Adalast

I'm going to enjoy making up new constellations every so many years and using them to mess with people who are into Astrology.

What gets me is part of Project 2025 is planning on reclassifying all of the workers in the exact agencies this affects with sycophants and yes-men. As I understand it, the entire idea of that move is that Trump and the GOP can bypass Congress and the courts and essentially rule however they want.

Doesn't this decision run counter to that? Instead of allowing the regulatory bodies that are going to be sycophantilized to just run shot over their domains, now the risk having a non-sympathetic judge or an unfavorable swing in voting in Congress?

I didn't read this article, so idk how they spun things, but given the title and the information you shared from the actual study, they sensationalized, not exaggerated. 5.31 is an 87% increase from 2.31, which is a rounding error off 2x. Honestly, in medical/psychological/anthropological/sociological studies the sigmas are never high enough for my comfort as a probabilist anyway.

Oh, I get that. I actually have a BS in Applied Mathematics and specialize in Statistics, Probability Theory, and Data Science professionally. I am well aware of how unstable thses numbers are, which is why I made the jab at the "soft sciences" and their acceptable sigma analysis points.

What I was more noting was the linguistic tic of OP saying that they 'exaggerated'. I freely admit that I did not actually read the article and do not know what the author did in it, but the click-bait title was accurate given the data shared. So what was done is to 'sensationalize' the results. If we are ever going to get better and teach society how to understand when statistics are being used to manipulate, we need to be sure to describe it in a way that people can recognize one manipulation from another.

I would see an example of manipulation through exaggeration being "cops kill more white people per year than black people". Yes, this is true, but it is inflating one piece of the statistics that ignores a lot of relevant factors, like the per capita rate, the proportion of stops and actions by police which result in violence, etc.

Sensationalizing is what we have here. Intentionally choosing words that fell the full picture of the statistic in a way which causes knee jerk reactions. There isn't anything left out per se, the time frame is described, the change in the statistic is mentioned, and a potential causal relationship is proffered. Would "The overturning of Roe has caused a statistically significant increase in the number of voluntary sterilizations among young US Citizens' haave been more genuine, yes. Is it catchy or emotional, no.

When cops only legal responsibility is to enforce the law, and the laws are written to protect corporate interests, of course they will stand outside the school and arrest protesters. SCOTUS has ruled that way so many times that "to serve and protect" is literally gaslighting.

Sooo... Everyone should go share these news stories for her en masse and be sure to tag the police department and judge personally in them, right?

Valve is one of those companies that I genuinely believe makes a strong argument for ethical capitalism being possible. Sure, they have some shitty things, but overall they do treat developers and customers reasonably well, they provide hardware and software that is easy to use and non-abusive (not filled with spyware and data harvesters, doesn't use advertising, is well maintained, etc.). If we could obliterate all of the other major conglomerates and replace them with people/companies that understand that you don't have to be a massive pile of shit to make money the world would be better off.

And in 5 years they are going to automate the entire thing providing precisely 0 jobs to the local economy.

I am getting really tired of these all these chucklefucks being in charge of things they patently do not understand. Modders are the modern lifeline of gaming. They work for free, fix your fuck-ups, and breath life into games that are years and sometimes decades old. Rimworld and Factorio both started their crowd funding campaigns in 2013, and both are wildly popular 11 years later, still selling copies. Factorio is just now coming out with their first expansion, and Rimworld just came out with their 4th. Neither Ludeon Studios (Rimworld) nor Wube Software (Factorio) have had ANY financial need to produce any other projects besides these games. Why are they so wildly profitable and evergreen? They both have rabid modding communities that have been supported and cultivated by the developers constantly fixing and expanding modding support to allow for an infinite variety of new content to be created for their games. Hell, the Vanilla Expanded team of Rimworld modders have actually turned it into a primary income source via Patreon.

AAA devs need to just sit down and thank these modders for tirelessly working on their games after release for free. Ever since DoTA became more popular than Warcraft 3, they all have their panties in a bunch and keep trying to claim ownership over all mods. No, bad developers smacks on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. God, it pisses me off to no end.

