from what i’ve seen this is a very american phenomenon. a lot of yanks are concerningly quick to switch off their empathy when someone is “on the other side” and they often use the same kind of tactics they decry as horrific when it is used against them. (ostracism, ableism, what have you.) they often don’t have principles, just allegiances.

i’d say this is slightly more noticeable on the left than the right for the sole reason that the american right keeps its empathy off nearly all the time, while the left has it on by default but turns it off when someone’s vibes don’t match. but the core issue of critically low and conditional empathy is the same there.

and sure, idk how literally everyone around the world behaves, but at least the progressives i met (locally, outside the us) usually aren’t like that.

there’s still one, marco rubio. sure he has his ghoulish project in cuba, but in every other sense he’s the sane one to talk to about foreign policy, and he usually presents a counterbalancing force to trump and co back when the truly idiotic policies come up. idk how much domestic stuff he does though, i would expect the outlook on him to be different from within the us.

that said, he’s not the real architect there. bannon and miller are, and they’re actual full-fledged nazis.

i think this is flawed, tbh. it’s true that up until this year, llms did not make people any faster at coding, or more able to tackle challenges outside their skillset. but that has changed, and if you’re in uni now, you’re not trying to be useful today, you’re trying to be useful 4-5 years from now. it’s wildly irresponsible imo to gamble your future on llms failing when the trend has been the exact opposite.

you also shouldn’t gamble your future on llms being easily available forever. but you don’t have to do either.

the real thing that matters isn’t line-by-line coding ability, it’s a deep understanding of technology. that’s what you should be focusing on. it cuts juniors deep (and by definition, most coders at uni are juniors) because they tend to be the group that focuses the most on the superficial aspects of coding and not on the underlying reasons and technologies, but that focus was always wrong, it just used to be easier to get away with being wrong.

focus on being someone who understands systems and builds things, whether or not you have an ai to help you. programming is not an abstract field judged arbitrarily by how well your peers like you, at the end of the day it’s very results-driven. we build real things, and it matters more what you can build than how you do it. and what you can build directly depends on your understanding of technology, regardless of how much ai is being used at building it. it does not matter if your c++ is 10% more idiomatic or 20% less llm-coded than that of your peers, what matters is if you managed to solve the problem.

even if we assume llms will be more capable in the future, not less, that direction will help you, because most non-coders don’t know what the hell to ask an llm to get something done. they also didn’t know where to start before llms were a thing. it’s your willingness to learn and your understanding of where to go, what to reach for, that sets you apart from an mba with a claude subscription, not your ability to dance around the borrow checker.

tbh as far as those lucrative jobs go, a lot of americans and western europeans also have some reckoning to do. especially in the us, a lot of those jobs come from selling a service to the whole world, which siphons a bunch of money from a whole lot of different countries into the us. so why should only americans be allowed to work those jobs? and if the rest of the world gets tired at that, why shouldn’t they just cut those companies off and make domestic competitors?

it’s crazy that we live in a world where you can do the same job as someone else in the same western coalition – and increasingly, in the same global trading order – and often do it for the same global companies, and yet, get paid wildly differently just based on where you’re from. as long as that is the case, in my opinion it’s already unfair to an immigrant that they had to immigrate to get access to the same opportunities someone else has by default. anti-immigration rhetoric is just deepening that injustice.

welcome to orbanistan, recently renamed for our new glorious leader! we’re the perfect hangout spot for commies for that raw soviet vibe, because we sure as hell haven’t progressed since. indulge yourself in a thousand intricate flavours of hate, walk the depressed streets of our only city, or simply enjoy our currency making you feel like a millionaire just for being able to afford to visit.

lmao

y’know, i used to think that we would get android girlfriends because jensen huang is 62 and you know he wants to bang a robot while he still can. i didn’t expect that the way this would lose its relevance is through him losing his position as ceo, but it’s indeed a very jensen way for him to do it

although now that he’s not saddled with managing nvidia, he can go and focus on it. like he’s still a billionaire

as someone who went through the same, it was mostly lack of attention. i had a vague idea that israel and palestine hated each other, and it was easy to understand from a perspective of israel taking palestinian land, but when you don’t think about it too much it’s easy to both sides it or feel like the supposedly western, supposedly democratic one has a point. i think a lot of people in the west had that vague, unrefined view when oct 7 happened, and it’s easy to stand with someone who just suffered a terror attack.

but it just kept being a focus in media, and the more you look into it, the clearer israel’s crimes against humanity become. and the crazy part is that the vague perspective of israel taking the land for themselves is absolutely correct, but when you see it for the real atrocity it is, rather than an abstract curiosity, it’s impossible to side with the occupiers if you’re not a bigot.

i used to think the us was an incredible place to live, and that most people saying otherwise were just amplifying its faults from a sheltered perspective. one single trip to nyc of all places changed that. it’s impressive how broken the us is, the decay isn’t just an abstract concept, it’s literally everywhere in a physical sense. even places that were supposed to be nice were rough around the edges in so many ways.

