Oh wow yeah. Like nails on a chalkboard!

Shopping cart wheels here only freeze for one reason: crappy bearrings that get jammed up when people run through pools of spilled grape juice and maple syrup.

Just gonna leave this here!

That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!

The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.

A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!

I think most people here are missing the point of the meme. Interpreting it as “you too can write a culture-defining fantasy novel at 45!” is naive at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

The message here is that you shouldn’t feel bad about yourself if you haven’t started on your plans yet. I can say this from experience because I didn’t finish high school until my 30s and then finished university just when I hit 40. I’m starting my first job post-graduation this Monday after a year and a half of searching for a job.

I still have so much I want to get done. None of these things involve fame or fortune. These are basic things like learning how to mix a drink, learning how to make a great hot sauce from home grown peppers, learning aquascaping and how to keep a Walstad aquarium, learning how to play a musical instrument, learning how to repair vintage electronics (especially vintage computers and game consoles), learning how to use a telescope to make deliberate observations, learning how to cook Chinese food…

On and on and on it goes. No one should feel bad for taking as long as they need to accomplish their goals. No one should feel bad for having modest goals. Whether you’re 15 or 45 or 65, you shouldn’t feel like it’s too late to do the things you want to do!

But you don’t really have an advantage there. The super rich have a populist army of their own (maga) and they’re going all out with it in an attempt to destroy the left by attacking its foundation: academia.

Systemic change doesn’t happen without political will. Political will depends on personal opinions. Try to bring in systemic change with an election win but not overwhelming support then you get reactionary backlash like we’re seeing right now.

Also known as kicking the can down the road.

If you don’t fail a kid in elementary school they’re gonna fail in high school. If you don’t fail them in high school they’re gonna fail in university or in life in general.

Life has consequences for making mistakes and not learning from them. If we try to shelter children from their mistakes and bad habits then we raise adults who are poorly equipped for handling the challenges of life.

When I was in first year of university I met so many nice, seemingly-well-adjusted people who hit a brick wall with their coursework. I believe around a third of my peers failed to graduate at all in their programs. Many dropped out or transferred to other departments or other universities.

But here’s the thing: my peers had already been subject to a rigorous selection process to get in (only about 10% of applicants were admitted). If you had put all applicants through the rigours of the coursework far more would have failed.

The really tragic part of this whole story is when you factor in the degrees of the consequences for failure. In elementary school the consequences for failure would be very low. Children who are older than their peers tend to outperform them anyway. In university, however, the consequences for failure are very high (thousands of dollars wasted on failed courses that need to be repeated).

The consequences for failure outside of school (real life as they call it) are even higher: unemployment, homelessness, incarceration, and even violence and death.

What I described is water filtration: biological filtration. Runoff from farms is organic in nature: manure and fertilizer, for the most part. Filtering it with traditional water filters (which need to be regularly replaced) is a huge waste of materials and a source of plastic waste that needs to be disposed of. It’s spending more money in order to fill up landfills needlessly.

Furthermore, it doesn’t even make sense from an infrastructure perspective. Artificial water filters are designed to be installed in pipelines. The water runoff on farms is not contained in a pipeline. It’s caused by rainfall and snowmelt on fields and running downhill (as well as sinking into the ground, soil permitting) over a large area. To filter it artificially you’d need to collect all that water into a pipe which would require enormous infrastructure to construct.

It’s so much easier, so much more economical, and so much more environmentally friendly to do minimal landscaping and allow water to collect in a basin located downhill where the water was flowing anyway. Some of it may need to be diverted for one reason or another, but that’s nothing compared to the cost of full collection and water treatment. Plus all those native wetlands plants that uptake the excess nutrients provide a habitat for native wetlands wildlife. It’s a win-win!

Fixing the runoff problem is just a matter of proper landscaping. Establishing an artificial wetland or preserving a natural wetland can go a long way towards reducing nutrient loads in the water that drains from a farm.

