To avoid our company, don’t buy our product?

To avoid all AI, well first you’re going to have to degoogle. And then probably any tech company larger than 1000 people is going to have some place where they use AI, so you’ll want to get on openstreetmap, Lemmy, mastodon, i.e. all the free software versions of things that you can. There’s a lot of overlap with privacy-focused people there. Also basically no shopping online - Stripe and probably most other payment providers use ML for detecting fraud.

And then if you’re doing web development you probably have to consider things like scrapers. Something like Anubis https://anubis.techaro.lol/ can help with that.

There’s probably more I don’t know/haven’t thought of.

I am building it! Or, well, not it anymore but a product that is heavily based on it.

I think we as a company recognize that the, like, 95% of AI products right now are shit. And that the default path from now is that power continues to concentrate at the large labs like OpenAI, which haven’t been behaving particularly well.

But we also believe that there are good ways to use it. We hope to build one.

The thing your boss is asking you to do is shitty. However, TBQH humanity doesn’t really know what LLMs are useful for yet. It’s going to be a long process to find that out, and trying it in places where it isn’t helpful is part of that.

Lastly, even if LLMs don’t turn out to be useful for real work, there is something interesting and worth exploring there. Look at researcher/writers like Nostalgebrist and Janus - they’re exploring what LLMs are like as beings. Not that they’re conscious, but rather that there’s interesting and complex things going on in there that we don’t understand yet. The overarching feeling in my workplace is that we’re in a frontier time, where clever thinking and exploration will be rewarded.

Disclaimer: I have a dream job for me and my experience is probably not representative.

Go on open.kattis.com, pick a problem, solve it. That’s what 40% of my job is like. 20% more is reading through and understanding where the right place for this bit of code to live or what bits of code I should be reusing to make it. Another 20% is discussing with other engineers the tradeoffs of solving a problem with x vs y and picking what to do, and the last 20% is reviewing code, i.e. making sure other people solve their problems correctly and don’t drop a bunch of hack in our tree.

1. Dollar is fucked, national currency is Bitcoin now. Hope you bought some.

2. You all have fought over gender too much, I’m taking it away. They/them for everyone. Using gendered pronouns is a minor offense, but can be considered harassment and/or incitement. All sports leagues are now coed. Bathrooms only have private stalls.

3. If anyone your business employs can demonstrate that they are below the poverty line, it’s getting nationalized. No, you don’t get to know the number before the fed publishes it each quarter.

4. Climate is fucked, and it’s significantly our fault. Gas is now taxed at 2,000%. Meats and well, everything really, is going to be heavily taxed according to carbon footprint. And that will go up until we reach our target net emissions, zero.

5. All elected public officials are executed at the end of their terms.

I will not be reelected, and I will not be taking any questions.

And my toes too, just to be sure

2.5M sounds ok to me. Even 10M would get the 99.9% of the benefit. The important part is that it’s capped.

How much do you blame Germans? As in the ones from 1940s?

We might not have started killing people yet but the signs are here, for anyone who cares to know their history. We had a Nazi salute at the inauguration for Christ sake.

Yeah. It’s shocking that your friends and neighbors are party to this. It was to many Germans too.

Play around with this for a bit: https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=50000&initialBalance=0&expenses=20000&annualPct=5&withdrawalRate=4

Consider spending 30k yearly when you’re earning 50k. You can retire in about 20 years if you keep to that. You really gotta keep to it though, spending 40k means you’d have to work almost 40 years instead.

Now compare that to spending 30k when making 100k. Now you can retire in 9 years. Even if you have to spend literally twice as much time+effort doing so, you end up with more of your life leftover.

This is not to say that you should take a job you hate, but rather to say that making more money does make your life better, but only up to a point. If you find a job that you genuinely enjoy, great do that. If you’re picking between different things you dislike, translate it back into years instead of trying to understand it in made up funny money numbers. And when you get there, stop.

Have you ever heard of a drop bear?

Wicked smaht. And generally good genes - no family illnesses or anything.

Elvis

So a commune?

For people organizing protests and taking part in them, Maybe to Likely.

For people just posting things online, Very unlikely. They’ll have their hands full with all the immigrants and protesters first, and there’s far too many people who have said something leftist online.

Mostly, they don’t

1. Get a flip phone or a phone that isn’t absurdly large.
2. Wear pants that fit. You might need elastic if you’re literally running.
3. Back pocket. 4 ???
4. Profit

Zork zork zork zork zork zork

Where this isn’t true, it’s extremely effective propaganda

Kangaroos don’t exist

Takkyubin.

If you have a large suitcase or other parcel it may be unwieldy to walk around Tokyo or another city with it. Subways only allow one suitcase of a certain size, so you might have to take a much more expensive taxi.

Instead you can go to a desk at the airport and have your luggage delivered same day or next day to ~any hotel, subway station, or convenience store. It will be insured and kept safe for you there to pick up. And at the end of your trip, you can send it back. The price for this convenience? Around $10.

This is not only a good demonstration of Japanese trust and customer service, it’s also a legitimately hard logistics problem. I daresay that such a business could not succeed in the US both because of our defensiveness and sprawling cities.

I don’t eat lunch