(edit: just to clarify, i’m a european)

honestly this is mostly a result of disenfranchisement, not immigration itself. the middle class has a reason to fight through that, while lower classes are protected by their own against a hostile society. make society less hostile and the problem solves itself.

but if you wanna solve mass immigration, you should strive for global equality. even when given unrestricted immigration prospects, people tend to stay put when they don’t have a strong reason to move, and if you knock out economic and military reasons, most immigration tends to happen due to relationships and it’s fairly balanced.

insisting to prevent mass immigration in ways other than trying to solve the root reasons is just insistence on a privileged place in global hierarchy. i don’t think that’s morally sound in any situation.

same tbh. the correct answer is no cars. i still think evs are better to have around than ice cars, but an oversized murder machine shouldn’t be the primary mode of transport, and it will always need to announce its presence.

road noise along major roads is mostly tire noise anyway, and evs still have tires

…there has been a third?

mostly by having the market run out of money to shovel into the ai companies. which is already happening in parallel to this, it’s just difficult to tell how long it’s gonna take.

afaik the anthropic ipo next week is the next potential trigger point

that’s musk, not jensen

tbh i have a theory that the ai bubble itself is what’s holding us up. the llm angle has been explored deeply and optimised to ridiculous levels. what we got out of it is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s not agi yet. it does have the ability to absorb a lot of skills though, both with deliberate training and with incidental exposure during training, so teaching it new tricks is probably going to be a thing all the way until we reach agi, but imo we’re not getting to agi just by building larger llms.

but the problem is, that’s literally the only thing that’s happening today at any reasonable scale. llms have become the same kind of safe investment slop that reboots and sequels are in media, sure it’s guaranteed to be mediocre (in this case, by being expensive to run and having relatively little advantage over existing stuff) but at least there’s very little chance they will fail outright. real r&d, on the other hand, is inherently risky, but it’s how real progress gets made.

after the crash, hardware will be (relatively) cheap and plentiful, both to own and to rent online, and we’ll see investment sour on llms. that will finally open the door for moving past them and finding the next thing. and if agi will ever be made, that’s how it will be made, not by training ever larger llms just to distil them back to the same scale as before with minor tweaks to how attention works. which is pretty much what has been happening in the past 2-3 years.

from what i heard, cold war era slovenia got somewhat close. they were technically in the east bloc, but moscow had enough problems with yugoslavia as-is to micromanage them, so they could implement some common sense policies such as letting a factory fail if it doesn’t work and just doing something else instead, without the common capitalist failings of letting some rich guy own the whole thing or making the bankruptcy the workers’ problem. i haven’t looked into it too deeply, so i expect their system was still imperfect in ways i don’t really know about, but afaik they were rather prosperous for a soviet-allied state.

which is exactly what happens to real world anarchy too, but there is a particular subset of leftists who like to delude themselves into thinking that that only applies to ancaps

honestly, based. marx was cool af, he had impeccable insights into the problems we would be facing today. adding that authoritarian coward lenin is how you turn a commie into a tankie

personally i do consider it a slur and avoid it accordingly, but i think the difference with this one is that colloquial usage took it over entirely. i’m fairly sure the average person does not think of down syndrome when they hear that slur, they just think of a particularly stupid person. which is also how the words “idiot” and “dumb” stopped being slurs over time, even though those also used to refer to medical conditions.

this might differ between cultural backgrounds, i suspect that’s why it was categorised as a slur in contemporary internet culture. but it’s pretty hard to find another slur that doesn’t unambiguously, inseparably refer to a particular group it degrades. with the r-slur, some people do appear to separate it, i think that’s why they insist it’s okay to use.

the ceo of nvidia had an affair with a chinese spy (not this one, a real one), it’s fairly recent news

unpopular opinion, but i’m glad about this. the dems hate hegseth with passion, if he was almost impeached even in a republican congress, it’s practically guaranteed he will be impeached next time anyone tries. and why would the blue tsunami not try?

the real risk would be replacing him too quickly. senate can block his replacement, that’s gonna be a major point of leverage for the upcoming democrat congress. letting the gop rush his replacement would be a blunder, it would burn up all that leverage for nothing.

those no-shows are a genuinely good strategic move. they block the impeachment for now in a deniable way, because it’s gonna go through anyway, and because you can’t replace him if you don’t impeach him first. (unless trump fires him first, but like, fat chance.) however, an impeachment in february leaves trump begging the dems for his next secdef, while an impeachment now would have him scrambling to get a new guy in before the deadline.