OpenAI team after including the data: why is the model suddenly even more horny, abusive, and discriminatory?

Hmmm... Show me a pregnant 1 year old and I will show you a little girl in desperate need of an abortion and a new home with people who actually will love her as one should a 1 year old.

Seriously, how fucking stupid do you need to be to actually utter something like this. I don't care if it is supposed rhetorical hyperbole, it just oozes with /r/NotHowGirlsWork energy.

They think corporations and for-profit organizations ever have their best interest at heart.

Steam Deck. Without question. I don't think I would have been able to cope with the last year and a half of my life without it. This year has been very rough and I have been able to escape life while still spending time with my family. Top-tier psychological maintenance for me.

God I love this movie. True irreverent humor that I don't want to know if people contained about. Nude breasts that perfectly fit the MPAA PG nudity guidelines of "brief and non-sexual". So many quotable one-liners. The sight gags were on point and perfectly timed. I WISH movies like this could be made. Scary Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, and all the other parody movies are great, but do not hold a candle to the Airplane! movies.

So goodbye custom-built accessibility controllers? Little Timmy, who was born with no arms and loves video games but has to play with his feet on a custom controller, is going to be told "Git good stumpy"?

Ok, the Amazon thing pissed me off. I realized that the drivers are illegally being classified as 1099 contractors. 1099 contractors are not allowed to have required schedules, not allowed to have mandatory meetings, and are required to have specific goals/periods/responsibilities in a contract with a definite term. Why the fuck isn't the NLRB/DoL/IRS dropping the hammer on them for their illegal employment practices. They are skirting paying employment tax, they are abusing employees, they are skirting full-time benefit requirements. Fuck. Can someone with power please start cracking down on the abuse of 1099 tax codes.

Honestly, we won't likely see cheap energy in our lifetimes. A fusion powerplant could come online that is able to power the entire eastern seaboard of the US with some leftover for millionths of a cent per kW and we would still be getting charged just as much if not more for it. The general populace will never see the benefits of nearly infinite, nearly free power because the company that owns it will just see it as a higher profit margin. Sure, they may underbid fossil fuels or other renewables by just enough that they can't operate, but it will still be orders of magnitude more than we should be charged. The only way the population sees the benefit is if the reactor is publicly owned and the government is prevented from converting it over to privatization because that has ever gone well for us.

I remember a story about a CEO who decided to pay ALL of his employees well. As I remember, all of his middle management left in a huff because they no longer had their higher earnings to hold over their subordinates and feel superior, all of his friends ostracized him and he essentially became a pariah.

Yeah, Dan Price, just went to look it up. Apparently, he had to resign after some allegations against him, which turned out to be false. Something smells off about a man paying employees fairly suddenly getting trumped-up charges that never got properly investigated before being referred to the prosecutor's office literally the day after he announces the pay stuff.

https://fortune.com/2023/04/19/gravity-payments-dan-price-assault-charges-are-dropped/

I remember Microsoft saying that Windows 10 would be the last version they would ever release and everything moving forward would just be iteration and improvement. Knew that was a lie immediately.

I fucking called it. Seriously, I have a comment on here from the day after the vote complaining about how the bill was still open to being edited after we voted on it and I called the they would remove the home growing part.

Gotta love this shit. Conservatives/companies: "Let the market decide!" The market: "We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it." Companies: "Waaaaaa, they are fighting us."

Headline in a reality literate world: "Remote employees 'don't work as hard' says obscenely biased and out of touch person with a vested interest in the abolishment of remote work."

A. If you haven't played ΔV, do it. One of the most amazing games out there imho. So good in fact that I just went to find a Δ on the internet so I could use it and not disrespect the dev and the game. B. He is such an amazing dude. I don't know him personally, but I do know that when Ukraine was invaded he made the game free for months on Steam so people in Ukraine could get it and have something too distract themselves from the conflict. A+ move in my book right there. I had already bought the game at that point, but I wish I could buy it again just to support him further. C. Reading this almost makes me think it would be a good tactical move to offer early access games at a steep discount on Linux if it has this great of an effect. Pay back the "free" QA kindness of the community.

