• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Sure, but she’s also his mother, not a random family member. I’m not going to fault a mother for standing by their child, no matter what he did.

    She didn’t let him buy anything, but she couldn’t make him get rid of it because it wasn’t in her house. It was locked up at a friend’s house in a different town.

    She was also ill, poor, dyslexic, and a single parent dealing with a difficult child. She doesn’t seem to have much in her life but her children, I’m not going to condemn her for not banishing him from her life. It’s not an easy thing for a mother to do.






  • It’s a good read, but as with absolutely any discussion around high school on platforms like this, it heavily shaded with the cynicism of the adult that looks back on their high school days bitterly and thinks little of the teenagers who don’t hate it as much as they did/do.

    The whole comment is based on the assumption there’s some kind of FOMO-esc pressure to make prom incredible, where kids feel like they “must” go big or they’ll miss out.

    But it sidesteps the simpler explanation: maybe some teenagers just genuinely enjoy making prom a blowout. Going big has been part of the tradition for a long time, and maybe it’s not pressure those teens are feeling, but simply excitement.

    The basic notion of prom is that it is the night to go big. It is the last high school dance. It seems incredibly reductive to assume teenagers would not look forward to making it a special occasion if it weren’t for outside pressure.


  • I mean, important? Not especially, no. But will never see again? I’d argue that’s true. The whole idea with prom is that it’s meant to be like the last big school event before graduation. Yeah, at some point in their adult lives they’ll get over dressed to dance badly, but this is the last time to do it and teenagers, with other teenagers.

    Will they grow up wrong if they miss it, or if it isn’t the biggest, most likely expensive prom ever? No, of course not.

    But what does it actually hurt?

    Feels like the tradition isn’t just prom but also to make prom a big deal. And frankly, why not? Let the kids dress up and have fun. They will grow up, but it doesn’t have to be tonight.

    Also curious where you have a prom coming up in late June?


  • I’ve seen people defend using AI this way by comparing it to using a calculator in a math class, i.e. if the technology knows it, I don’t need to.

    And I feel like, for the kind of people whose grasp of technology, knowledge, and education are so juvenile that they would believe such a thing, AI isn’t making them dumber. They were already dumb. What the AI does is make code they don’t understand more accessible, which is to say, it’s just enabling dumb people to be more dangerous while instilling them with an unearned confidence that only compounds the danger.



  • So it’s helpful for saving time typing some stuff

    Legitimately, this is the only use I found for it. If I need something extremely simple, and feeling too lazy to type it all out, it’ll do the bulk of it, and then I just go through and edit out all little mistakes.

    And what gets me is that anytime I read all of the AI wank about how people are using these things, it kind of just feels like they’re leaving out the part where they have to edit the output too.

    At the end of the day, we’ve had this technology for a while, it’s just been in the form of predictive suggestions on a keyboard app or code editor. You still had to steer in the right direction. Now it’s just smart enough to make it from start to finish without going off a cliff, but you still have to go back and fix it, the same way you had to steer it before.


  • Another friend of mine was reviewing software intended for emergency services, and the salespeople were not expecting someone handling purchasing in emergency services to be a hardcore programmer. It was this false sense of security that led them to accidentally reveal that the service was ultimately just some dude in India. Listen, I would just be some random dude in India if I swapped places with some of my cousins, so I’m going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you’re an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

    This aspect of it isn’t getting talked about enough. These companies are presenting these things as fully-formed AI, while completely neglecting the people behind the scenes constantly cleaning it up so it doesn’t devolve into chaos. All of the shortcomings and failures of this technology are being masked by the fact that there’s actual people working round the clock pruning and curating it.

    You know, humans, with actual human intelligence, without which these miraculous “artificial intelligence” tools would not work as they seem to.

    If the "AI’ needs a human support team to keep it “intelligent”, it’s less AI and more a really fancy kind of puppet.





  • Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What’s happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.

    YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube’s losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.

    But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.

    And this is what it looks like.

    As for risking competition, at this point, I don’t think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.

    I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There’s a long-term strategy here to nuke ad blocking permanently. That’s what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back with a new name.