You eat hamburgers, it’s a similar scale comparison

Unless it’s the sale of a product or service or the wage earnings or someone who worked on a product or service, it doesn’t contribute to GDP, if country A made product X, it being sold in country B contributes to A’s GDP

Nah just get the work certed, it’d be available for anyone, it just needs to pass the “No AI was used at all” test, and that can be done by giving creative software tools the ability to sign files whenever AI or screen shotting tools get used in their making

I think the approach of providing software tools the ability to grant the cert if no AI tools are used will be the way to really spread the practice, can even work with them to create a cert mode that just doesn’t even present those tools to the user in the first place.

The next step would be getting publishing sites to use the cert or signature as a check that either blocks the upload or more leniently get a visual marker that indicates it was not made with generator tools.

Plus checking for the cert also eliminates the crisis of teachers having to outsmart GPT to avoid their students cheating on takehome essays.

I think that’s what people really ought to fear about our future. Once there are enough of us, once we’ve spread out widely enough, horrors and disgusts the likes of which we speak of in hushed tones praying we never find ourselves even adjacent to them will be cut loose into the universe.

Until we develop means of consistent and viable FTL travel and communication, we’re going to all live with knowing that any heinous act we can possibly imagine is not only playing out somewhere, but the victims of it were probably bred for the purpose of making the show as enjoyable as possible for whatever freaks arrange for it.

Even when we regain the proper footing of being able to enforce basic rules of prevention of the worst things we can imagine, the sickos will always be finding another remote world, another star at the fringes where justice can’t reach reliably yet.

We will live in a universe of untold prosperity, and yet also one of an eternal game of whackamole against the worst kinds of us that could ever exist, and some that can’t yet but will come into existence with what we learn going forward.

Even colonizing the solar system, we will regularly see headlines that force us to ask if we are doing enough to protect others, if everyone can live like kings while some are made to be the victims of Caligula, or of Pol Pot, or of Jim Jones, or of any of the other depraved madmen of history who made those underfoot their playthings for the worst impulses that not even the call of the void dares give an ear to.

Looking at the current conduct of the russian military, you’re not exactly giving me higher hopes for our ability to let anyone have those

I’ve said before, what’s needed here is an independent org or maybe even multiple that can provide certification that pieces of media were created without the use of generative tech, and then open up companies that publish anything missing the cert to lawsuits from the public.

Verify then trust publishing would go a long way to contain misinformation in general, not just deep faking and other generated content.

My take is that the afterlife comes in three phases, yes phases because as much as it gives the fundies a hard-on there’s literally nothing humanly possible to do that could justify a permanent state of the worst torment imagineable.

Phase 1, atonement, you do the hard work for the souls you’ve harmed in your life to forgive you and release the chains that bind your soul.

Phase 2, forgiveness, you do the harder work of forgiving what wrongs have been done to you. Those chains hold you to your material existence, and you have to let go of them to be ready to move on.

Phase 3, reunion, the veil behind which no eyes may see. All you’ll know is that by now anyone you haven’t met yet from your life has done the soul rending work you have and walked beyond it. They’re on the other side, and they’re waiting for you to join them, what that’ll look like, probably some 4-D amalgamation of every heaven or paradise or state of eternal bliss ever foretold by human words, and yet also none of those things, because not only do we not understand it, doing the hard work of being forgiven and doing all the forgiving is what it takes for you to be ready to understand it. I think it is what specifically god spoke of when they said they are both and yet neither of human binaries, and incomprehensible in their true essence to the human mind.

I guess pursuing the question much further is necessarily going to take us to the big one, “what happens after we die?”

And there’s only so many times I can deliver the punch line “lots of things that just don’t involve us anymore.” before I start to feel like a “that guy” about it.

Slowly dying out as our descendants evolve into divergent races and species and stop being technically classifiable as human.

People who think doom is upon us really don’t understand just how hard it is to kill all of us, it would take a confluence of several extinction level events at this point to completely wipe us out just because of how resilient we’ve made our society to collapse factors.

We’re gonna live, we’re not gonna escape living with the world we’ve made as easily as just all dying because of it, and someday one of your descendants is gonna regard you the same way we do the savannah apes that figured out how to walk upright to get a better vantage over the tall grass.

