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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • My assumption would be that he hoped he could at least become a martyr for the Russian people. It is one thing to be accused of crimes, and flee your country forever, it leaves space for Russians to think “well if he is an innocent man, why is he on the run? If he wishes to represent this country, how can he if he flees it?”. Maybe he hoped that by coming back and facing the ridiculous charges, it could at least give him some credibility with the citizens who would maybe see the absurdity of it all, and maybe spark some kind of political unrest. It obviously didn’t work, but in the face of the hopeless political situation in Russia, can you blame him for trying?



  • So your solution to the issue of mass shootings is that everyone should carry a gun on them at all times, and everyone should be ready to kill if necessary? And you don’t see the issue with that?

    I’m not saying you specifically should not carry or be ready to defend yourself, and I would be a fool to pretend that you shouldn’t be willing and able to defend yourself, especially with how things are now. But do you really want to live in a world where every citizen has to be ready and willing to kill his fellow man at the drop of a hat when things go to shit? Do you want your kids, grandkids, etc. to live in a world like that?

    The point isn’t that you shouldn’t be able to defend yourself. The point is that the fact that you need to is fucked up, and we shouldn’t accept it as the status quo.



  • Yeah man I know a lot of guys who drop money on shit like this. None of them are “whales”, but i know they’ve dropped hundreds if not thousands on this mtx bs. None of them own homes (which is kinda normal as we are in our 20’s), but only a few of them are even living on their own at all. Something is clearly going on psychologically there, if someone is willing to forego their own needs for cosmetics (that they will later replace with new cosmetics they bought!!)


  • Not everyone, but the vast majority of everyone, and even those who don’t want to buy would still probably be better off with owning instead of renting.

    “Going a few hundred grand in debt to buy a non-liquid asset” a house is probably the best asset you could buy for yourself, and also, do you think you’re saving money renting? Do you think a landlord is losing money on his mortgage? You’re covering the mortgage anyway, and then a premium for not having it in your name.



  • Sure, all religious groups in the area have had ties and claims to Jerusalem for Millenia, but the actual nation of Israel was founded in 1948.

    If you found a nation on a contested holy site and try to push all the other religious groups out, you will have a huge amount of radical and violent resistance, i’m not really going to support you either.

    If the situation was reversed, and the middle east was dominated by jews instead or muslims, and Israel was instead a (somewhat) recently-founded muslim nation surrounded by jewish ones, I wouldn’t feel too bad for the muslim nation that decided to set up shop there and make it your holy capital or something.

    Its awful, and the whole religious side of things makes this a never-ending war with no real “moral victor”, but its just hard for me to pretend I don’t see the ridiculousness in all of this. A radical militant group kills/kidnaps 2000 isrealis and the response is to kill 15,000+ palestinians with not just tacit approval but full-blown military support from the largest world powers. We are not even talking about “an eye for an eye making the whole world blind”, we’re talking about trading an eye for a whole human body.

    Should Israel have responded? Absolutely. I’m not going to say it should have even been a peaceful response. But what’s happening now is a clear over-correction, a clear attempt to both weaken the Palestinian state as a whole and the Palestinian people themselves. It will breed more violence, and you will inadvertently create groups more radical than hamas, who will point to this and say “they did not go far enough”. The Palestinian people need to reject hamas on their own, and this isn’t going to cause that.


  • Some guy gets his house burned down. Its terrible, so they find him a new home: its a room in your house. New roommate is intent on getting you to move out so he can take the whole house. He makes it clear that the two of you can never be equals, and that god wants him to have the house. It starts with petty psychological shit but its clear he’s trying to start a confrontation. You retaliate, he retaliates, it becomes a mess of you guys slinging shit. At the end of the day, you were minding your own business, who can blame you for defending yourself. You’ve both done awful shit but you were doing your own thing until this guy came along and declared himself owner of your house.

    Thats how I look at isreal/palestine. Hamas is awful. But when you oppress millions of people you can’t be that surprised when some of them become ruthless maniacs hellbent on getting out from under your rule. Just put yourself in Palestinian’s shoes and ask yourself if you’d be alright with it.

    Al Queda was terrible too, but we brought it upon ourselves invading the middle east. You can’t crush people under an iron fist and expect them to be cool with it.




  • Everyone with a dissenting viewpoint from your own is not some secret right-wing troll smuggling in the “wrong” viewpoints. You are not helping anyone with this mindset.

    I live in a pretty red area. I talk to a lot of people who have a lot of these right wing beliefs. Im not going to pretend these aren’t dogshit takes, they fucking suck. But like this guy is trying to tell you, these views and talking points are very prevalent. We can’t treat these people like right-wing sleeper cell trolls that just want to attack us, they are people who have been misled.

