I mean yeah I have one friend that smokes indoors still and it’s wild to be transported to the 70s when I visit her, and there are casinos where you usually smoke indoors. I just think if these models were trained on the worlds data then we should probably nationalize the data centers or just have the majority of people have affordable gpus again to self host and continue making strides optimizing the models to run on lower vram if people insist on using these things. I think it should be considered cringe to try to make money off them or use them for art, and the other use cases need to be regulated - giant scam apparatus manipulating the shit out of people, propaganda spreading convincing bot accounts, automated cyber attack attempts…ya know all the wonderful and most popular use cases benefiting humanity and improving our lives.

Anyone seen some of the promo videos for Forever California? Nothing radicalized me more than hearing a business pitch talking about how progress is being hindered by ‘legacy systems of governance’ Hell yeah they absolutely without a doubt want to make company towns again and pitch it like a new idea and sidestep democratic governments.

It’s not a ‘goal’ there is no purpose or goal to evolution or life…it’s a property of life that it propagates itself but that’s not the goal, reproduction is a function or a property of life. You could also argue the ‘goal’ is survival and there are sticks and carrots poking at making an organism survive, but again it just sounds like you’re misunderstanding how those words are used in academia, you’re doing the same thing with fitness. Fitness in evolution isn’t about running or being strong it’s how well an organism functions in its environment and what makes an organism fit varies from organism to organism and environment to environment.

Yes.

I want to be convinced and those are affirming articles, but since Roe v Wade fell I’ve just felt like nothing is safe. Any thoughts on Roe falling?

Everything in crypto was supposed to be benign low level infrastructure that no one cares about how it works for specific use cases like voting with shares and signing files and making a bank system that isn’t owned by any one corporation. Tech and finance bros needed to keep seeking growth in tech and targeted it and made it all an insane grift. Basically doing the same to AI imo, promising it’ll change and do everything, saturate development with wasteful and awful projects, make everyone hate it, and make a small amount of people a very large amount of money.

Exactly they worded it like that completely on purpose.

No it’s not too late! I didn’t start branching out and making new friends outside of the ones I made in high school until I was about 28. I got in touch more with acquaintances and started going out to bars. It wasn’t immediate and you have to be ok with having days that it doesn’t work, and show up repeatedly and you can start knowing people. You also should feel ok with the fact that not everyone will be super close friends and that it can take time, and that’s ok. You are allowed to exist in public spaces just like everyone else. The first few times I went out I didn’t talk to anyone at all. Nowadays I can go out and have days I don’t talk to anyone or meet anyone new or see anyone I know, but that is also ok. It’s a numbers game and you have to just keep going and get comfortable with checking in with your feelings and accepting when you feel social and when you don’t and accepting when things don’t turn out how you want and just appreciating being human and being out in the world. Go to cafes and listen to music and read books, go to bars and strike up conversations when you’re inspired, become a regular, ask people’s names, strike up casual conversation, accept awkwardness as part of the process and just keep moving forward! I now have multiple circles of friends that I’m close with to varying degrees and usually see someone I know when I go out. Work on your hobbies and career when you’re not socializing to have things to talk about and relate to, and be curious about other people and their lives. Most of the time at bars other people are also there to socialize, and you absolutely do not have to drink to be welcome at a bar. Do virgin drinks, sodas, water, pineapple soda, and ask the bartenders their choices in non alcoholic drinks. And also get comfortable with the fact that sometimes you’ll encounter sour apples while you are out, and don’t let them discourage you from going out to meet good people. Not everyone will be nice or fun or enjoyable, but that’s just part of it as well.

That’s pretty cool I can only render a couple million on my 3050, and I’ve been trying to do captures of my town with a drone, gonna increase my max Gaussians and try using this.

how decentralized is bluesky really?

I keep this link around for this question and curious about others thoughts. I’m basically fine with fediverse alternatives nowadays, I never post much anyways. I’m fine with not joining bluesky and just sticking to activitypub and remain skeptical about AT proto. People much smarter than me that actually build things in this space seem to be skeptical too.

Could you elaborate? I too would also like to sleep at night.

I believe you would want to be more dialectic about this not didactic

Yeah the two seem to be besties. Funny how people have talked about social media being the killer of ‘legacy media’ but honestly they seem to just complement each other and be used to sow division and FUD.