It’s all about having a basin to store water so it doesn’t drain off the farm too quickly and allowing native aquatic plants to take up nutrients to filter them out of the water.

Yeah. I remember people talking about how in the 1950s you’d go for a drive in the country during the summer and your car’s windshield would be completely covered in bugs. It was like a rainstorm there were so many. Now you can drive through those same areas and not even get a single bug hitting your windshield.

I felt the same way when I first got online in the mid-90s. I thought it was gonna bring all people together. Seems pretty quaint at this point!

Things are obviously pretty bad right now but for me the jury’s still out. It could be really good a hundred years from now!

I never use AI. Can’t stand it. Wish it would go away!

I also think it’s completely stupid and overhyped. I took a course in 4th year on building and training neural networks with PyTorch. I know how it all works at an intimate level. It’s not going to lead to a singularity any time soon (as so many people think).

Yeah! When I was a kid I played this game called Exile 3: Ruined World and it had a place called the cave of friendly spiders. You talked to them and they’d say things like “Hi! You’re cute!” It always stuck out to me how friendly they were.

Now I realize that jumping spiders literally are those friendly spiders from the game!

Cute salamander by the way! Where I live they’re extremely rare. Only seen a couple of them in my life.

I think there’s a lot of explanations for the decrease in value of the ads:

• ad market saturation
• user ad fatigue
• rampant ad blocking
• less engagement overall

I’ve heard YouTube video ads pay a lot less to the creator than they used to. A lot of creators are struggling and feel pressured to release a lot more videos and more consistently. But this can all be measured by view counts where the numbers drop off as engagement disappears.

One of the worst things a YouTube creator can do is completely change the type of videos they make. This often gets people to stop clicking videos and YouTube’s algorithm takes this as a sign to stop recommending that creator, causing their views to drop off a cliff.

I wonder if there’s a similar issue with the ads on game review sites today. I have seen some YouTube video reviews that include a sponsored segment for a game I’d never in a million years consider playing (which has no relevance to the video at hand). Maybe if people are reading reviews the ads aren’t relevant to the games they’re playing so they never bother with them?

Video game reviewers used to provide a valuable service. Back when all video games were Nintendo expensive, we needed trustworthy reviewers to guide us towards making the correct purchase. Paying the inflation-equivalent of $100+ for a single video game made a single bad purchase really hurt.

Nowadays, people log on Steam and scroll through hundreds of previously purchased (never played) games they picked up for a few dollars each during a Steam holiday sale 3 years ago. They can just click download and start playing anything that tickles their fancy!

Plus I’d also add that many gamers have found games that have enormous replay value (especially multiplayer games like League of Legends or Hearthstone or Fortnite) and they sink thousands upon thousands of hours into that one game.

What room is there for professional game reviewers reviewing new games every week and writing about them? Most gamers seem to have more games than they could ever want, plus single games that could last a lifetime by themselves.

The same could really be said for music reviews. People used to read magazines like Rolling Stone in order to get reviews of the latest songs from the hottest bands. Nowadays people just listen to the music themselves and decide whether or not they like it, no reviewers needed.

Edit: I forgot to mention streamers and lets players. People can watch a lot of these videos by amateur or professional content creators and judge whether or not they like the game based on how it plays. Reading an article, even a very well-written one, pales in comparison to a gameplay video at the job of communicating how a game looks and sounds in motion.

Yeah. Sometimes I think people are so used to media (TV, movies, video games) and the distancing effect of being in a vehicle (looking out a window at people) that they’re actually capable of travelling to another country without actually believing that they are there in person.

Apart from stories like this, there are countless other stories of clueless travellers who walk around treating locals like NPCs, not really realizing how annoying and offensive they are. These big blowback stories are just the tip of the iceberg on that whole genre of stupidity.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Thailand’s lèse majesté laws are very strict. The government treats insults to the monarchy as a harm to the entire country.

Just don’t do it! If you’re not a Thai person then what business do you have with the monarchy anyway?

Just don’t wear an American flag on anything and you’ll be fine!