upstream

The biggest problem is people trying to peddle it as currency.

It isn’t currency, never will be. Much more alike to bonds.

It’s an investment object with a speculative value, and no tangible value. The only value it has is what the next guy is willing to pay for it.

While currency is deflationary by nature, crypto is entirely based on demand and supply, and sure, as long as people think it will be worth more tomorrow - sky’s the limit.

Like any pyramid scheme it pays out to get in early, and get out before it collapses.

Relying on crypto is high stakes gambling, and people being people is the only reason I can find for it not having collapsed totally already.

All technological advancements have caused changes, many have made entire professions obsolete.

One could even be allowed to imagine that science itself ought to have put priests out of a job, yet that hasn’t happened yet either.

“AI” is a generic term that’s being thrown around a lot.

There’s a huge distance from today’s AI, which at its best is generative AI based on large language models, to actual General AI that is able to learn, understand, and adapt.

Sure, you can train a language model, but it doesn’t make it “smarter” in the same instance.

Do you think Sony isn’t dangerous?

The solution is to create a system where their political prostitution is both illegal and unnecessary.

That’s the only way you get to shift politicians into working for “the people” and not their backers.

https://youtu.be/PJy8vTu66tE

Obviously not a guarantee, but if they could stop spending 40% of their time worrying about being re-elected and financing their re-election that would probably be a boon. Maybe they could even read some of the legislation they’re passing.

Even after fixing this issue you have the other one where you have a shitload of politicians which seems to be members of a cult, not a political organization and millions of Americans voting for them.

Instead of Olympic swimming we get Olympic Drowning

At this point I feel like Facebook and Google are like the East India and West India trading companies sailing the oceans with their own fleet of militarized ships, and X is just a Pirate Ship being piloted by Jack Sparrow from PoC4.

Humans were not designed to live to/past 50.

After around 30 it’s downhill all the way.

Thus, orthodontic correction gives many people a higher quality of life, correcting bad teeth positions or help compensating for “excess” teeth.

Personally I had a fairly ok set of teeth, but the size of them would have likely made getting my wisdom teeth a pain. Only reason this was ever picked up was because I had 5mm overbite and could choose to get orthodontic treatment with braces.

My specialist took one look inside my mouth and said “wow, that’s a lot of teeth”. I feel like that’s like taking your car to the mechanic and he opens the hood and says “wow, that’s a lot of engine”. Yeah man, it’s your job!

Anyway, I pulled four molars, had braces, and for the longest time three out of my four wisdom teeth did not bother me at all.

But, the one in my lower right jaw decided to go tunneling, and instead of coming up, it went sideways into the roots of the next tooth.

So they sliced my jaw open, cut the tooth in half, and took out the two pieces and sowed the hole back together.

13 years later the wisdom tooth that was supposed to push against the removed one decided to try to escape and started pushing against the jaw bone at the bottom. It basically extended beyond my other molars.

Teeth are such a great source of pain and discomfort, and I think it’s crazy that people would play around with surgery like what you first describe, but I suppose these people don’t know any better.

I believe you’re confusing it with the SE.

Also, there was a late color release for the 13 mini, IIRC.

France have nerfed old Apple products before.

My second gen iPod got volume nerfed back in the day because it was playing too loud for French regulations (with the earbuds that came with).

I’m probably one of the few that noticed because I was using a studio headset that required all that output power to play at a decent level.

35+

Never seen or used a check.

Haven’t used cash since the last time I visited the US (2017).

There’s no down-side to selling a smart TV to someone who doesn’t want one/doesn’t use the features.

The features we “want” from modern TV’s like DolbyVision and all the shit they do the image to make it stand out in the store requires a significant amount of processing power.

It’s simply better business to sell smart TV’s to everyone than to make dumb TV’s that compete for a tiny fraction of the market when people buy Smart TV’s in every price segment.

As with any tool it is how you use it that matters.

Today’s LLM’s are capable of fairly amazing stuff.

It’s a BS machine? Sure. Have you read or written stuff for higher education?

You don’t get points for being short and concise, even though you should. You get points for following the BS formula.

You know who else is good at BS?

LLM’s. If you manage to provide it enough meaningful input it can do a great lot of BS legwork for you.

I see people who overuse it, don’t edit, isn’t critical. Sure. Then you end up with just BS.

But there’s plenty of useful applications, like writing boiler plate code (see also CoPilot), structuring code, tests, etc.

Is it worth all the hype? Nope.

Some of it? Probably.