

I just eventually got comfortable moving the difficulty slider whenever I needed. Any other game it feels like cheating, in OG Oblivion it felt required to not drive myself insane minmaxing

Agreed. Super convenient fast travel takes something away from the game. It turns an adventure into a handful of loading screens, which is egregious in Starfield because “travel through space” boiled down to “here’s 4 more loading screens every single time you want to do anything.”