Gaashk
12hr ago
Yeah, it's certainly not fantastic. I was experiencing some schadenfreude last fall when SNAP benefits were possibly going to be delayed due to the government shutdown, and people were panicking about extremely first world food problems.
I do think we have to work on culture a bit. Countries used to have fasts. Lent and Ramadan are both starting. We should probably move back towards some amount of abstention being the proper thing to do, rather than just eating thoughtlessly all the time.
Gaashk
12hr ago
My kids have been eating government posole lately. I guess I'm happy to see the government pay for regional food traditions. A big step up from my mom's memories of Navajo garages full of cheese sitting there going bad, because cheese wasn't culturally considered a viable food.
Gaashk
12hr ago
Some states offer, in addition to free school lunches, to let people bring their children to eat remade lunches during breaks as well. That's fine, they can keep doing that. I'm generally impressed with the free lunches around here, the kids' school lunches are better than what I bring to work.
Gaashk
12hr ago
The divil is always in the details for these kinds of social credit schemes.
Have kids? If they all attend school 97% of school days
If the AIs cure viral infections first, I suppose.
Kid scores in the top 20% of his grade on a standardized test?
The main reason people currently (often) get paid more for being smarter is because we need that intelligence for important things like good decision making. But in a world where their parents are putting all their intellectual effort towards gaming the social credit system, this will end badly, as currently seen in places like South Korea. Anyway, in a world with ubiquitous AI programs, why wouldn't the student just talk directly to the AI, and get rewarded for asking about socially beneficial things, and generally sounding like an upstanding young person in the AI's professional judgement, rather than doing standardized tests at all?
Gaashk
2d ago
I'm in America, and don't think anyone has ever asked me point blank who I voted for. That seems very intrusive, and I would think less of them even if we agreed on who to vote for.
Gaashk
2d ago
That's what I had heard, and why I would consider asking a LLM if I didn't have anyone IRL to talk to.
Gaashk
2d ago
I'm not sure. Possibly. LLMs seem really sensitive to word choice, so it's hard for me to tell what they say to people with a different set of perceptions than myself. I did get them to be really paranoid when describing a situation, and I'm sure they could do that about relationships as well. One of the advantages of a real person is that they might know you, and what you're like, and maybe even meet the other person and have a sense of what they're like. Which neither the LLM nor Reddit has. But I also get the impression that a lot of people don't really have trustworthy friends either.
I took a quick look, and despite enjoying Youtube vlogs about textile content, nd enjoying beating wool with sticks, felting, and several other textile things, it looked pretty boring. I can see why someone wouldn't ever click through to knitting or weaving or anything else.
Gaashk
3d ago
Almost all of my colleagues are women. I mostly know men from Orthodox church, so they are preselected for that kind of interest.
Gaashk
3d ago
Third and final point is: stop trying to make fetch happen.
What does that mean?
Gaashk
3d ago
When colleagues have brought up politics out of the blue, generally comments about Trump, I've generally made a disgusted face and left the room. Or sometimes just ignored what they said and change the subject hamfistedly.
I've occasionally had a man try to discuss Byzantine or post USSR politics with me, and mostly I let them mansplain about it, but sometimes try to change the topic to mosaics or the history of ultramarine or Solzhenitsyn instead, and that is fine.
Gaashk
3d ago
However, I know multiple people who use LLMs to get relationship advice or other services best left to a therapist, and this example of how they can’t correctly answer a question about whether to drive or walk to a car wash is a good example which I can use to show people they can’t ask a LLM whether to go out with someone/stay together with someone or give them a lot of space, because while LLMs speak languages well, they can’t do other tasks.
The LLM doesn't have to outrun the bear, it just has to give better advice than the person's own mind or whatever friend/Reddit thread was willing to listen somewhat carefully to them. I could easily see the order of preference being: Wise Human>Normal Human who's paying attention > LLM > Normal human who's not paying attention > Own opinion > People who give advice on Reddit. But wise humans are in short supply, and often unavailable.
Gaashk
5d ago
I think this is because American waitresses make most of their money through tips, where being attractive tends to generate more tips, so hot women are literally paid better in those industries.
Gaashk
5d ago
I continued to enjoy Chicago public transportation well into the 2000s, and will probably visit and take my kids on it. There are just certain park and ride places not to park at, because your car will get stolen, but that's true in the Southwest too (which was never segregated).
Gaashk
6d ago
It wasn't that bad, just irritating to have to do. The social worker was an older veteran, who had gone into the field to give back to his community, but seemed to agree that some of the cases are stupid, especially while reading the transcript of a "mandatory reporter" just literally insulting how my baby looked, things like how fast his hair was growing.
Gaashk
7d ago
I got investigated for leaving my kids unsupervised in the same room as my husband and I, in a school, with cameras on. And for having a child with eczema.
