Serious question: if someone claimed deaths by smoking are up or down, there’s stats we could rely on to tell if that’s the truth or not. How do we tell the amount of racism in 2025? What statistic or statistics are indicative of racism?

I don’t find it too hard to indicate some things that were actually better in the 1970s:

• Consumer goods and appliances were typically more reliable and designed to be repaired
• Less additives in the food supply
• Obesity was less of a problem
• College education was more affordable with an entry level job
• Children had more freedom (would roam the neighborhood for hours unsupervised)
• Less surveilance

I can make all these points without saying “1970 was better in every way than 2025”. Why does it have to be all-or-nothing? Can’t some things have been better then and not worse?

If you make an analogy, then have to explain the thing you are comparing the first thing with, what is the point of the analogy?

The explanation is about as redundant as a third wheel. You know, the awkward extra person tagging along with a couple on a date.

Tho I think people from 70s would very much still choose 2025 living over 70s. People really underestimate how much better we have now.

Couldn’t I yearn for a time that has neither the bad points of 1970 and none of the bad points from 2025? Not everything was worse in the 1970s, and not everything was better, either.

Is this similar to violent crime? A lot of right wingers bemoan the increasing amount of violence in “blue states and cities”. Except, almost by any way you can measure it, violent crime has been on the decrease for years now. Is racism becoming worse, or are you just becoming more aware of it?

Err, did you read your own link? This wasn’t a deliberate “watermark”. It was a training error that resulted in some odd characters being inserted. This was a training defect that was fixed, not some sort of plagarism countermeasure. These marks were present for only a short time and only on a subset of OpenAI models.

He didn’t really “predict” any of it though just as Gordon Moore didn’t “predict” that computers are going to get faster.

You’re right: Gordon Moore did not “predict” that computers would “get faster”. He stated that the numbers of transistors on a chip would continue to double every two years. It’s only semi-recently that this has started to peter out.

I guess you’re not happy with usage of the word “predict”? There were plenty of people who weren’t Alvin Toffler that used the same data in the 1970s and drew the opposite conclusions. Do you disagree with what Alvin says or are you just trivializing what he wrote because it seems obvious to you?

I feel like we just aren’t equipped to handle the global information age yet, and we need specific ways of being to handle it. It really is a brand new thing for our species.

The root of so many of our problems is we have the firmware from a prehistoric primate up in our head but we have to live in an environment that on the geological scale is more or less brand new. With the rate of change STILL increasing, natural evolution will never enable us to “catch up”. It’s only going to get worse from here on in, at least until the Singularity, when we can just hope that the AI overlords let us live our our days in a little human “reservation” while it keeps on rolling…

Was the past not racist?

I used a tool online to validate it.

There is no reliable tool to detect AI content. A few months ago someone tried to do a “gotcha” on some of my content, citing AI generation by use of some “AI detector”. However, I ran some of their posts on LinkedIn through the same tool and it came up as 80% likely to be AI generated.

He vehemently denied using any AI at all — and was pretty annoyed to have the tool turned back against him.

“The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed”

I’ll never forgive OpenAI for making the unordered list a reason to complain about content.

It used to be… look up “vin mariani” sometimes. Cocaine is illegal in the USA largely why a lot of other drugs are illegal: they aren’t profitable for the right folks.

If alcohol / caffeine were discovered TODAY neither would be approved by the FDA for usage in products. But because both are intertwined with USA culture in a way neither cannabis or cocaine is, the former two are allowed (and even glorified) while the latter two are forbidden. It has nothing to do with harm reduction and everything to do with corporate profits.

This is horrible. Does anyone have the locations of the eggs so I can safely recover them to make sure no one else smokes those dank nuggs?

This type of abuse is old as the hills. The rights enumerated in the constitution only apply to citizens. Look at how wiretapping is done among the “Five Eyes”. The USA just has allies do the snooping on its own citizens, conveniently dancing around the same constitutional protections. It’s unclear if even under the most charitable reading of the constitution if this should apply to an unlawful foreign resident of another country.

Cruel and unfair, definitely. Much like the electoral college, everyone likes to complain about it while not doing too much. If you find the above distasteful, then it should be made clear in US case law that aliens are eligible for constitutional protections. Until then, Trump and co. will gladly keep doing what they are doing, because they don’t care about “being fair”.

This is a direct result of the degradation of education. Countries that have a higher standard of living for ALL people: health (mental and physical), fair wages, maternity/paternity leave, etc., also have better education standards. In some cases, free university.

As an American, I can say this sounds like COMMUNISM and I will fight to the death to avoid the specter of universal health care! America leads the world in health care spending and we intend to keep it that way.

My favorite phenomonon is anti-vaxers and the like saying “Science is hogwash! Ever notice how they just say ‘Trust the science!’? That means it requires faith!” Sure, that’s all well and good, except an actual scientist will NEVER say “Trust the science!” The foundations of science are NOT built on blind trust. It’s built on truth which is established experimentally, which is the opposite of blind trust. It’s very telling that people saying science is flawed are the same folks that don’t understand it.

It’s largely the same thing as someone saying “Evolution is hogwash. I’ve never seen a monkey turn into a human!” (except evolution doesn’t say that it will either…)

https://www.newsweek.com/tim-pool-critics-white-house-clothing-206306

Is this revenge for him mocking Obama for him wearing a brown suit? Glad to see them squabbling over dress code instead of further degrading our republic…

I mean, this is a level too generic. They aren’t going after 60 year old women with the Rolling Stones logo tattoo’d on their thigh. However, if you are heavily tattoo’d and from a certain part of the world and a certain race, you should be pretty jittery. There’s been some collateral damage in all the ICE sweeps. The current administration is far from highly competent, and their error rate is carrying over to these arrests and deportations. I don’t trust Trump and co. with the smallest of operations, so I definitely don’t trust them with life-or-death, potentially citizenship-violating mass arrests.

Despite the scale of the incident, Russian officials have offered limited information, with regional governor Aleksandr Avdeev confirming a “blast” but threatening penalties for spreading unofficial reports.

Man, the USA can be a shit show, but at least we can spread unofficial reports whenever we like.