andallthat

@andallthat@lemmy.world
1 Post – 120 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Russia and Ukraine are two countries that have thrown everything they had at each other: from good soldiers, to inmates, to good people who'd probably never held a weapon before.

At this point I imagine that having troops who are alive and actual trained soldiers, not emotionally and physically drained (if not outright mutilated) by years of fighting is a big advantage

If I was taken from my home and suddenly sent to fight for my country, no matter how full of patriotic love I might be, one North Korean child with a knife would be enough to take me out.

I think I'm with him on this one. Replacing all the people on social with AI agents would give us back so much free time! And we could even restart socializing for real.

Go on Zuckerberg, give us a Facebook made only of AI agents creating fake pictures of inexistent gatherings and posting them, so other AIs can recommend them and million of other AIs can comment on them!

You are an unsung hero, Zuckerberg, but one day they'll understand and thank you

The Moon, unprovoked, collided with the Russian vessel that was approaching amicably. An old, whitened but still recognizable USA flag was planted on the Moon's surface, indicating this as a clear act of aggression from the imperialist power

It is about fragility, like others said, but It is also about uniqueness, in the sense of "oh, so you think you're soo special!"

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Yes, South Korea wouldn:t want to ruin their friendship with their neighbors in the North. You know the ones always sending them gifts

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Zorr'ak notes, page 2:

Earthlings' nutrition consists mainly of elongated pieces of synthetic rubber. These can't be fully digested, so consuming the nutrients they contain is achieved by inserting them repeatedly in one or more of the mouths that Earthlings have in different parts of their anatomy.

Zorr'ak notes, page 3:

Several attempts to feed the Earthling specimen we collected have failed. We are releasing it to avoid it dying from starvation

NY Post, page 3 headline:

Texas man claims he was abducted by aliens and anal-probed

I do see your point, it would probably look funny from a safe distance.... Chicken (especially roosters) can be vicious. Up close, a dinosaur-sized chicken would be freaking terrifying!

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Genitals. Both male and female. (Generally) awesome when in use but a maintenance nightmare otherwise. Reasons for being the worse (some depending on gender) include: initiating takeoff visibly and without reason, leakages, being very fragile, requiring more packaging than any other body part and others

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  • Manipulating political elections worldwide to favour far-right pro-Russia candidates was an escalation

  • Weaponizing immigration to Europe to give an anti-immigrant platform to the above far-right was an escalation

  • The irony of trying to purportedly "de-nazify" Ukraine while literally nazifying the rest of the world is just the icing on the shit escalation cake

No, you see, we didn't intend to ask...

I assume that guy on the poster is dead, then?

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Have seen that too. The canned press release from all of them is something like "as part of our continued effort to make the org more efficient we have aggregated tram X with team Y and as a result a handful of roles were no longer needed. Our company remains focused and confident in our growth". Has AI taken over the PR department too?

From what I can see, this is not even about individual performance. It looks like a continuous game of musical chair where an entire team here and there is suddenly decimated or completely removed with non-existent internal communication.

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Angling to be considered unfit to stand trial when he loses the election

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I can't say if this specific one is authentic but I would not be surprised, as my company does the same: branded pride flags, t-shirts for their LGBTQ+ employees. And I'm torn on this, because I feel a bit bad about the branding aspect of it, but on the other hand the company putting their name to openly support all sexual and gender identities does seem like a good thing to do....

Yes, the irony of a company that produces more efficient ways of killing people being concerned with social issues does not escape me. But there are employees of the company who apparently support both (and good for them)

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If you didn't like it, you shouldn't have let your laptop walk around dressed so provocatively

Yes, fuck Trump but forgetting a guy who interviewed you months before does not sound like a good example of severe memory loss. Sounds more like the guy who already made some money by writing books on Trump is now back to try and make some more and needs to remind people who he is. So fuck him too

...especially you, Elon

I'm not even remotely a legal expert and I don't know what type of popup that is but I think the anti-competitive piece is "could Google use the same technique to push the user to switch to google search on Edge or not?".

If this was an ad from a web page OP had opened or from the game and if clicking "Yes" only directed the user to a site with instructions on how to switch default search engine on Chrome, then yes, obnoxious but probably fair. Google could strike a deal with the game developers to push their search engine to Edge users or buy an ad. Someone writing a new browser or search engine will probably have considerably less money than Google but could reasonably do something similar to try and gain market share.

