so i actually saw this on my internet sojourn yesterday and popped briefly into the r/asmongold subreddit to see what the hoi polloi were saying. that a thing like asmongold itself would say something like that is not necessarily surprising (in fact i’ve heard just about the same or worse from those in more respectable and influential positions), but it is really disheartening to see people, most of whom are presumedly young children, either endorse such sentiments or create apologia for them.
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Yeah. This will disconnect a lot of people from online and real spaces much harder because it will be an extra mask through things that are not real. And also, I fear that if people had problem with reading comprehension skills already and will try to read diagonally as much as they can (thank you, social media and clickbait-y news), this will reinforce that trend further down the line.
Also, I don’t know how much this “less than minimal effort” in those cases will erode communication skills further down the line in a field where, in interrelational spaces, communication is either horrible in so many fronts due to other subjects or protocolarian, formulaic bullshit to cut off any genuine effort to talk and relate to other people personally or professionally (I know it has been said and implied before, but still).
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just yesterday I got an email from my bosses boss about something and I was like… this does not sound like them. And I was like… is something wrong? Did something happen? Then it hit me they probably used copilot to write it. I’m like christ getting worked up for nothing. archive.
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FWIW, I think using Copilot for email is a security issue.
I get emails a lot from people pretending to be my boss wanting me to click a link, provide my personal cell, and things like that. Each of them are fairly easy to detect for a number of reasons, including the tone it’s written in. If my chair (an otherwise savvy, affable person who writes good emails) were to suddenly write with an AI-assisted tool, it’d be more difficult to tell between true boss and an imposter. If someone said they’d fallen prey to social engineering because they couldn’t tell between AI-written scammer emails and AI-written genuine emails, I’d believe it.
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I can definitely commiserate about AI worries… some younger engineers in my office have used it to write technical reports, without asking if that was appropriate. I don’t think company leadership has any guidance or is prepared for that at all. We are in the field of civil engineering, drawing plans for roads, etc. with a duty to protect public safety - and state licensure is required to practice. I’m sure it could be useful in some ways, but it seems irresponsible to use it without knowing exactly how it is going from input to output, overseeing and triple checking everything. Hopefully the governing bodies of the profession put out some guidance, and I’m sure they will - but I personally don’t want to see it at work at all.
Now, if AutoDesk wanted to use AI to make AutoCAD work how it should, and add features that have been missing for decades (automatic page numbering of plan sets, seriously!) that might be OK.
Here’s my rallying cry I want to say to anyone that sends me anything that reeks of AI copywriting:
Don’t be a PUPPET of ChatGEPPETTO!
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frankly, i’m worried that rallying cry might be too catchy
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And now for a change of pace, a return to the subtle hilarity of the local race for sheriff. Last time, we had a candidate named Craig GOCHA!
Now, the continuing escapades of Keith sWANK!
This story is ongoing.
So there is a political campaign sign on a road near me. It looks something like this (of course I never thought to take a picture of it):
Now, some locals made some minor modifications to the sign, either to express some discontent or simply spread joy:
Of course I had to snap a pic for posterity. The campaign came by and fixed the sign by repainting the background green, and spray painting the original “S” in white. Unfortunately, I thought the shenanigans were over and did not take a picture. Little did I know… (refer to Pic #1 for the state of the sign at this stage)
The rogue artisans were clearly disgruntled at the erosion of their work, and resorted to drastic measures:
This iteration of the sign lasted for many days, and it seemed that the graffitists had won. But things are never so simple… I was walking by last week, and what did I see but two campaign workers trying to fix the sign. With their apparently limited resources, both material and mental, they did what they could, by pasting on some additional smaller signs:
I saw them snap a pic of the “fixed” sign on their phones and drive away.
I really couldn’t believe it.
I think they were given the mission to “fix the holes in the sign” when they should have been provided a goal with more clarity - “make it so the sign doesn’t say WANK anymore”.
Now it says WANK twice!!
I will report back with any future updates.
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I dropped my phone laughing at those photos.
On the second photo, they just needed to remove Keith for it to be a true masterpiece.
Whomever is doing those edits, they’re doing God’s work.
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That’s an absolutely beautiful example of environmental storytelling!
The last picture is also why the German word verschlimmbessern was invented. It is a portmanteau of verschlimmern (to make sth. worse) and verbessern (to make sth. better/to improve sth.) and means “to make something worse with one’s attempt to improve/fix it”.
