It’s not just exposure to political content that makes it not fun to live in America. It’s the never ending mountain of shit you deal with on a daily basis simply because you’re an American.

it doesn’t look like fun anymore.

It hasn’t really been fun to live in this country in nearly a decade, and that’s me speaking as someone sitting on the top of the privilege pile.

The country is basically 6 corporations dressed in a trench coat.

LLMs that can spot tumors better than humans can

Are they though? LLMs specifically? Seems like a very strange use case for an LLM.

But yeah we’re mostly in accordance, I wanted to riff a little bit because as a long-time tech worker I actually do have some bones to pick with the tech itself. The in-exactitude of its output and the “let the prompter beware” approach to dealing with its obvious inadequacies pisses me off and it seems like the perfect product for the current “test in production” “MVP (minimally viable product)” “pre-order the incomplete version” state software is in generally. The marketing and finance assholes are nearly fully running the show at this point and it’s evident.

I think the usefulness of this particular technology (LLMs) is very overblown and I found its very early usages more harmful than helpful (i.e. autocorrect/autocomplete is wrong for me more often than it is right). It has decent applicability in some areas (machine translation for instance is pretty good), but the marketing department got hold of it and so now everything is AI this and AI that.

I think it’s basically just another over-hyped technology that will eventually shake out to be used only where it is useful enough to justify its cost. If the company has to show profits at any point it is either going to go the surveillance capitalism ad route, or it’ll have to increasingly charge more per query than the gibberish it generates is really worth. I don’t see most people paying for ChatGPT long-term so they’ll probably have to enshittify further beyond their current (already kind of shitty) state.

Cuz the video in question is as biased as fox news. Just into the opposite direction.

The video in this post is from a comedy show on comedy network.

It ads nothing to the political debate

As you continually do here with your “this adds nothing” and “this wastes electricity” posts.

If you don’t like the video or the show, here’s an idea: don’t watch it. You don’t live here so it isn’t even really for you, and you don’t seem to enjoy it much from your pissy moany comments.

Some of us have to live in this country where people make the absurd arguments refuted in the video about Trump, and some of us like to kick back with our feet up and blow off steam with a little mild humor about the absurdity of the political situation in this country.

Ultimately, the structure of the modern corporation was allowed to take on a lot more complexity due to the advent of computers. So, we have fewer roles where people do full-time work managing inboxes or whatever (though not zero, because that is essentially what my wife still does for work), but more roles have an “inbox management” or other secretarial component to them now.

In practically every job, it became the case that you’re also a part-time secretary. Assistants became mainly a luxury reserved for fat cats, and the rest of us plebs are buried in emails.

The issue people have with AI isn’t the tech.

I have multiple issues with the tech:

1. It’s based upon a giant theft and mass violation of copyright laws as well as the licenses of lots of open source software.

2. It’s ClippyGPT and much of the output is either hallucinations or trite non-sense that sounds like it was cooked up in the most bureaucratic weak-willed corporate boardroom.

3. Its massive energy footprint to inefficiently solve math equations (for instance) is completely and thoroughly ridiculous.

4. I don’t want to type bullshit into a chat bot in order to look something up…this is a step below even the absurd modern substitute for documentation of “go watch this 2 hour YouTube video on my development framework”.

5. “Miniature model” and “fine-tuned model” results could have been much more easily achieved by just having functional site / domain search engines.

Further about the last point, I feel like the open source part of the industry chased Google until it got to Lucene and then decided that an open source altavista was completely fine and dandy and stopped pursuing the goal of making their own search engines functional. So people had to continue to use Google until now and when Google has enshittified into a crappy, worse AI model for search now all we have left are chat bots that are maybe slightly better than altavista, but frequently spout out inaccurate information that they guess would exist.

It would depend upon the type of business. Modern office buildings filled with “information workers” weren’t a thing 50 years ago so it is kind of difficult to compare.

I can feel this science in my bones.

Dude, secretaries and assistants still exist.

The future portion of this list reads like something produced from ChatGPT.

Dude looks and sounds like a reanimated corpse.

why wouldn’t companies have a failsafe for their equipment being used against them

Because they got tired of paying for the whiny engineers that would have to implement the failsafe and so they fired them all.

Brave Sir Trump ran away,

Bravely ran away, away.

When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.

Yes, brave Sir Trump turned about

And gallantly, he chickened out. Bravely taking to his feet,

He beat a very brave retreat,

Bravest of the brave, Sir Trump.

I think it’s a good barometer when trying a new Chinese restaurant. Like if they fuck up on orange chicken they’re probably terrible in general. I do the same thing with Tikka Masala at an Indian place I’m trying for the first time.

Sure, “no man sets foot in the same river twice”, but that does nothing to argue against the preservation of cultural items.

Take music, for instance. I never feel the same way the second time listening to a song as I did the first time, but that doesn’t make the music less special or change anything about it at all, and it certainly does nothing to advance a hypothetical argument that music shouldn’t be recorded or that the recordings of it shouldn’t be preserved for future enjoyment or different audiences.

Yeah I’m not sure for everyone but it solved my problems with the phone being too big to fit in my pockets. It even works in like pajama pants for when I’m walking the dog. Before, the phone tended to be too long and flop out.

You might feel like it’s “everyone”, because you never hear anything the other side has to say.

Au contraire mon frere. I would posit that nobody that gives even a single iota of a shit about politics in this country hasn’t been exposed to what “the other side has to say”. I’d also venture to guess that the number of people who don’t give a single iota of shit about politics in this country that have also heard what “the other side has to say” is far above zero. There have even been studies (since you occasionally pretend to give a fuck about objectivity) confirming that Republicans who watch Fox News know less about Democrats than Democrats know about Republicans.

It’s kind of difficult to not “hear what the other side has to say” when half of your news media spends its time interviewing people on both sides of divisive issues such as “the vaccine question” or “is the earth round”, and the other half of your news media openly roots for and argues for Republican candidates.

I don’t think your message is ever received by anyone who disagrees. My question is what’s the point? This is a waste of electricity.

And you go down the thread posting shit like this. That’s also a waste of electricity. I guess humans are just wasteful. 🤷

Now, tell me, if I’m an outsider with no horse in this race, and no way of objectively measuring the reality by living in the country of question, what should I think?

“Living in the country of question” is not necessary for an objective measurement of reality.