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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Conservative super pacs have been running ads against him for months. He still doesn’t have a running mate. No one showed up to support him outside his trial. Rich shareholders have cooled on him, because an erratic president will hurt stocks far more than any tax breaks or slashed regulations will help

    His supporters are leaving his events because he just looks weak and incoherent - he’s not even “incoherent sprinkled with buzzwords”, he now just rants about himself like an old man

    Mainstream media is owned by a few billionaires - regardless if they want Trump or Biden, selling Trump as a threat kept people focused where they wanted them. They’ve been showing as little unedited footage as possible, but even his softest softball interviews have so little that makes him look good.

    I think it’s ok to be optimistic, I don’t think I can sit through the debate tonight, but I think the clips will be interesting




  • In fairness, most computers built after around 2014-2016+ last way longer, performance started to level off not long after that. After all, devs write software for what people have, if everyone had 128 gigs of RAM we’d load everything we could think of into memory and you’d need it to keep up

    Macs did have some incredible build quality though, the newer ones aren’t holding up even close to as well. I’m still using a couple 2012 Macs to play videos, it’s slow as hell when you interact, but once the video is playing it still looks and sounds good


  • I think you’re looking at it the wrong way - triggering the flight or fight response won’t make you able to fight or flight by itself. You have to practice the responses or they’re useless - detrimental even, like a deer in the headlights

    Play is a way to exercise those instincts and practice responses, but in a safe way. We even creep into the danger zone a bit sometimes, but most people (and animals) keep the danger measured

    Fear isn’t pain - it’s not meant to be an absolute deterrent. It makes us think twice and go into fight or flight mode to handle a challenge - it doesn’t discourage behaviors, it moderates them. Sometimes you do have to face off a rival, or need to take a risk for a reward. It releases endorphins if we come out of it better off

    So it’s not weird that we are drawn to it - horror stories/movies/games trigger it artificially, but so does fighting each other or tests of courage


  • I don’t think it’s weird - we’re animals, mammals and hunters no less, and animals play. If we have unstimulated instincts and free time, we find ways to exercise them

    It’s kind of like the zoomies or play fighting, it’s just built into our design, for one reason or another

    Now, aliens might come here and be fascinated how Earth vertebrates can even function, assuming this isn’t a common thing. But I’m guessing our social behaviors will be more mind boggling





  • Trouble is, their main job is to game public perception

    A transparent, honest CEO would win a lot of people over (although they’d also probably be less likely to ignore the horrible decisions that require apologies)

    Just remember - generic PR apologies are an attempt at mimickingv leaders actually taking responsibility for a mistake. The transparency will just become as soulless and corporate as the apologies are now

    We need to fix the system to remove the incentive to put heartless demons in positions of power



  • The virtual boy was awesome. I literally thought it was a childhood hallucination for almost 2 decades…

    Imagine if they had more games for it, and kept improving the tech. Up through the Wii, Nintendo actually made some of the most amazing tech - the Wii accelerometers are what made quadcopters possible (outside of DARPA projects). The Nintendo back then could’ve made worthwhile VR before the iPad took the “I want to be on the Internet on the couch” niche





  • Going further, they’re like magic. They’re good at what takes up a lot of human time - researching unknown topics, acting as a sounding board, pumping out the fluff expected when communicating professionally.

    And they can do a lot more otherwise - they’ve opened so many doors for what software can do and how programmers work, but there’s a real learning curve in figuring out how to tie them into conventional systems. They can smooth over endless tedious tasks

    None of those things will make ten trillion dollars. It could add trillions in productivity, but it’s not going to make a trillion dollars for a company next year. It’ll be spread out everywhere across the economy, unless one company can license it to the rest of the world

    And that’s what FAANG and venture capitalists are demanding. They want something that’ll create a tech titan, and they want it next quarter

    So here we are, with this miracle tech in its infancy. Instead of building on what LLMs are good at and letting them enable humans, they’re being pitched as something that’d make ten trillion dollars - like a replacement for human workers

    And it sucks at that. So we have OpenAI closing it off and trying to track GPU usage and kill local AI (among other regulatory barriers to entry), we have Google and Microsoft making the current Internet suck so they’re needed, and we have the industry in a race to build pure llm solutions when independent developers are doing more with orders of magnitude less

    Welcome to the worst timeline, AI edition