As for what our descendants will evolve into, honestly, it’s gonna be a much more designed process as we continue to master gene editing tech. I could genuinely see several branches just being different “forks” of the base human body plan that try to resolve “design flaws” like disconnecting the respiratory and digestive systems or restoring partial water breathing or fully activating our potential for bioluminescence.

I think 40k is on to something too, the practice of the mechanicus of augmenting their bodies with tech to the point of even enabling their own brains to perform mass data analysis akin to a binary computer will be where a lot of folks end up too.

In fact I believe that the moment a “third hemisphere” implant to the brain is successfully developed will be the actual singularity point for humanity rather than the development of an independently intelligent artificial being. Unlocking the potential of human pattern recognition in harmony with binary number mastery would instantly change so much about how people even understand the world let alone interact with it that predicting beyond that point is more an experiment of speculative evolution than of more standard futurism.

As for immediately, I believe we’re a lot closer to a solar punk world than anyone’s really comfortable with accepting, because doing that means giving into fatalism means them having personally failed a goal within reach instead of “just accepting reality.”

Gossips will tend to respond to outright rejection by gossiping about you instead, and being a man in a predominantly woman’s field is gonna mean that gossip can get very dangerous for you and your career very quickly.

Remember, gossip doesn’t have to be true to still be hot, and scorned gossips will be more than happy to exploit that to the fullest to spite you.

Don’t tell them you don’t care about religion and politics either, because even if you don’t women have learned from shitbags to translate that to “I may or may not have been at the capital on Jan 6th and held a bonfire celebration burning IUDs when Dobbs came down, but I still want to get laid ever.”

My advise, try just being boring. Contribute duds to any conversations they try to involve you in where you’re uncomfortable.

Most importantly speak to a supervisor you feel you can trust to not tell the gossips and tell them the gossip makes you uncomfortable so that if the boring act doesn’t work and they start gossiping on you already, there’s a previous record indicating they might do that and it’ll at least insulate your future career prospects.

As for sex life talk, women are under two impressions, 1, that they aren’t being raunchy when they talk about their sex lives, and 2, that men do it way more and are way grosser about it.

It is entirely possible that they keep bringing up sex lives because they’re trying to relate to you and extravert adopt you, so if you gently explain that you don’t feel comfortable talking about sex with coworkers you might find yourself in a more open conversation about mixed signals and how you all can create a better working relationship.

Some people keep trying to talk to ya because they really do just want to be friends! That sounds obvious but trust me it’s hard to actually internalize that to the point that you can believe it when it’s happening to you. Missed out on chill compsci bonding time with this pretty cool dude named gabe because I didn’t get that he was being so spontaneously friendly to me so much because he’s just a friendly guy. I met tech wiz Ned Flanders and it didn’t register to me for a solid year lol.

You strike me as a bit of an introvert so I’ll add, uncomfortable but tactful conversations now can save you exponentially more awkward and embarrassing ones later.

I refuse to believe that there isn’t a secret containment plan that all nuclear powers are coerced into agreeing to that basically gives every other nuclear power the right to intervene and secure the nukes from paramilitaries and terrorists in the event of state collapse.

The only reason I would presume NK isn’t in on it is because everyone’s agreed by now that if they fall it’s gonna be a race between China and South Korea for who can press a legitimate claim first.

If the executives could have just had less pay, yes, cutting someone off from their entire livelihood is theft. Especially if there wasn’t even cause like criminal behavior or inexcusable misconduct.

And I think it’s perfectly fair to just assume executives are lying about everything they say since *gestures wildly at all the everything since as far back as Smedly Butler.

Don’t worry, if Kyiv’s getting nuked, so are all the rest of us, so you’d have found out long before you had time to read about it! :D

More seriously, someone’s really gotta figure out how to attack the nuclear arms specifically. Putin is making it obvious that the world will never be safe if there’s even the remotest chance some lunatic could gain the ability to fire those things.

It would have to be the fastest military operation ever conducted in human history, but if it worked, it would save the world.

