132 karma · joined October 7, 2013
Feels like we're juggling with ball sized nukes these days... So amazing... until someone eventually drops a ball.
We're already seeing governments shaming and gaslighting their citizens as they try to find ways to pay for programs to support as many as possible, saying they don't want to work anymore, they're lazy and have to be given everything, pre-chewed.... When you make it nearly impossible for humans to find worth and purpose by exchanging labor for pay, you devalue any contributions they could have and are racing to a future where most of what humans have to give, outside of original creative thought, and art, which AI can do too so it depend on others willing to find value in it, then you're not left with a whole lot. Most of the population aren't self starting entrepreneurs with an infinite drive for wealth and who want to sacrifice everything for a job. Many just seek stability and want to find something they can be at least ok at and can repeat and provide for themselves and their family. By making jobs that much harder to get, you're adding barriers for most to find work. Many countries have been spoiled by stability for so long, their populations don't view survival as a "fight", maybe a struggle, but not a fight for life. Soon it'll be a fight, if not all out war, and almost no one will be ready for that. IF the economy and government (under whatever system and name you want to call it) was setup to provide for all, knowing all the wealth was centralized and they had a mandate to redistribute resources so all could be comfortable, it would be a different story, and even then, but its not the case. A time is coming soon where companies will start losing customers because customer's spending power will disappear. Companies will have optimized themselves out of a path for future growth by destroying their customer base.
Younger generations are already looking at a future vastly different from the one we saw or thought we'd see. Most things older generations took for granted are literally out of reach. Some older people literally expect younger people to just toughen up and just work hard and make it happen, since they did. Easy to say when their education cost them a couple summers worth of income + maybe a side job. The next generation paid their student loans over years, then decades, some pretty much for life. Now its not just education, owning a home is now out of reach of a lot of people. So now if you have the guts to take on an education, you're dealing with potentially decades of student loans, average homes in the US have gone from around $140,000 to $500,000 over the past 20 years, while incomes adjusted for inflation has grown roughly 12.7% between 2003 and 2023, or roughly 0.6% a year. Add on to that the extra cost of other new necessities the picture is looking very different. Life is more and more equating to financial slavery. Used to be any job enabled you to provide necessities for a family, now unless you live in the middle of nowhere, its harder and harder to even get started. AI is already causing cuts to entry level lobs, thinning out the pipeline for future senior employees..
Its going to be fun they said... Its going to be glorious they said...
One thing for sure, its the people who will pay the price during the adjustment period.
With how my brain works, I find it insulting to be told to pray the weakness away figure of speech..
That all being said, our brains, as wonderfully capable and complex as they are, are also pretty stupid and simple in other ways. Willpower and inner strength are a trained skills and mental states combined with chemical states. If the goal is to free yourself from addiction, the means of getting there don't really matter as long as they work and don't cause direct harm to yourself or others. The placebo effect is real, so if one gets strength from believing that there's a "god" or "higher power" giving them a high 5 and believes in them, then go for it. Whether I believe thats a delusion or not is much less important than the person breaking their addiction. Its a whole other fight of its own. I do think there should be as much available support for people that isn't based on feeding you religion if thats not your thing, regardless of the fact that one can attend AA+12step and not be religious and get value out of it too.
I feel like having faith in a higher power is almost like a part of your brain never grew up, in the sense that you're allowing yourself to believe in magic, like a kid. When you were a kid, that made you excited, dreamy, which puts you in a certain state. If you believe and that allows you to put yourself in a mental state where you think the end result will work out positively, whether thats because you felt empowered, you found strength to persevere, or whether you think god's got his quantum digits up your ** and is going to partially puppet you, thus relieving you of some of the pressure, strain, and allows you to get to the same end point, then good for you...
If this was a discussion about whether religions and faith in higher powers should be the guiding philosophies for humans going forward, my answer would be capital F no.. But if we're talking about current crisis response/management and addiction support, you can't rewire everyone's brains before you can start helping them out..
Same with your face... You leave your home, other humans see your face, cameras see your face. You do not get to control who sees your face or even who captures your face when you're in public, but you can decide whether or not you consent to your face being used by an entity for profit.