Gaashk
11d ago
Artists were already in a fairly bad place, due to centuries of encroachment and ease of replication making it a tournament profession.
A normie compatible take is something like Brandon Sanderson's recent speech, We are the Art (https://youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo). We've had enough content to consume or decorate with or read or whatever for quite some time. Most people who aren't Brandon Sanderson can't make a living off of it anyway. But people still want to be makers, not just consumers anyway, but it's annoying because... probably because our communities are broken, so it's not trivially easy to just give a friend a handmade thing and have them put it up and appreciate it, or read it, or write a letter back about it.
But so far that's not the case and, to be honest, the last big improvement to text generation models I've seen happened in early 2024.
People have been appreciating the new Opus quite a lot at least, and the others to various extents.
I think some women do have surprisingly debilitating periods that are difficult to medicate properly, so it might be worth it in that case.
Edit: I watched the linked video, and what's the trans man talking about, with forming friendships with women in the bar restroom?? No wonder some trans women apparently think women's restrooms are worth fighting for... Different worlds, I guess.
Gaashk
11d ago
And it wouldn't be such a big deal for a relationship to end because one partner evolves.
...? You're arguing that in the ancient world a woman with young children being abandoned by her husband wouldn't be a big deal?
Yeah, the people of Minneapolis seem to have been spiraling for years now, and despite having lived nearby, I don't really have a feeling for it. I have a middle aged female relative, in a different part of the upper midwest, who's been broadcasting some of this energy over the past half decade. She's since blocked me on social media, but appears to be influencing my mother in law, who is cowed into just not saying anything about her at all. Back when we were talking, my impression was that she is, in general, kind of boring, and living a fairly boring, constrained life, lacking traditional middle aged woman outlets like running a church ministry, generating cultural output, and mentoring/getting help from younger women. She had a baby in her mid-thirties, and has been trying to "gentle parent" it, which sounded like it was going rather badly. I think she had the father of one of her children leave her for a man. I think there's a lot of sublimated anger going on, but the culturally approved expressions are only political. Rene Girard would probably have something useful to say about it.
Edit: Another woman I knew in Minnesota, who seemed generally like a nice person, had her husband and the father of her very young children decide he was a woman. She took her baby and toddler to pride demonstrations with her spouse, and posted about it online. That seems very stressful, but she probably can't really complain about it, he has the right to become a woman if he wants to, and seems to be still helping to care for the children. It's probably the Right's fault that the situation is uncomfortable.
Gaashk
15d ago
if that behavior is not literally criminal
Isn't the entire debate about what is and should be literally criminal? Rightists think that it both is and should be literally criminal to enter the country without permission. Leftists don't. In some states it is literally criminal to abort a fetus after a certain length of time, but before natural childbirth, but leftists don't want it to be. There are probably leftists who want it to be literally criminal to state certain opinions or use certain symbols, as it is in Europe. Leftists are often but not always in favor of more rights and fewer laws disallowing freedoms. Maybe not all debates are legal debates, but quite a lot of them are.
Gaashk
15d ago
As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit. I've only seen such particular diners in movies and I can only assume that they normally make cozy third places in the terms of sociology. Is there any particular reason why they are normally open around the clock and are disappearing and are relatively expensive?
I think it's mostly a culture change. My parents, like to reminisce about hanging out at the local Denny's with their friends in the middle of the night. I have never even thought about doing that, despite going to the same college with the same Denny's. It just never came up, I did other things instead. Maybe an arbitrary change, or phone and internet related. Not only did they not have cell phones, they might not have even had an individual landline, I wouldn't be surprised if the phone was for the whole floor.
Gaashk
25d ago
Do you say "celsius" every time you do? Because I wouldn't expect you to. If someone said "it's 40 degrees out! I'm sweltering!" I could infer what they mean.
Both systems seem to provide about the same value as far as I can tell, more than for length measurements, where metric has clear benefits.
I do like that 100 is a nice round number, and have always been a bit disappointed that in human terms it represents a mild fever, not the baseline human body temperature.
As I understand it, the Conservative position is something like that there are still jobs that kind of suck. Electricians have been going out in 50mph winds, working on the power poles lately. There are people repairing roofs in Phoenix in the summer. There are people collecting garbage on single lane dirt driveways, where they have to back all the way down the driveway to get to the garbage bins. There are people working in the South Dakota oil fields, and on Alaskan fishing boats. They have to both get paid quite a lot, and also get negative blowback from not working. There's a whole essential layer of work like that. I knew a man who was a sewage diver, and was married with kids.
A big part of the illegal immigration "jobs Americans won't do" narrative is about how high the floor for labor is, due to forbidding low labor and poor person lifestyles, while also providing more benefits.
Of course, I say this, but don't necessarily want to do those jobs as currently constituted (and couldn't physically do most of them), and am strongly in favor of further automation to make them less difficult.
More options
Context Copy link