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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Seeing technology consistently putting people out of work is enough for people to see it as a problem. You shouldn’t need to be an expert in it to be able to have an opinion when it’s being used to threaten your source of income. Teachers have to do more work and put in more time now because ChatGPT has affected education at every level. Educators already get paid dick to work insane hours of skilled labor, and students have enough on their plates without having to spend extra time in the classroom. It’s especially unfair when every student has to pay for the actions of the few dishonest ones. Pretty ironic how it’s set us back technologically, to the point where we can’t use the tech that’s been created and implemented to make our lives easier. We’re back to sitting at our desks with a pencil and paper for an extra hour a week. There’s already AI “books” being sold to unknowing customers on amazon. How long will it really be until researchers are competing with it? Students won’t be able to recognize the difference between real and fake academic articles. They’ll spread incorrect information after stealing pieces of real studies without the authors’ permission, then mash them together into some bullshit that sounds legitimate. You know there will be AP articles (written by AI) with headlines like “new study says xyz!” and people will just believe that shit.

    When the government can do its job and create fail safes like UBI to keep people’s lives/livelihoods from being ruined by AI and other tech, then people might be more open to it. But the lemmy narrative that overtakes every single post about AI, that says the average person is too dumb to be allowed to have an opinion, is not only, well, fucking dumb, but also tone deaf and willfully ignorant.

    Especially when this discussion can easily go the other way, by pointing out that tech bros are too dumb to understand the socioeconomic repercussions of AI.





  • There are still those mugshot websites that post all the booking photos from the sheriff’s departments daily. They always have the disclaimer “for entertainment purposes only, all suspects are innocent until blah blah” but you have to fight with them to get them taken down because it’s public information. You can go to your local jail or prison’s website and look up someone’s name to see if they’re in custody, regardless of whether they’ve had their day in court. Some of them have inmate rosters so you end up seeing everyone’s names alphabetically.

    It just makes it even more gross when they extend this privilege to cops but not the average person, especially innocent people whose cases go on to be dismissed, but they had their mug shots posted online. Yes, criminal privacy laws would make sense, but in the US everyone is guilty until proven otherwise.




  • So UPS will only put ac in new trucks, sometime next year, and possibly get them to the hottest parts of the country, and old trucks will get “cabin fans” (?).

    I know negotiations must be really difficult. I know everyone is relying on their jobs and paychecks to survive. But it seems like too often these corporations get away with half measures and vague promises because even when we revoke our labor, they’re still the ones in control. Workers from a company like UPS seem like they should have more control than most though. Shutting down deliveries across the US indefinitely is a pretty big threat. So maybe they could have gotten better results.



  • I absolutely agree. But I do think it’s interesting how there’s almost never any discussion of drug use and alcoholism among housed people, as though that’s not a social problem in itself. And imagine how much more severe the consequences are of people going to work fucked up, driving their cars, selling drugs in their dorms and getting kicked out of college, raising a family while trashed on xanax, and so on.

    But when this happens, it’s an even more individualized matter than it is with homeless people. When we look at homeless folks, we individualize the blame and socialize the consequences (it’s the homeless person’s fault they’re homeless, but that’s fucking up our city etc). Somehow, we never consider the social repercussions of housed people with addictions, especially if they have an addiction to alcohol. Alcoholism can get pretty far in an “average” person’s life before anyone really steps in and sees it as a serious problem. Same with prescribed drugs, because they have some psychiatrists signature on them. Millions of people drink when they get home from work. But if we see a homebum with a 40, we first make a snap diagnosis, then widen our judgement to everyone whose ever been evicted or had to sleep in their car.

    All I’m saying is that half the problem is ingrained social stigma, when they’re really not much different from the rest of us.



  • Regardless, it is an important study to disspell stigmas that have existed since the beginning of private property.

    But it is still important when it comes to housing. This argument of homeless people being untrustworthy with money has undoubtedly already worked it’s way into that debate. If people won’t trust them with money, why would they trust them with an apartment? Canada and the US don’t see them as “worthy” or responsible enough to be given anything, not even food. Look at what an insane process it is just to apply for food stamps in the US, and that applies to low income folks as well as homeless people. Everyone is considered a criminal until they can prove otherwise, and they’re rarely given that chance

    Not that I think academic research will make much of an impact. Research from the social sciences consistently debunks all kinds of common, harmful beliefs, and yet is still often ignored by policy makers and average people. It’s depressing as fuck that there are academic researchers spending years on studies like this, convincing people to fund them, getting paid dick by their universities, and still a bunch of assholes who have never set foot on a college campus get to just cut it down by saying “oh, well, that’s what I heard.” And then move on with their lives while homeless people continue to suffer for no reason. This is an example of the far reaching impacts of devaluing education I guess.





  • Here’s a somewhat tangential counter, which I think some of the other replies are trying to touch on … why, exactly, continue valuing our ability to do something a computer can so easily do for us (to some extent obviously)?

    My theory prof said there would be paper exams next year. Because it’s theory. You need to be able to read an academic paper and know what theoretical basis the authors had for their hypothesis. I’m in liberal arts/humanities. Yes we still exist, and we are the ones that AI can’t replace. If the whole idea is that it pulls from information that’s already available, and a researcher’s job is to develop new theories and ideas and do survey or interview research, then we need humans for that. If I’m trying to become a professor/researcher, using AI to write my theory papers is not doing me or my future students any favors. Ststistical research on the other hand, they already use programs for that and use existing data, so idk. But even then, any AI statistical analysis should be testing a new hypothesis that humans came up with, or a new angle on an existing one.

    So idk how this would affect engineering or tech majors. But for students trying to be psychologists, anthropologists, social workers, professors, then using it for written exams just isn’t going to do them any favors.


  • That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.

    That’s the thing. No one I’ve ever heard who says this kind of shit has ever lived here for any length of time or knows anything about the state beyond what the “news” has told them to believe. There are issues here like there are issues everywhere. So people want to focus on homelessness. Of course we have more homeless people, we have more people. We have two of the largest and most well known metro areas in the nation with an up and coming third.

    The bitching takes away (maybe intentionally) from the homeless issue that is rapidly increasing throughout the rest of the country. This is an issue of inflation and greed masquerading as inflation. Of corporate property owners buying up rentals and raising rents. Of workers not being paid a living wage. Of food and essentials becoming increasingly unaffordable by the month. Of course people are losing their homes and stealing from walmart. But this is a national problem. It gets worse all over the country for the same reasons and at the same time that it gets worse in California.

    But what I will say is, we do have reproductive rights. Reasonable firearms regulations. More tenant regulations that most places, though still never enough. Some cities have social worker response teams instead of sending cops to kill people having mental health problems. We have homeless outreach and a statewide homeless census. Our schools and colleges still have diversity programs and sex ed. The state provides tuition waivers and grants for low income and marginalized students. We have drag shows and pride parades. And our libraries aren’t being purged by fucking nazis. So there’s that.