We make the distinction between humans consuming information and machines because humans can't typically reproduce the original material. So like, you can go see a movie, but you can't record it with a device which would allow you to reproduce it. But what if human brains could reproduce it? Then what? Then humans could replay it to themselves all they want, and to those near them, but wouldn't be allowed to reproduce it in mass for profit, or they'd get sued. I think the same stuff applies to data ingested by AI models. People care so much about what is fed in when the same information is fed in to humans around the world which increases their knowledge and informs their future decisions, their art, their thoughts. Humans don't have to pay to see a picture of the Mona Lisa, or pictures or any other art out there, even if it'll influence their own art later on. But somehow we want to limit what is fed to models based on it having gotten the permission to be influenced by its existence. I agree, we can't feed protected IP, or secret recipes, formulas for things that are not in the public sphere.. etc.. But other than that, not sure how people expect to limit what is fed into it that it can draw inspiration from.. As long as it doesn't copy verbatim... I get that images have been generated where original material has come out, but if its sections of, or concepts of, then its the same as a human being influenced by it, I honestly don't think that matters.
Then comes the idea that this is owned by a private company who's profiting from it all... Thats true... But there's also open source models that compete with them. Not sure what the best answers to it all is.. But to go back to the original point, if your unique voice, or image isn't copied precisely for profit, then whatever... It'll get used by models, or humans in their thoughts, you can't control what your existence affects in the world, just who gets to profit off of it.
Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering questions in the comments, would always claim it was their work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page.
Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions..
Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than to argue about how air is air and water wets.
I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice, unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their advertising dollar.
At most, if kids phones were registered as "student" phones and registered to a school so that between certain hours, the phones allowed policies from the school to be applied to a phone while the phone is on the premises. Teachers could just disable them during class or allow for exceptions like if such and such kid was waiting for a critical call from a parent or something.. Classrooms could have beacons telling the phones they're in a classroom so if they go in the halls the phones could work... Or not.. Either way, there should be tech solutions to tech problems and teachers have enough to deal with, they shouldn't be further strained by having to police students always trying to find ways to sneak on to their devices.
Soon teachers might be a thing of the past and kids will just interact with an AI teacher anyway... The AI will be responsible for keeping them engaged and make sure they understand the material. At that point the AI can just shock them into submission if they whip out their phones... Muahahhaa... jk jk.
There's definitely a different type of satisfaction/reward you get from finishing something you put a lot of time in when you can feel and see the thing. I guess it aligns with why I enjoyed front end dev more so than backend enterprise stuff. Its visual.. With woodworking, its not only visual but a physical object. You see every inch of it, every corner, every joint, everywhere where you fixed something, where you took the time to perfectly sand a surface to ensure it looks just perfect in the end.
I also usually put on an audio book or music in my buds. Its a great way to disconnect and immerse yourself into something that isn't tied to anything else at that moment. No deadlines, no PRDs, no tests, no dependencies, just you and what you're working on... Its relaxing..
Sorry.. I lied... there's tons of dependencies.. Those happen to be all the right tools for the job that you don't yet have and every time you do something, you have to decide whether you'll invest the money to buy said tool, or build said thing to help you get from A to B, or if you'll go the other way around and wing it by hand, taking much longer and hopefully not too much of a worst result..
Reality is, its not all that new, is not solely attributable to Covid and there should/could have been much more research conducted a long time ago that would/could have laid way more ground work instead of researchers coming out with articles years after the fact that just reverberate what many have known all along.
Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) overlaps other post viral fatigue syndromes associated with other infections. SARS 2003 also left many with a storm of symptoms that almost perfectly aligned with Long-covid. The infection itself may stem from a different virus or one related, so the onset of the infection, the aggressiveness of the virus, how quickly it peaks and how the immune system reacts, may be different, but many of the sequelas overlap. Many viral infection impact the body differently but devolve into pneumonia for example. So the connection between viral illnesses and ME/CFS and/or POTS may not be a specific protein, or specific interactions, but the shock to bodies, the response to a viral illness followed by secondary infections. The strain put on the immune system, the inflammation, the cytokine storm, etc.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS for short, has been affecting people for a long time. It has been triggered in people after viral infections. POTS risk factors as noted by Hopkins medicine (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...) "may begin after an apparent or confirmed viral illness, but it can also appear following surgery and other health events."
ME/CFS + POTS (very often comorbid) like chronic illnesses have been cropping up for a long time. Due to the array of symptoms experienced by everyone, its made it hard to differentiate between the combination of potential symptoms and individual symptoms in isolation and the fact that there's no single test to diagnose ME/CFS. The diagnostic requirements for POTS are much simpler and clear, although a cure is also elusive. There has also been a severe lack of knowledge within the medical community, as these aren't resolved illnesses, so patients have been brushed under the rug, misdiagnosed and prescribed treatments which have often been counter productive and even harmful in many events. The complexity of it all and lack of explanations or solutions for patients has frustrated doctors.