On the other hand, if that popup comes from Windows itself and especially if clicking "Yes" directly changes Chrome's settings, then this is Microsoft using their ubiquitous (on desktops) OS to nudge more users to switch a competitor's browser to their own search engine. Google, or even less a new competitor. would probably not have the same type of OS-level access to switch the settings of a different browser.

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Toilet break

see? It says it right here: "that thing you just did"

Is it still "disputed" if absolutely nobody else thinks it's Chinese? if I claim the Grand Canyon is mine, does it make it the Disputed Canyon?

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and Trump would just... "your beer? Haven't seen it. There's just MY two glasses of beer here. A great beer, the greatest. My uncle invented beer, Fred Budweiser Trump. Great IQ, very good genes!"

Agree, it definitely rocks!

there's an old joke about this:

man goes to doctor saying "I keep farting, doc; my farts aren't smelly and luckily they are also silent but I am worried because I fart all day long. Even now, as I was talking to you, I kept farting the whole time".

"I see", says the doctor. "I will prescribe you this pill, to be taken twice a day for a week".

"And will that help with the farting?"

"No, but it should help you with your sense of smell. Then come to see me after one week and we'll try to fix your hearing"

she saw the photographer and she's trying to hold him back from sucker-punching an Amazon warehouse worker he's just spotted

"see this chart here? We lose money for every subscriber! We'll never make any money until we get rid of all of theml"

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I'm semantically torn here. He did (narrowly) take a bullet and shooting on politicians is an attack on Democracy. On the other hand he's not exactly on friendly terms with this whole Democracy concept.... In case of friendly fire, can you say you took a bullet for your enemy?

All right, you get the chip opening for free, but masturbation requires a paid subscription

This lead to lots of people investing in companies. As long as those companies paid out more money than those low interest rates, it was worthwhile. But at the same time, this meant companies didn’t have to be profitable, because they could pay out investors from money that other investors gave them???

I'm not an economist, but this is how I understand it works. If interest rates are low and your company can deliver 2% returns to investors, more people will invest in your company rather than leaving their money in the bank. Your company can ALSO borrow money from banks at near-0 interest and deliver a 2% return on that borrowed money (I'm probably over-simplifying, here, but I hope not by too much....). Basically, after building and selling more of your product thanks to the borrowed money, your company will have enough to return the money they borrowed from the bank and then some. If interest rates are 5%, your company now needs to be much more profitable for the whole thing to work.

This is why I understand most companies (even big and solid ones) have what is considered a "healthy" amount of debt. As long as your company can earn enough to repay that debt and keep something, not taking that debt is considered a lost opportunity.

If you're a start-up, though, you're almost by definition not profitable to begin with. You need money in exchange for a promise of big future profits. Access to that money becomes a lot more challenging with higher interest rates, so you might not be able to operate at a loss for long enough to turn profitable.

EDIT: as I see a lot of discussion on speculation, stock market and such. While these elements do exist and magnify the effects of the higher interest rates, I think the basic mechanism can also be explained without them. Low interest rates are a way of pumping "free" money into the economy, when you stop doing it, the economy goes to shit in various ways. For instance:

You have no job but own a car. You plan to drive to the countryside, buy $100 worth of potatoes and resell them in the city for $110. You estimate that gas will costs you $4. You have only one problem, you don't have $100. But hey, interest rates are super-low! You can borrow $100 from the bank and give them $101 back after selling your potatoes, so you're good to go! In the end, you're $5 richer, as you've spent $105 and earned $110.

WAY #1 things go to shit: if rates had been higher, you wouldn't have even be able to start your business (low interest rates attract more new businesses to the market)

Now say you want to do this again. Your net worth is no longer 0, you have $5! Can you buy $5 worth of potatoes and go on without borrowing any more? Not worth it, you would barely be able to cover your gas costs. So, even if your business is overall profitable, you still rely on borrowing. Given your earlier success, if anything you will probably want to try borrowing more and go for $200 worth of potatoes this time! Note that in this example you started with an owned car; if you'd had to buy one, it would take you years to repay the car and start actually turning a profit.