    I’ll give you an example. I was talking to someone who was a little upset we were sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. Is this a shit take? Yeah it is, but he didn’t have it because hes some russian fascist who wants to see putin recreate the USSR, he’s just living in the COL crisis like everyone else. When I pointed out it was a shit move to let ukraine burn and made him think about it, he changed his mind. Theres other shit we spend way more money on, like our military, and we should defend a country that is being annexed by another world power.

    He’s not a bad dude. He just hadn’t stopped to think about it. If i had just attacked him for it he would have just doubled down, because im being an asshole, and why would he adopt the assholes position? Thats how most people are. It sucks but it takes a lot of energy to really sift through all the bullshit, and surviving in todays world is stressful enough as it is for people. Its hard to look at the bigger picture when your smaller, immediate one is so turbulent.




  • Its a collectors game with nothing good to collect. This might seem like a silly take, and with 813 pokemon now in the game, it should be. But the way pokemon are laid out in this game is just horrendous.

    In the main series games, you LOOK for pokemon. You might just wander around the grass for a while and take what you get, but at some point, you have a shopping list. In order to find specific pokemon, you go to a specific location. You find the pokemon you are looking for, often with others similar in type.

    Well, in pokemon go, this isn’t the case at all. There are maybe 20-40 pokemon in the spawn pool at any given time. Go somewhere, ANYWHERE around you, and you are going to see more of the same. Once you have them, you wait for the next spawn rotation (sometimes thats 1 month, sometimes its 8) or events. The events are somewhere between 3 hours and 1 week long, and then you might actually have some cool shit, and the game is exciting for a bit. But after that, its back to the same old bullshit.

    Now the game is just about collecting shinies. This is really what niantic has tried to monetize. The (often only) way to get them is to either hatch eggs (buying incubators) or doing raids (buying raid passes). The other way to get them is by doing certain events where they hand them out like candy. I stopped a couple years ago when i had well over 300 shinies, because there just wasn’t a point anymore. The whole “cool collectible” factor came from them being rare, if everyone gets them in events, why is it special?


  • From the article, because it explained it much better than i was going to:

    The date, calculated by Global Footprint Network each year using National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts data, marks the point when humanity’s demand for biological resources exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate them within that year.

    So basically, lets say 1000 tons of coal is formed every year (this is not a real number, its a hilariously high overestimate), “Earth Overshoot Day” marks the day we actually use up that years resources. So if that day is Aug. 2nd, that means we already used the 1000 tons that would have formed that year, on that day.




  • Sure, AI is not doing anything creative, but neither is my pen, its the tool im using to be creative. Lets think about this more with some scenarios:

    Lets say software developer “A” comes along, and they’re pretty fucking smart. They sit down, read through all of Mark Twains novels, and over the course of the next 5 years, create a piece of software that generates works in Twain’s style. Its so good that people begin using it to write real books. It doesn’t copy anything specifically from Twain, it just mimics his writing style.

    We also have developer “B”. While Dev A is working on his project, Dev B is working on a very similar project, but with one difference: Dev B writes an LLM to read the books for him, and develop a writing style similar to Twain’s based off of that. The final product is more or less the same as Dev A’s product, but he saves himself the time of needing to read through every work on his own, he just reads a couple to get an idea of what the output might look like.

    Is the work from Dev A’s software legitimate? Why or why not?

    Is the work from Dev B’s software legitimate? Why or why not?

    Assume both of these developers own copies of the works they used as training data, what is honestly the difference here? This is what I am struggling with so much.


  • Sure, but what I’m asking is: what do you think is a reasonable rate?

    We are talking data sets that have millions of written works in them. If it costs hundreds or thousands per work, this venture almost doesn’t make sense anymore. If its $1 per work, or cents per work, then is it even worth it for each individual contributor to get $1 when it adds millions in operating costs?

    In my opinion, this needs to be handled a lot more carefully than what is being proposed. We are potentially going to make AI datasets wayyyy too expensive for anyone to use aside from the largest companies in the market, and even then this will cause huge delays to that progress.

    If AI is just blatantly copy and pasting what it read, then yes, I see that as a huge issue. But reading and learning from what it reads, no matter how rudimentary that “learning” may be, is much different than just copying works.


  • Okay, given that AI models need to look over hundreds of thousands if not millions of documents to get to a decent level of usefulness, how much should the author of each individual work get paid out?

    Even if we say we are going to pay out a measly dollar for every work it looks over, you’re immediately talking millions of dollars in operating costs. Doesn’t this just box out anyone who can’t afford to spend tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on AI development? Maybe good if you’ve always wanted big companies like Google and Microsoft to be the only ones able to develop these world-altering tools.

    Another issue, who decides which works are more valuable, or how? Is a Shel Silverstein book worth less than a Mark Twain novel because it contains less words? If I self publish a book, is it worth as much as Mark Twains? Sure his is more popular but maybe mine is longer and contains more content, whats my payout in this scenario?