Lets go back a look at multiple flu epidemics and their long term outcomes.
In "Historical Insight into Infections and Disorders Associated with Neurological and Psychiatric Sequelae Similar to Long COVID" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33633106/ they mention "Historically, the common symptom of altered cognition has been reported during earlier pandemics, which include the influenza pandemics of 1889 and 1892 (Russian flu), the Spanish flu pandemic (1918-1919), encephalitis lethargica, diphtheria, and myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome or post-viral fatigue syndrome)."
In "Lessons from the 1918/1919 Influenza Pandemic" https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2020/04/09/lessons-19181..., "Dr. G. Holliday wrote to the British Medical Journal on August 17, 1918, that “mental symptoms were frequent” in the cases he saw; Samuel West informed readers of The Lancet in Feb. 1, 1919, that “the depression which follows influenza is so constant that it ought to be regarded as part of the disease.” The medical correspondent for The Times, having contracted the illness himself, advised readers that “the most distressing symptom was a swift loss of mental capacity and then inability to think coherently.” “All forms of hysteria have been observed after influenza,” reported Thomson and Thomson in 1919,” such as hysterical convulsions and the so-called hystero-epilectic attacks.” “Post-influenzal neurasthenia is very familiar,” they noted, “post-influenzal psychoses” “frequently observed and reported.” They cited a study that asserted that influenza, “of all the infectious diseases . . . is the most likely to be followed by mental disorder.”
Note "Post-influenzal neurasthenia", or "an ill-defined medical condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache, and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance.". In today's medicine, doctors are required to rule all known and understood causes of all your symptoms before coming to the conclusion that you suffer from ME/CFS. Thats if you're lucky to get a doctor who's heard of this and if your doctor had the patience to follow you through all these non conclusive diagnostic tests, all while not defaulting to the simple and all to common medical gaslighting which usually involve telling you its all in your head. Since after all, you're complaining of too many things wrong at once, everything seems inconclusive, so you sound a bit off, and mental capacity is most often affected, brain fog being a very common overlapping symptom between all these post viral conditions, and you're easy to dismiss. Combine brain fog, uncontrollable fatigue, POTS like symptoms, and patients are more often than not just seen as headcases, hysterical, and a waste of time. If you read stories of patients who are now diagnosed with ME/CFS / POTS, many have been ill for decades, spent years and years if not decades seeking answers, most of them no longer living among the masses but chronically ill and barely meeting their basic needs day to day, the majority unable to even work. They're referred to now as "millions missing", and they've been too ill to fight, to ill to be seen, too ill to be recognized.
Its not until there's pandemics or large groups affected by some viral strain that the media starts talking about a rise in deaths or illnesses that some fringe articles will dig deeper and mention how a subset of people seem to just "stay sick" etc, often without relating the similarity between outcomes after other viral illnesses. With Covid having been so impactful and so much money being invested in research, its being talked about quite a bit more now, finally. That being said, it was clear before this even left China that what was to follow would be just as bad as the virus itself. Some people already had "long-covid", or post-viral fatigue, or one of the many names that seem to all want to describe these illnesses, and what would seem to be this fresh discovery of "long-covid" and all these mysteries left all previous sufferers dumb founded since they had been brushed under the rug and medically gaslit for decades. Its almost like the medical community runs out of time trying to figure it out and eventually moves on and when it comes up again, they slap another title on it and start all over again, often without taking into account every previous instance that could be used as a starting point. Obviously every virus, often every strain, can infect differently and have a different set of primary symptoms, but it should be clear by now that post viral and often chronic conditions, especially after flu like infections, seem to have a definite overlap.
I remember watching clips and amateur news coming out of China in early to mid January 2020 and thinking to myself OMG, I hope this doesn't spread across the globe. The aftermath is going to be worse than the virus itself. Only reason I instantly thought this is my partner contracted SARS in 2003 and after barely surviving, having spent 2 weeks in the ICU, went on to develop a host of issues including stroke, ME/CFS, POTS, and brain fog to just name the main overlapping ones. Having dealt with this for two decades, having exhausted all options available in current medicine, the impact of long-covid or post viral illness has been devastating. It has stripped so many of their lives, it has left so many as dysfunctional shells of their former selves, unable to work or contribute in meaningful ways in their lives, not due to lack of desire or willpower, but a body and mind that won't follow. I've seen first hand the struggle of seeing someone fight with everything they have to just be themselves, a person who did what they had to in order to overcome whatever life through at them, but now, the harder they fight, the harder they fall as their bodies reminds them after any amount of effort, exercise, or too much brain work, that they are ill, and they crash, almost as a punishment for even trying to fight, exacerbating many of their symptoms for days, weeks, even months.
