BranBucket @ BranBucket @lemmy.world

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162

Joined

2 yr. ago

IPA: If Pinecones were Alcohol.

Well, if you take good old-fashioned violence out of the picture, money. Or specifically a lack of it.

Sanctions, selling off US debt, more retaliatory tariffs, blacklisting US investors and companies, anything that pulls cash out of the US economy and puts it somewhere else. Turn off the money tap, make the mega-donors hurt bad enough and the dystopia machine will eventually grind to a halt. Don't think for a moment that the current squad of high-functioning sociopaths that are enabling this are principled enough to stay the course after a few of their mega-yachts are repossessed. They'll flip sides again and again just to try and keep that horde they've built up. Someone just has to prove to them that the threat is serious, because right now, they think everyone else is helpless against them.

Additionally, the majority of Trump voters cited the economy as a primary reason for voting for him. A good portion of them were probably lying to cover for being racist and just wanted to see POC and the LGBTQ+ community suffer, but if you crash the US economy hard enough, you can still hijack a big chunk of Trump's public support. It's the same as with mega-yachts, but here we're talking pickup trucks, ATVs, and rent-to-own furniture.

Few problems with this. 1. It's slow. 2. It'll hurt everyone else economically because US businesses have hooks set real deep in a lot of places. 3. Other nations have a wealthy elite with similar sway who want Trump in power for various reasons and might not play along. & 4. Whoever replaces the US might turn out to be just as big as bully in a few years if we're not careful.

Still, it needs to be done.

EDIT: It’s like the old saying goes, everything is about money, except money, which is about power.

illegal and unwise.

Shocked. Shocked! That could describe damn near everything he does.

Bet this gets Epstein out of the headlines, and all he had to do was kidnap the duly elected leader of a foreign nation and start yet another war for oil. That's obviously a master class in political subtlety.

As others have said, I use a client that doesn't display them, so it never dawned on me. And in general, profile pics have never been a big deal for me. So if the app or site doesn't make me do it as part of the account set up, my profile pic just stays as the default.

Glad to see old school let's live in the woods and do cult shit crazy still exists in this world.

I'm real tired of this new-fangled let's make the world into a dystopian hellhole and do genocide crazy we got going 'round now days.

You can set profile pictures on Lemmy?

Looks good!

I did this in our kitchen. No one else pays attention to it and I still can't find shit. YMMV.

Once I passed, my family decided that I'd get over my fears by forcing me to drive, every single day, for weeks, with the whole family in the car, yelling, mocking me...

As I'm sure you're well aware, this is not only a massive dick move, but the worst way possible to "help" someone in your position learn. It's a training method I actively discourage at work, as someone who's nervous should be allowed to focus on the task at hand and not have to worry about making their trainer angry. I'm a quality inspector who directly observes and evaluates indivuals performing work, and I've found it's almost always best to back off and remain quiet unless a clear safety issue presents itself. I am utterly and completely baffled by their choices, that was an unforgivably stupid way to handle the situation, and I hope you're doing okay.

This is, as others have mentioned, a time to take things in small steps. Drive in off peak hours, small distances, and at average speeds until you build confidence. Adopt a mantra of "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast" as you develop skills and gain confidence in new situations. So long as you're not impeding traffic, you're under no obligation to meet or exceed the speed limit, tailgate, run yellow lights, or do any of the other bullshit things sloppy and impatient drivers often do. Worry about yourself and your car, drive defensively, and remember you aren't responsible for someone getting upset just because you drive safely.

This isn't exposure therapy for anxiety, and thrusting someone into a situation that makes them deeply uncomfortable never helps. Instead, think of it as practice and skill development. Confidence and reduced stress will build with time as patterns and skills are reinforced, but only if you develop your abilities at a natural pace instead of forcing the issue.

Absolutely brilliant. The brink of human ingenuity. An amazingly creative solution for generating revenue. Let's take this technology we've invested countless resources in and make it the 199,422nd internet advertising platform in existence. The world was desperate for another ad platform, so this can only help humanity in the long run.

True innovation and inspired leadership.

You're when it comes to finding affection. Which is precisely why my approach fell flat.

While the environmental problems and the market bubble eventually bursting are bigger issues that will harm everyone, I see the beginnings of what could be a problem of equal significance concerning the exploitation of lonely and vulnerable people for profit with AI romance/sexbot apps. I don't want to fully buy into the more sensationalist headlines surrounding AI safety without more information, but I strongly suspect that we'll see a rise in isolated persons with aggravated mental health issues due to this kind of LLM use. Not necessarily hundreds of people with full-blown psychosis, but an overall increase in self-isolation coupled with depression and other more common mental health issues.

The way social media has shaped our public discourse has shown that like it or not, we're all vulnerable to being emotionally manipulated by electronic platforms. AI is absolutely being used in the same way and while more tech savvy persons are likely to be less vulnerable, no one is going to be completely immune. When you consider AI powered romance and sex apps, ask yourself if there's a better way to get under someone's skin than by simulating the most intimate relationships in the human experience?

So, old fashioned or not, I'm not going to be supportive of lonely people turning to LLMs as a substitute for romance in the near future. It's less about their individual freedoms, and more about not wanting to see them fed into the next Torment Nexus.

Edits: several words.

For a while I was telling people "don't fall in love with anything that doesn't have a pulse." Which I still believe is good advice concerning AI companion apps.

But someone reminded me of that humans will pack-bond with anything meme that featured a toaster or something like that, and I realized it was probably a futile effort and gave it up.

Yup. The Internet was going to demolish barriers and let people communicate mind to mind without prejudice. We were going to democratize information and science, put the power in the hands of the people, and put an end to pointless conflicts.

Far fetched? Sure. But we should never forget what they stole from us. The most complex and powerful machine humanity has ever created, a collaborative project built in the spirit of cooperation and empowerment, is being monoplized and exploited so some high functioning sociopaths can get rich.

You okay bud?

Not a lot of opportunities to ride naked where I'm at, but I'll try to remember this as sort of general safety information.

Nice! I'm still pretty new to cycling, but I'm looking forward to getting some longer rides in as time goes by.

Sounds awful. Sorry about that.

A little, but I started out as a lousy climber so...

It keeps my weight further back on my sittin' bones rather than on the ol' gooch and associated bits, and that's where the padding is thickest on the seat. But everybody's built different.

Yeah, no one would have even blinked at that from what I recall. Unless you tried to take it onto a plane or into someplace high security like a courtroom it was something so mundane that it wouldn't have been brought up.

Making an issue out of it would have been akin to saying "Did you hear about Bob? He always has his car keys with him. Watch out for that guy..."