That’s not how GDP works

Edit to elaborate, GDP is calculated based on final goods and services, outsourced work exclusively counts towards the GDP of the country that work is done in, and only affects the GDP of another country when they buy what the first country made, but the outsourced work still happens in country A, so country A gets all the GDP created by selling finished goods, and all the GDP of the work done on unfinished products within their borders.

Basically, the US isn’t sitting on everyone else’s money, it just genuinely makes and sells that much shit

IIRC the ring mold donut pizzas were specifically for that meeting and what they were cut out from was what you’d usually get if you ordered that pizza

Point still stands that the caramalization is why you’ll see really good deep dish pizzas and skillet pizzas stop building up the sides of the dough with enough space for the sauce to overflow a bit.

It cooks and brings out the sweetness, and then hardens into effectively being the rest of your crust

Of course if you’re going traditional there’s other routes to get other mixes of flavors but the sauce rim is something pretty specific to the pan made family.

Well it can certainly involve being a piece of shit

Part of it is that America just has an insane amount of resource richness even compared to historical empires of it’s comparative influence.

Let me try to explain it in agricultural terms. America is a nation of immigrants, and yet a common phenomenon is an observed disconnect between what Americans consider local cuisine from a given country and what people from that country today consider average cuisine of their culture.

This is because those immigrants were the tired, the poor, the hungry masses yearning to be free. The cuisine they brought was the stuff people would make to subsist as peasants, notice how many different varieties of “take this basic grain as a filler then layer on bitsins and fixins to give it flavor and nutrition.” Meanwhile in the home country, cuisine culture continued to be defined by the elites who had already been defining it. What’s really interesting is that the cuisine brought by the poor, did not stay pauper meals.

This is because America as a country is so packed to the gills with farmable land that ingredients considered a rarity for sheer cost in “the old country” were abundant to the point of being cheap. American serving sizes are so big because they were pioneered by people who were thanking god that they could be that big. Chop Sui literally was just “whatever you can throw in the pot, serve it up!”, tacos and sandwiches were invented basically to maximize the flavor and nutrition of expensive fresh ingredients on limited supply, Pizza has roots as the equivalent of a street pretzel in NYC.

Imagine if someone took the NYC pretzel, moved to a land of unheard-of plenty unseen by human eyes thus far, and decided to spice that pittily ass bread and salt with choice of topping by loading that shit with the most unimaginably luxurious ingredients they could conceive of because that shit is all cheap there. That’s the story of Pizza. That’s what happened to basically every peasant food culture that made contact with the US and its because American resource richness is just that unprecedented for anyone who isn’t from America already to conceive of.

Stalin once stated that WWII was won with, “British Intelligence, American Steel, and Soviet Blood.”, but America wasn’t just a factory for the world, the American kitchen put into that war just as hard as the American foundry, arguably more, America’s first casualties of the war were the merchant marines who faced U-Boats head on to run food aid to the British public and anywhere else they could slip past the Nazis.

We got so much shit we will literally give it to you for free sometimes

That is how 4% of the world population ends up sitting on 25% of its GDP

I feel like schemes like this warrant a law that you’re failing your fiduciary duty as a company owner and can be sued by any of the stakeholders for it if you can’t prove failure to at least break even is due to genuine misfortune. Not even gross incompetence, that should just get you sacked with a dunce cap on top of having the company broken off and sold to a bidder that isn’t hellbent on stripping it for parts.

That or company owners are only allowed to draw funds from the company’s profits and funds coming from anywhere else, including from layoffs and corner cutting, are seized at 150% the value stolen and the company owners involved get treated as though they had committed embezzling so long as the books can indicate that the executives and owners drew more in compensation than was recorded as profit.

I disagree with the Great John Stewart’s maxim on the subject, but I will say that Deep Dish is definitely there to satisfy a different taste than traditional pizza makes.

Just watch Food Theory’s perfect burger video, stack order matters! And the ideal crust can stand up to the sauce beginning to soak it a little so don’t try to say that it’s to put a wall between the crust and the sauce. The Bear had it right, you wanna be doing that kinda jazz because you’re looking to get caramelized sauce crust to get a crunchy sweet rim on the whole deal.

I’ve started craving nostalgic foods for myself as a coping mechanism, for me it’s being unable to keep anything down save for like 2 things consistently