The long lasting effects of this will not only be those who were lost, but those who now depend on the system and their loved ones, while requiring more medical attention. When its one person, its one thing, when its a percentage of your population, regardless of the whole digit representing that subset, the costs are huge. You're talking about a whole percentage of your population who essentially becomes a disabled retiree at whatever age they get ill. Those costs pile up over a lifetime, as does the collective loss of productivity within society. While society will adapt and readjust, it doesn't change anything for the millions upon millions who spend the rest of their lives desperately seeking answers, cures, any simple advancement that will give them a piece of their old lives back.
alright.. done typing, thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
He might not quit playing music as he's a musician, but he might quit the business, performing and putting out music for others to hear, if all that comes out of it is frivolous lawsuits.. Basically piranhas out for blood regardless of the harm they're causing.
If I had to spend half my time in court as a software engineer for using a for loop, it wouldn't make much sense for me to keep being one.
Its not exploitation if you're paying people higher than their local cost of living and higher than other local jobs. If you're just appalled about people being paid an amount of money that to YOU, based on your cost of living isn't fair because you'd want to make more, then be appalled at capitalism as a whole and how much work is being hired outside of company's originating countries. The production of almost everything globally is outsourced to locales where the cost to compete is lower than in the originating country.
Secretive Giant TSMC’s $100 Billion Plan To Fix The Chip Shortage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU87SH5e0eI
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2021/07...
Say people just start launching rockets and drones literally anywhere, at any time... How are flight paths supposed to be know ahead of time to avoid collisions? With 45,000ish DAILY commercial flights handled by the FAA, almost 20,000 airports in the US, how exactly do you think you can safely co-exist without catastrophes if people can just start putting stuff up there?
My reaction to this whole "unconstitutional" rebuttal to everything in the US is literally jaw dropping, confused, and wtf... If you're smart enough to not do something stupid, or not put yourself in a position to make mistakes that affect others, thats great. Good for you. There's 350 million other peeps just in your neck of the woods and I can guarantee you that same innate sense of logic and common sense doesn't apply to everyone else. When a stupid move can put the lives of 100s of others at risk, or cost a ton of money every time they need to intervene, I'm not sure you get to just throw around "me myself and I and my constitution" and actually come out not sounding like a 1 year old throwing a tantrum because he's told to not wipe poop on everything and everyone.
How many hundreds of millions or billions would have to be wasted in downtime, planes crashes, car crashes, lives lost, random injuries, before we ask people to do the equivalent of reading the dumb ass common sense instructions that came with the toy that is way more than a toy?
There's also awareness of where you can and cannot operate drones and people should know this. You are after all occupying air space. If drones could only fly up 30 feet it would be a different story but they can go quite far. People fly them over protected airspace, crash them in random places... Last thing you want is people flying them over airports, over busy streets or highways where they can crash into planes, get sucked in to engines, crash into cars and cause accidents, etc etc...
They're not asking people to take hundreds of hours of flight to get certified, just a short awareness course for those who have no common sense... You don't need to blow a gasket to have a drone accident. It's not like drones are crash proof and all aware of airspace restrictions. Just don't want to have accidents in places that can affect others or have people fly them into places that will automatically trigger an emergency responses and disrupt operations and waste time and money... Like a drone over an airport where they'll dispatch security to take down the drone and interrupt all flights taking off or landing. Thats a LOT of money for one person's ignorance or stupidity.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2190096-drones-are-caus...
I'm all for freedom as long as your 10 minutes of good times don't cost others a ton of money and the reality is there's a ton that can go wrong even with no intent on doing anything wrong.
I was well aware of most of this and had been complaining lately about how I don't see there being a good ending in sight considering how much growth there seems to be in the extreme right and extreme left. I've been finding it harder and harder to have conversations with many people I know or even family because of their extreme stances on many of todays core issues. Most if not all of their positions or perceived understanding of these issues is straight out of their facebook echo chambers. They started with an ignorant stance and had all their thoughts and ignorance echoed and amplified back at them, empowering them to feel even stronger about it all. My feed is peppered with propaganda simply because I still bother to comment to family, trying to share facts, trying to pull them back a bit.. How can they not know better?? Right... The information never reached them, because they relied social media to get the initial news and once suckered in, they only seeked to confirm their biases.