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in america, we call that politics!
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I dunno if you’re on bluesky (I looked and did not find you) but can I post this on bluesky
god those nuclear power plants for AI. I think a whole lot of us are like “You know this capitalism thing kinda sucks. Maybe its about time we start doing things a little differently now that we have so much already.”
And the other people are like “how can we keep this capitalist machine going? We can create the most inefficient program of all time, a bunch of fake currencies and worthless tokens and they need a ton of resources to burn through! we figured it out!!”
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can someone genuinely present the good-faith argument for crypto
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can’t provide any detailed info ofc but have run into more than one very disabled, about as socioeconomically dire as you can imagine patients that have told me about investing their savings in crypto. My reaction was that sounds bad
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My impression is that it’s like playing the lottery, but the ticket costs like whatever $7000 you can save from disability checks over the years, and I guess unlike a losing lottery ticket it’s not always going to totally worthless in theory. For people that are in that kind of situation (there are a lot) and don’t have like a 401k or whatever, what else is a few grand in your checking or a basic savings account going to do for you? Just describing the use case, not saying it’s a good idea
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I feel like looking at crypto credulously the purpose is to stay away from the kind of crashability of government issued currencies and large banks.
The philosophy kind of goes hand in hand with this idea of tech basically replacing all public infrastructure in life, now you have your own privatized tech currency. Which is what appeals to the billionaires in the same way as like, Argentina privatizing roads.
It has the same thing as the AI places right now, where all the individual ones are pining to basically be the replacement dollar and that’s what fuels the speculation.
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that much i understand, and it seems to be the “realpolitik” use case for crypto. god help them.
i guess what i’m asking is what’s the institutional case for crypto? crypto lobbies are donating millions of dollars to politicians. why do they say crypto needs to exist? i’m assuming there has to be a better answer than “blockchain casino,” but i don’t know what it is. is everyone okay with just being openly cynical now?
is this real lmao
So, the only real actual unique utility that crypto offers is that it is a trustless form of a financial transaction.
In the context of financial transactions, trust is roughly speaking referring to whether or not the transaction is overseen/observed/recorded/verified/finalized/etc. by one or more third party intermediaries. In the part of the pre-fiat but post gold doubloon era, when we had banknotes that were backed by a gold standard, whether or not banknotes could actually be used as currency involved a lot of third party intermediaries, the biggest ones being, say, in the United States, the federal government. A banknote was, in some ways, the United States government (a third party) saying that a piece of paper (printed by the Mint, one part of the third party) you had in your pocket was worth something, because another part of the federal government (Treasury I guess?) had a whole bunch of gold bricks stored somewhere where the communists couldn’t steal it (thanks to the military). And then if you wanted to keep your dollar bill safer than it’d be in your pocket, you could involve another network of third parties (like a nationwide bank) to turn your banknote into a promise that they are holding on to your money on your behalf, so that if you were to go from Washington D.C. to Washington state (which I assume also has a city named Washington), you could get a dollar bill back out of your bank account (not the same one though, but that’s okay, dollar bills are fungible).
So, the supposed actual utility of crypto is that it can enable trustless economic transactions, because using some kinda crazy computer stuff, the means to oversee/observe/record/verify/finalize/etc. a financial transaction is essentially automated over the internet by a network of distributed machines. As I understand it, it’s kinda like torrenting in the sense that a network of computers (this is the blockchain by the way) that store the same information, dispersed geographically, oversee/observe/record/verify/finalize/etc. financial transactions by way of the creation of and reference to a lot of intentional redundancy, which (theoretically) can’t be undermined because the repositories of redundant information are automated to refer to each other and for transactions in the past to remain identical, perpetually. Bitcoin and the “mining” for it was basically an ongoing and constantly running lottery for small amounts of what was essentially payments in that crytpocurrency for using computing power to operate this system and both make up this distributed, decentralized network, and also to contribute to the computing power needed to process transactions.
That, as I understand it, is what the actual real world utility for cryptocurrency is. That this system, with its innate dependency on an ever growing body of redundant information to process transactions, and thus an ever growing need for computing power (hence its catastrophic energy needs), and how it depends on a whole lot of centralized third party intervention in order to be even remotely usable or appealing to anyone in the real world, and its world class propensity for every kind of fraud under the sun, is really it’s actual, real world application and substance. But, that is the good faith argument as I understand it, and boy, is there a LOT of good faith required to see what it would actually be used for and represent.
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