Just looked at that company's website. Gotta love the frigid mentality that causes them to refer to people's home and shelter as a "business" and talk about "minimizing costs" like it is making fucking dog collars.

If anyone knows how to get in touch with Anonymous, please suggest that they obliterate this dystopian nightmare from the face of the internet.

No, you do need milk. Don't let the capitalist propaganda engine tell you that comfort and contentment are not necessary for life. To even insinuate that having milk to put on cereal or in tea is some sort of luxury or indulgence that you should be able to cut out is lunacy. Human beings need comfort as much as we need socialization for emotional and mental maintenance. We need fun and enjoyment. That is why even in modern hunter-gatherer tribes the workload is less than half of ours and they all have full bellies and spend the rest of their time pursuing leisure activities and spending time with their family/community.

(not accusing the person you are replying to, they are a victim too)

They certainly know something about swinging.

I literally cannot answer this without seeming like a pretentious, arrogant ass. Anyway, quantum field theory, high energy physics, condensed matter physics, generative art, computing algorithms, arcane math theories (meaning difficult to understand, not magical), procedural art, simulations, awesome places to visit in the world, Factorio, the channels I watch on YouTube. Honestly, I don't have anyone around me who cares about or understands most of my hobbies. They all love me and care for me, just not the stuff I like.

Only if you ignore WHY it has the ability to do that. The reason is the hydroelectric power plant, or more specifically the construction of the plant, required that they divert the falls for a couple years a LONG time ago. They have maintained the capacity to divert the flow of the river to ensure that they are able to perform maintenance on the plant and the various national park infrastructures around the falls. The seasonal diversions are usually to perform said maintenance as well as to protect parts of the power plant from freezing. It is actually one of the great engineering marvals of the early 20th century.

So what I'm seeing is to find any way I can to short the auto lenders so when they declare bankruptcy I can finally be able to afford a car?

Ok, the mask if you are actually rested and not just "feeling rested". Being hit with the physical effects of sleep deprivation and having organs start failing after a couple weeks would be a real problem.

Otherwise, that damn penny. Knowing that I have 12 hours of "I win" without any real limitation, even if it ends up being 12 hrs/month, would be obscenely broken. None of the other artifacts even come close. I make sure I always flip on a Monday at about 8am, if it's heads, I apply for jobs I want and trade some stocks until about 1 pm, then go for a walk and see what goodness I can fall into for my life. Head home around 6pm with 2 hours of perfect luck left which I spend working on the cure for Autoimmune diseases and Cancer. Once I have enough wealth built up and have found plenty of cures to Salk the hell our of to piss off the pharma companies, I start working on Nuclear Fusion. Continue this pattern until I get bored.

There was actually an opening to an episode of American Gods that has that exact scenario. He literally walks across the Rio Grande and after he gets to shore a bunch of hilbillies with religious iconography alongside their confederate flags roll up in their lifted trucks and shoot him with a fully automatic weapon.

In fairness, last time this was tried we had Husky Musky employing a fraud with the explicit intent of killing the high-speed rail. Toss on a host of republican opposition and undermining in 2013± and you have the reason why it failed. It has nothing to do with the rail companies. It has everything you do with political dysfunction and not wanting to "let liberals win".

As far as I'm concerned the inclusion of the "anti-DoTA" clause in their EULA murdered it for me. I was so excited. KSP is one of my favorite games of all times, largely as a result of the vibrant and very technically advanced modding community. Same goes for essentially all of my favorites; Rimworld, Backpack Hero, Factorio. The free labor that expands the games in major ways extends the value of my money and let's me have fun forever in them.

Putting in a clause in a EULA which automatically and irrevocably assumes all ownership and rights to any code or assets that are created for a game is just too far. Assuming rights at all is a huge issue for me, but I can accept that it is beneficial to assume royalty free licenses to the mods, I'll even begrudgingly accept clauses that allow developers to gaffle features and optimizations from mods without giving remuneration or even acknowledgment. But wholesale ownership that revokes all rights and licenses for the independent 3rd party creator. Fuck that. I will never support a game that I find out is treating the people who keep games alive and relevant for decades for free like that.