There's no questioning why we're in the world we're currently in. Nothing about this is normal, especially when we claim to have access to information.
I know better, yet still find myself scrolling my feed robotically.. I had just scrolled it a bit ago, but, found myself scrolling it again. I didn't plan on it. I just had a blip in focus while I was watching something and my new programmed behavior was to pick up my phone and start scrolling.
When they say kids mental health severely affected, I'm not surprised one bit. I see it. My nieces and my gf's nieces are all hooked. I only see my nieces once or twice a year since we live pretty far from the rest of my family, but I was shocked to see they knew how to find content and how to operate my brothers iphone before they knew how to read. And if there was a youtube video they talked about, they knew how to find it again. Again, they couldn't read or spell yet..
My girlfriends older nieces are locked on tiktok. They determine how they feel based on others perceptions of their online accomplishments. All these kids are trying to become influencers. The feuds that arise, who collaborated with who, commented what on who, bullied them, etc etc. Bullying in schools is nothing new, but at least it used to have a schedule. You got bullied in the hallways at school, or around town, or during recess. Now, there's no turning it off. Kids get bullied around the clock, and some of it leaves a permanent mark online for every other kid to see. Thats not healthy for kids. They don't have a safety net once they get home.
Politics are a clusterfuck right now. One can't keep up with the events while trying to find the actual facts on everything and not simply believing everything being targeted at them. And we hope to have positive change soon? Come on.. As long as people can be bought, this is not going anywhere.
The one thing the documentary didn't touch on, and I guess its the cause of this in the first place, our capitalistic systems are unsustainable. Everything must grow, indefinitely. Every quarter, companies must meet their growth targets or take a hit. At first, you work on improving production, cutting waste. Then you optimize every other aspect you can. Eventually you cut corners, eventually thats not enough anymore so you outsource everything, move production to the cheapest place you can. Then all these tools are available to market your products in the most targeted way possible. Facebook et al don't care what you pay attention to, as long as you pay attention and they can throw ads at you. The companies will pour as much into this as they can get out. They'll squeeze every drop out of that lemon.
This whole system is like one big dirty coffee filter being wrung out too hard. Eventually it'll rip and people will fall out, civil war is definitely not that far out of sight. I think they touched accurately on the big picture and where things are headed if things don't change. Whats sadder is we know it, we see it, and we're unwilling to change it, because that would drastically affect finances of too many parties, and there's one thing that rules above all, and thats the all mighty dollar.
I wish it was talked about more instead of people dismissing the fact that if a large percentage of those who get severe symptoms develop chronic illnesses, this is going to be a lot bigger than "just a flu". It far from just a flu. My significant other happens to be a SARS survivor who's been dealing with chronic illness since "recovering" from the infection in 2003. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
I hope diabetes isn't yet another condition that many will develop after this.
Not all comparisons are equal there. Like youtube vs twitch? Talking about livestreaming? replays? I don't go to twitch to look up peoples vlogs, how to's, etc. Apples / oranges even though you can livestream on both.
Gmail clogged? Unsubscribe to some stuff or adjust your filters. I've had my gmail account since gmail became available and I have no issues keeping a clean inbox. Spam folder is massive, but I guess its doing its job.
I get what you're saying.. But thats how the industry works. Giants can't move as quick when they have billions of users that rely on 100% uptime and backwards compatibility. You can't upend your stuff all the time. Startups are scrappy and can do crazy stuff. But notice how many crazy things don't last.
The average gamer is 34 years old 70% of gamers are age 18 or older
Considering FB has between 2.5 and 3 billion users. FB has much more chances of success considering its size, its user base, its built in advertising platform, its global reach, etc. Streaming and gaming isn't just about 12-18 year old gamers. If you're thinking monetization, there's not a whole lot to gain there for the majority of steamers. Not a whole lot of 12 year olds can support streamers financially. So sure, maybe it won't be the platform of choice for the 16 year olds, but doesn't mean it can't be dwarfed in size by the rest of the demographics who are also into gaming.
Don't forget, gamers of yesterday who started with the earliest consoles or who got on board anywhere between atari, NES, SNES, Sega, PS1, PS2, or PC gamers, are still gamers today.