WAY #2 things go to shit if rates get higher now, you will have to shut down your business. You will still have earned some money, but you can't continue

Fast-forward a few years, your business is moving about $1M worth of potatoes You buy them for $1M and sell them for $1.05M, earning a cool $50K. From your years in the potato business, you have accumulated $200K in cash. Now, if you want to buy your $1M worth of potatoes, you still rely on the bank to lend you money. OR at this point, you could scale back your business and only use your cash reserves to buy potatoes. You would buy for $200K and make $10K every time. But rates are still so low and demand for potatoes is still very high, so why wouldn't you borrow and make a $50K profit instead? Or, by borrowing $2M maybe you could buy a field and start growing your own potatoes (since the farmer started raising his prices).

WAY #3 things go to shit if rates get higher now, you might still have a sustainable business, but you will need to scale it back and probably cut some costs. Maybe not too shitty for you, but probably not great news for the people you've hired to help you ("guys, due to difficult market conditions, our business has now 5 times less profit and we have to downsize")

And I haven't even touched on how an unexpected event, let's call it Schmovid, can leave you with $1M in potatoes that you've already paid but nobody can buy any longer. Your $200K savings have been wiped and now you're $800K in debt with the bank. You're starting to recover and.... NOW the borrowing rates get much higher.

About 20 new cases of gender violence arrive every day, each requiring investigation. Providing police protection for every victim would be impossible given staff sizes and budgets.

I think machine-learning is not the key part, the quote above is. All these 20 people a day come to the police for protection, a very small minority of them might be just paranoid, but I'm sure that most of them had some bad shit done to them by their partner already and (in an ideal world) would all deserve some protection. The algorithm's "success" in defined in the article as reducing probability of repeat attacks, especially the ones eventually leading to death.

The police are trying to focus on the ones who are deemed to be the most at risk. A well-trained algorithm can help reduce the risk vs the judgement of the possibly overworked or inexperienced human handling the complaint? I'll take that. But people are going to die anyway. Just, hopefully, a bit less of them and I don't think it's fair to say that it's the machine's fault when they do.

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This seems different, though. Google and Facebook still exist, with their respective logos as part of a parent company that mostly nobody, except for investors, should really care about. Maybe this is what will end up happening here as well, as Elon is sadly famous for saying outrageous things and then backtrack on them, change his mind or just never mention them again, but the way it’s been communicated Twitter and the bird logo are just going away completely.

We're supposed to be doing hybrid, 50% in the office. I don't think we ever went over 30-35% of people in the office. My company tried the carrot, more than the stick to get employees back, like events. Everybody hated the almost-full office in those days. Most teams tried to have in-person team meetings, so there were no available meeting rooms and nobody is really used to the noise of an open-office plan full of people. There is clearly some push from above on our managers, because they try to sound happy but they mostly look as miserable as everyone else.

How was the return for you? Is the whole company back in the office or just you/your team?

The one thing most religions agree on is that all other religions should be eradicated from the world until only the true one remains. Turns out they are ALL right!

Socials and the Internet in general would be a much better place if people stopped believing and blindly resharing everything they read, AI-generated or not.

Most things to do with Green Energy. Don't get me wrong, I think solar panels or wind turbines are great. I just think that most of the reported figures are technically correct but chosen to give a misleadingly positive impression of the gains.

Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity

TBH those same colleagues were probably just copy/pasting code from the first google result or stackoverflow answer, so arguably AI did make them more productive at what they do

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I think you're all focusing on the wrong part. I didn't donate $45M, I made an investment that I expect to pay back a lot more. Donating to Trump would indeed be cult of personality, buying a US President to protect me and be my pet is pure Elon.

Except for counterfeiters. They eat the whole thing to make sure their copies are accurate but now we can track their poops. I'm telling you, Mario, this thing is genius!

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I don't want to get too deep into your business but just to understand better what you're trying to communicate.... Please tell me if I get this right: there's current (not past) drama in your family and you think that not acknowledging father's day at all would feed into that drama (maybe your dad's reaction would be "see, you're all against me" and he'd play the victim or something like that) . On the other hand you also don't want to pretend everything is right with your father. So you want something to communicate "I don't want to be against you, but I certainly am not on your side either; I just want to be left alone and talk to you the strictly necessary amount of times". Is that it?

If that's the case, yes, the standard-est, humorless "happy father's day" card you can find, with nothing but your signature in it should convey that message pretty well. If you can't find anything, just a white one with a handwritten "happy father's day, [your name]" would do.

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sorry for the question, I'm not a native english speaker... do you mean this as in "this is the Googlest thing ever" or "I have never read so many Google news in a week"?

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