For me, my Steam Deck. I have been having a lot of mental health issues and it allows me to have an outlet for anxiety and stress while still spending time with my family. I use is most days and have enjoyed a good chunk of my extensive Steam catalog to boot. Honestly, the most bang for my buck I have ever gotten.

I have no idea who down voted you, but here, have it back.

In my experience talking with school officials and reading between the lines of BS that get fed out by them, you get to take your pick because all are true.

• sports are more valuable than the mental and physical health of all of the students. Boosters bring in fat stacks for the school and scholarships bring prestige and clout when it comes time to justify government spending.
• so the teens can get out of school early enough to be exploited for free childcare by parents.
• so they can be pushed into the labor force after school.

Really all of them are actual reasons that they start so early despite overwhelming research that starting later in the morning would lead to better academic outcomes and better long-term information retention.

Schools in the USA are not about education. They are conditioning centers to "prepare" kids for abusive expectations in post graduation employment.

Even better - Conservatives: show me your personal medical records, I need to know if you are doing something I want to be illegal.

Also conservatives: what do you mean you want to check my mental health background before I can purchase a gun? Outrageous.

The whole LGBT stuff is such bullshit since it should 100% easily fall under first amendment expression it is retarded that they have not been trounced are every turn.

Being someone with a foot in both worlds gives me a slightly robust viewpoint on this topic, so I try to chime in whenever I see this argument pop up. For reference, I have an MA in Visual Effects and a BS in Applied Mathematics, and work closely with artists and technologists in my job. I say this to support my credibility.

1. You are absolutely correct in who we should be mad at. Not the AI developers, many of whom are just trying to explore what is possible and make something cool, but the megacorps who are profiteering from the invention. All of the companies that are pushing AI as another SaaS and the ones who are trying to use it to replace artists instead of augment them. 1a. The other two specific groups we should be getting the torches and pitchforks for are the politicians who put so much legislation through that they circumvent our legal right to negotiate contracts we have to sign (EULAs in this case) and the companies and individuals who take advantage of our impotence to negotiate by placing abusive and abhorrent IP rights clauses in the contracts. To be 100% clear, when Deviant Art was scraped, nothing was stolen from the artists. They had all signed away the rights to their artwork when they uploaded it. The material was stolen from or provided by DA. They owned the rights, they owned the art, they were the ones who were ripped off.
2. "Ill-gotten gains" is a little strong of a terminology. At worst, it was dubiously obtained. The training of an AI is not that dissimilar to an artist looking at art they like and trying to recreate it to learn from the other artist, then attempting to make original pieces with what they learned. The only difference is scale. If you ask a practiced artist to recreate Water Lilies, if they have studied it and practiced Monet's style, they would be able to recreate it with varying degrees of success. AI training is entirely destructive to the input material, nothing of the actual original survives, just an abstracted mathematical representation.
3. You are so close to right on what the rights of artists should be. It should definitely be opt-in, not out. When posting anything online, the displaying company should only be provided a license to display the material, not ownership or non/exclusive transfer of any rights. Any and all uses of submitted materials should need to be expressly and explicitly requested from the content owner without exception. The fact that Disney can sue an elementary school for self-writing and self-producing a Frozen musical for the kids but I cannot tell Facebook that they cannot use the artwork I post to a group in their advertising is asinine. If they want to use my art, they should be using their wonderful chat system to send me a message and asking me to sign a consent form to license the art.

All in all, I advise to avoid blaming the AI engineers (most of whom are altruistic in their motives) and the users (most of whom just want to have fun and play) and focus on the politicians and profiteers. They are the real villains in the story, and also the ones who seem to manage to stay under the radar.

No shit, all you had to do is look at the litany of patents for ways to bully and punish people who miss payments that the car manufacturers have been filing and you could have figured out that people were struggling to pay.