Magnificent

I like nature but see it in both ways. It can be creepy and scary and gross. But I don’t know, mostly I guess it’s the variety of visual stimuli and noises that I like. It’s all just so neat, the shapes of plants, shiny hummingbirds, how big it all is, moody fog in trees, finding a weird bug or plant you’ve never seen in your life, seeing things that are explicitly not made by humans, I find it comforting. Human made stuff is cool but also if that was all there was I think it would be pretty depressing, it’s nice that things exist outside of our making.

Hell yeah canned peaches. I agree though too there’s weird things that make charity a hard problem

I agree and it’s what I’m trying to lean into. I’ve been thinking of democracy as a verb or a muscle that has atrophied in me. Corporations certainly aren’t democratic, and most systems we live in nowadays don’t lend themselves towards democratic modes of engagement. My goal is to learn more about unions and look at mutual aid groups and tenant unions and look at examples in American history when people were more civically engaged and try to do more.

The nazis and religious zealots should continue to have their free speech and be able to parade, but they need to be shunned back to the recesses of popularity and life where they were scorned and looked at with disgust and their points were not granted the dignity to be engaged with in ‘debate’. Instead they are now treated as a spectacle and a disbelief that anyone even truly believes those things. They also successfully framed the discussion that they have reason and science on their side, and culturally we all need to understand they are ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.

You’re probably right, I basically agree too, but idk. It just doesn’t seem to ever stop a zealot or a nazi or the spread of their ideology. Not to mention in America it’s basically every zealous evangelists wet dream that one day their bible will be illegal and their gospel will be silenced by the government - they’ve been saying it’ll happen for decades. I’d rather them say what they truly think out loud and for our culture to not tolerate it by collectively being disgusted and enraged and having no pity for if they do get hurt. Like I wish that no one would care or be surprised if someone that says ‘the gays and black culture are degenerate and are agents of demons and Jews’ get their ass beat because they basically should, but to make it law and have the courts and government do it? Idk. Seems like a trap to me. I just want cops to turn a blind eye and no one be surprised if a nazi gets punched. But idk Germany seems to be doing fine with it being illegal. It’s probably just some bs free speech absolutism Ive picked up being American.

I mean…yeah like Jaron Lanier warned about technocracy being distasteful of democracy in one half a manifesto which was published in 2000 I believe. And anyone who was on 4chan before 2016 would know about /lit/ recommends on nick land and moldbug saying nerds will be new techno philosopher kings replacing democracy with some fever dream of digital feudalism, but you could be talking about this stuff since 2000 and peoples eyes would still glaze over. It’s late? People still don’t even seem to care even though they bitch about centralized platforms. People still think you’re just over exaggerating or weird for saying social media owned by corporations is giving corporations way too much power over public discourse and culture.

What gives me hope is all the things that the madness of humanity can’t touch. No matter what happens life evolved and there’s so much variation it’s beautiful, and it doesn’t matter if we understand it is there or not. Star formation and supernova will continue to occur. There’s an entire reality outside of us that will continue to exist whether or not we go extinct. The electromagnetic spectrum, chemistry, microorganisms, neat rocks, all of those things exist whether or not we do. I think I just very heavily avoid thinking that centers humanity. It’s cool that we make music and have love and compassion but we also are nuts and have capacity for very sad and painful things like increasing suffering and causing mental anguish. So I just think clouds and leaves are neat and trillions of other planets exist and there’s probably life elsewhere too. Maybe they do better, or maybe it’s not intelligent life like us at all and it’s just a bunch of weird creatures just being neat. A planet doesn’t even need life to be interesting there’s entire geological formations on Pluto and weather systems on Saturn larger than our planet. Imagine the moody clouds not even made of water vapor just making the craziest looking sunsets on Jupiter and it exists whether someone is there to see it or not. I think that’s pretty cool that basically all of reality exists completely separately from our species. Completely untouchable by religion and politics. As for the religion and politics, idk I keep myself and those I love safe. I continue to express my dissent and my disagreement and remind myself that a lot of these ‘arguments’ are old as hell and humanity has been dealing with them for a long time and you probably won’t solve them. I hope you get more acts of kindness and less exposure to the cruelty.