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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • I get paying a decent wage but why ban tipping. Here in California there is no tipped wage difference and min wage is pretty high but I still tip whenever I get the chance because I earn a lot more than service workers and that $5 is worth more to them than me. I also appreciate that it goes directly to the workers instead of through the boss who will take god knows off the top. It should definitely not be required and discrete enough so that those who don’t can’t be shamed but banning it just hurts workers.


  • I think you misunderstand what apples value proposition is, at least nowadays. The app store and not being able to use other app stores is not a reason people get iPhones. Maybe back when app stores were first created and the threat of malware was greater people might have considered it but nowadays no one cares. Even the idea of a unified ecosystem isn’t as much a selling point any more because Google and Samsung offer similar seamless integrations with their accessories. You can see this in their marketing, they aren’t focused on how all the apple products work together easily any more. In their marketing you can see what they think their value proposition is, and what was their big Superbowl ad this year, longer battery life …

    Apple at this point knows it doesn’t have much of a value proposition for switching from android. So the only way they’re gonna sell new phones is to get the kids who don’t have a phone and convince the people who do have an iPhone to get a new one.

    They convince the kids through their tried and true aesthetics and lifestyle marketing, this is about half there marketing these days. This along with iMessage in the U.S. and the general fear of being in the out group and obsession with brands that younger people have moved them towards iPhones.

    They convince the current users with incremental upgrades, eg. Better battery life, better camera; and maintaining the walled garden and keeping exit costs high so they don’t turn to androids for those incremental updates.

    All this is to say that apple having a single app store isn’t a sign of consumer sentiment, but a sign of apples desire to milk as much profits out of their current users as they can. Other app stores can only benefit the consumers, either they do get them for lower fees or don’t because they put some value on the “ecosystem”. From a company’s perspective yes your right that they want to be able to do anything to their product they want, but the goal of regulation is to step in when the companies desires are at odds with the people or the consumers desire, this is one of those cases.


  • If anything this was worse under the old system. Making art previously costed a lot of money, you had to pay the artists for their time and money, and better artists cost more. So in the past that oil company could commission 100 top quality artists to make corporate propaganda while a person who cares for the environment but has no money could only make a drawing limited by their own personal technical artistic ability, which could be just stick figures.

    This is why “high quality” consumerist and capitalist “art” and branding in the form of advertising is so abundant meanwhile anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist art is rarer, no one’s paying to get it made.

    Now any cause, regardless of money, can create at least mid art to get there message across. Those causes can also have way more people behind them then an oil company can reasonably hire

    It’s sort of like how the gun changed how power worked. Previously a king could use there resources to pay for a smaller army of well equipped highly trained knights to subjugate a group of people. Then when the gun came training and equipment didn’t matter nearly as much and it became more of a numbers game, and to get those numbers rulers needed to give more power to the masses in order to be able to marshall them for their cause. Those rulers who didn’t got overthrown in revolutions.


  • Why would real meaning and messages be harder to find, does AI generated art inherently have less meaning?

    Let’s say I wanted to convey the message that oil companies are destroying the environment so , throwing subtlety out the window, come up with an idea of “a vampiric oil baron draining mother nature of oil”, does the picture that is generated from me putting that prompt into an AI generator have any less meaning then if I actually drew it myself?

    For all the advances in AI it still lacks intentionality, and always will under these current models, that has to be supplied by the person in the form of a prompt. I’d say that intention is the source of messages and meaning in art. AI just allows people without technical abilities in art to express those intentions, feelings and messages.







  • Israel is not even a good geopolitical partner in the Middle East. Nearly everyone hates them so whenever we do operations over there we keep them out because we know even their presence will increase tensions and lose hearts and minds. They’re good for spying on Iran but you have to take everything with a grain of salt because they could be lying in order to try and get us to be more confrontational because they despise Iran.

    The reasons the U.S. government overwhelmingly supports Israel is:

    • evangelicals think the Jews taking over Israel will cause the rapture, which they want…
    • Sheer inertia
    • the idea that Israel is “an island of liberal democracy” in a sea of authoritarian Arab states
    • Heavy lobbying from organizations like APEC, and if you don’t follow their line they’ll spend millions on you opponent’s campaign.
    • Military industrial complex loves sales to Israel
    • military industrial complex relies on technology and equipment from Israel
    • Islamaphobia and the idea that they’re fighting the good fight against the evil terrorists
    • residual guilt for the Holocaust and the west’s antisemitic past

  • I’m all for players getting payed and unionizing but I think getting rid of college sports would only hurt the players. Less people would watch them and therefore the players would get less money. A large part of the audience for college sports is students and alumni, if you take that away there’s not much reason for people to tune in or go up to Hanover New Hampshire to watch their basketball team play and buy merch, especially if they’re not a good team.

    It works in England because soccer’s the only big sport so you can make some money even if your a lower tier team.

    Not focusing on academics is a problem but if the option is to have to play in a minor league team, earn a middling to low income that’s going to basic neccesities, not make it to the big leagues and be left with no other career prospects or savings; or go to college, make a low income but be able to save it as room and board are covered, not make it to the big leagues but at least have the piece of paper that permits you to even think about having a decent life in this country, I’d go with the latter.



  • The electoral college doesn’t help small states, it helps swing states. Small rural states won’t matter in presidential elections with or without the electoral college because either way they won’t have many votes. The problem that makes the electoral college skew away from the popular vote, isn’t the slightly higher representation of small states, it’s that it incentives states to do winner take all for their votes because it makes politicians prioritize them. It makes more sense for a politician to try and flip 50,000 votes in Michigan and get all it’s 16 votes then try to flip half the population of a bunch of smaller more partisan states and still get less electoral votes. Hillary didn’t lose because she didn’t visit north Dakota, she lost because she didn’t go to Michigan.

    Also small states still have the Senate to protect their interests, and as Mitch McConnell has shown that chamber holds a lot of power.






  • computer scientists, neurologists, and philosophers can’t answer that either, or else we’d already have the algorithms we’d need to build human equivalent A.I.

    I think your mixing up sentience / consciousness with intelligence. What is consciousness doesn’t have a good answer right now and like you said philosophers, computer scientists and neurologist can’t come to a clear answer but most think llms aren’t conscious.

    Intelligence on the other hand does have more concrete definitions that at least computer scientists use that usually revolve around the ability to solve diverse problems and answer questions outside of the entities original training set / database. Yes doing an SAT test with the answer key isn’t intelligent because that’s in your “database” and is just a matter of copying over the answers. LLMs don’t do this though, it doesn’t do a lookup of past SAT questions it’s seen and answer it, it uses some process of “reasoning” to do it. If you gave an LLM an SAT question that was not in it’s original training set it would probably still answer it correctly.

    That isn’t to say that LLMs are the be all and end all of intelligence, there are different types of intelligence corresponding to the set of problems that intelligence is solving. A plant identification A.I. is intelligent for being able to identify various plants in different scenarios but it completely lacks any emotional, conversational intelligence, etc. The same can be said of a botanist who also may be able to identify plants but may lack some artistic intelligence to depict them. Intelligence comes in many forms.

    Different tests can measure different forms of intelligence. The SAT measures a couple like reasoning, rhetoric, scientific etc. The turing test measures conversational intelligence , and the article you showed doesn’t seem to show a quote from him saying that it doesn’t measure intelligence, but turing would probably agree it doesn’t measure some sort of general intelligence, just one facet.