Even for that, 4 legs like the robot dogs is easier/more stable. Plus purpose built robots that don’t need to move are generally cheaper and make more sense, like a dishwasher.

and ten 500 bucks purpose built robots are cheaper than one 20-50k humanoid robot that does tasks slowly and needs a human remote operator for most of them

Denmark and Norway. Not sure what he wants with the Netherlands, though.

Venta LW45 humidifier. easy to clean, uses like 8W/hour (compared to ~40 for ultrasonic or 300 for electric heating ones), quiet, goes through a 9l tank per day easily. And has almost no part that could break i.e. i could replace whatever could break easily.

but the price is insane for what amounts to a bucket with a fan

I wanted to punch someone when i realized my Bosch drill and Bosch electric saw use different batteries. They’re identical in size, but the plug part on one is a mirror image of the other and so not interchangeable

In a way, LLMs have already taken my job as a software engineer. It’s not that they can do my job better than me. But they suck all the joy out of the field, they expose the almost religious culture around efficiency and velocity in the field (no, i don’t want to be 5% faster to make the boss richer and feel miserable doing it) and how little my peers care about craft and quality. Also why do those fucks have to lap up every new technofacist oligarchy thing with such enthusiasm, it pisses me off.

so it’s not that it does my job, but that it showed me how much i disdain this field now.

I’m thinking of switching to something (cnc) machining/cad related, both skills i taught myself and love , but i don’t know what kind of position could be suitable given my dev knowledge and lack of formal training. Plus i wouldn’t want to do the operator kind of work where all you do is put stock in the cnc machine and execute someone elses CAM, that seems too close to using LLMs in spirit. I do want and like creative work and tinkering.

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and I’m lucky enough to work for a university, so good work life balance, job security, pension, mostly meaningful work. Ironically enough in the AI field… But that makes considering to switch even harder. I could easily and comfortably coast along and feel discontent for many years to come.

I think we’re more civilized nowadays. I’d be content with reintroducing the pillory. Especially the ‘In addition to being jeered and mocked, the criminal might be pelted with rotten food, mud, offal, dead animals, and animal excrement’ part.

Seriously though, hanging seems too quick/easy and I’m pretty sure public humiliation is a worse punishment for self important narcissistic fucks.

That’s true of most of the tech bros, though. They’re all losers that haven’t built anything themselves and that have been successful despite themselves, not because of themselves, just because they have money and fail upwards

Either the one from the Robot and Monk series (psalm for the wild built by Becky Chambers) or the Culture series.

I think they also need to come up with a better term than ‘western countries’, to something that does not include the US but is open to include others. ‘Countries that try to not be complete asshats’? Idk, the bar is in hell. But there are quite a few non-western countries that could fit the bill if it weren’t for US fuckery.

oh, definitely, and I’m not saying that they’re doing good or anything like that. I mean, the profits for investments have to come out of someone pockets. I’m just saying it’s a bit like having a parasite where removal might kill the host if not done carefully, not a free lunch where you just tax them and everyone lived happily ever after. They had a long time to embed themselves in all kinds of systems, and them not paying taxes is kinda built into the expectations of those systems.

yes, though to be fair, it’s not like this is just sitting in their bank account doing nothing. It’s mostly invested somewhere doing stuff to make them richer. So if they were taxed at a fair rate, idk, 90% or so, that would mean less investment, which in turn does help companies grow and pay salaries, R&D etc. They don’t send a trillion to a scrooge mcduck bunker on the cayman islands, they create shell companies there that own their stock etc. for them. They could not pay this tax since they just wouldn’t have the cash to pay x% of 3.5T. Which would either force them to sell stock to pay tax, potentially tanking the stocks value, or pay the tax directly in stock, making their holdings more government owned over time.

As a socialist, I’m fine with either tbh. just saying this is not cash floating around that can just be spent to tackle humanities problems, if only it was just taxed properly.

Why drop the ‘to break racial ceiling’ part from the title?

Definitely, this summer is bicycle summer!

I really hope he likes it more than the kayak, as soon as I’d get close to the shore, he’d jump out and swim to shore.

Measuring my dog to get an appropriate size dog trailer for the bicycle.

As a one size fits all kinda thing: sourdough bread, that takes me like 24 hours from start to finish, with incubating over night in the fridge.

Other than that, it depends. We already cook good for ourselves regularly, no need to wait for there to be guests. So we cook just regular food, whatever we think our guests might enjoy.

I wouldn’t fully agree with that. There is some of that, but then also there’s very little historical record of poor people. Up until like 1850ish, only rich people could really read/write, and their books and correspondence is what a lot of historical research is based on. And the rich people themselves didn’t write about the filthy poors a lot. And there are historians that would very much like to study this topic, l but it’s exceedingly difficult for lack of resources.

Now that said, there is quite a bit of bias still. Not just toward poor “unimportant” people, also towards women. E.g. Milan was ruled by the Visconti family, which was a powerful name back then. The last Visconti ruler died, leaving his son in law in power. He’s called “Francesco I Sforza” in most history books, even though Sforza was kind of a minor name back then, and he himself would sign letters with the Visconti last name of his wife, Bianca Maria Visconti. And even his sons (and I think Grandsons) would still use the Visconti name. But because 18th and 19th century historians thought it’s no good to refer to a man by the last name of his wife, and that the wife must have been unimportant anyways, this was the new Sforza reign, not the continued Visconti reign. But we have letters of her managing the whole city while he was off, of her disagreeing with him quite strongly and openly in letters, leading everything when her husband was ill, dealing with diplomacy and military affairs etc. So in a lot of ways they were reigning together, not one single strong man doing everything.

There is a growing group of historians that do study these kinds of things and it is slowly shifting. And I don’t doubt that this also happens in regards to poor people, just less so due to lack of available sources. But of course there’s also institutional pushback, nationalistic infighting, funding being assigned based on biases etc. it’s not all rosy.

And I’m no historian, so this in large part based on the “inventing the Renaissance” book by Ada Palmer(History professor at Uni Chicago and also a really good scifi writer). It’s an amazing read, not just about the period, the different power dynamics and personalities, stuff like homosexuality and atheism in the period etc., but in large part also on how historians work, how perceptions among historians changed through the ages, how some misconceptions (like “women aren’t important”) persisted for centuries. It’s without a doubt the best history book I read in a long time and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I’ve just finished reading a very detailed book on 13-16 century renaissance history and yes, always fucked. Though less dark ages than you’d think and more fucked politics, same as now.

Plus we only really know the history of rich people up until very recently, so no telling how fucked the poors were.

Yes, i hate this in these kinds of discussions. It so often devolves into how you’ll be safe from surveillance by world governments (spoiler: you won’t be, if they really care).

And here I am, just not wanting to hand data over to giant corporations that have been proven to use it for no good.

Heck, even if there was no good actor/solution, not giving all your data to the same bad actor is already a step up.

It can be done but doesn’t work that well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rliFQ0qyAM

Actually anyone can post using the API, and many people did. Lots of the heavily publicized posts were written by humans