• 2 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Dictatorships are not intrinsically bad.

    You can have good dictators, even if they are rare.

    Hard disagree there.

    But it really depends on what you value as good and bad.

    For instance, if you think that people have an inherent right to have a say in how they are governed, then a dictatorship can never be good because it infringes on that right in the most serious of ways.

    If you think a stable and sustainable system of government that will last beyond the life of a few leaders is important, then dictatorship is not a good system, because one good dictator creates no guarantee that the next dictator will be good, and establishing a system of dictatorship affords a bad dictator that much more power to ruin lives.





  • IT guy here, I am not that worried about AI

    That’s pretty much because you’re an IT guy. You’re in an industry that AI won’t replace any time soon.

    If you were a cashier, or a stock clerk, or a busboy, you should be terrified by AI. The speed at which those jobs are already vanishing is astounding. The other day I was at a restaurant, and I never interacted with a human. The ordering was done by touch panel at my table, the food was delivered to the table by a robot and I paid at an automated terminal. I don’t know how many staff were on duty but it had to be a fraction of what it would have been a decade ago. I bought clothes last week and there was one employee in the store, overseeing the self-checkout lanes (but really just sitting idly by in case anyone had issues). I read an article yesterday about how robots are now being distributed to convenience stores that can clean, stock, and reorder items, so these shops will pretty soon have only one employee in them.

    The gimmicky shit that your browser AI and chatbots can do is nothing compared to how this is already revolutionizing the world.














  • Considering that Taiwan has been de facto an independent country for a long time, its easy to see why “forever maintaining the status quo” is the best choice for most people.

    Declaring independence from China when they are already functionally independent from China would just be kicking a hornet’s nest. The outcome of a war with China would end in either a bloody defeat in which their country would be leveled and their freedoms taken away, or a bloody victory resulting in… the current status quo, just with lots of dead people.

    So why would your average citizen desire anything but the status quo? They’re already a free country, this question is just asking them if they’d like a war for the fun of it, or their freedoms taken away.


  • I agree Reddit is toxic. I’d argue reddit actually stopped being Reddit around 2016. But it’s posts like this that clog it all up and are partially why it is the way it is today.

    I gotta agree with this. The toxicity in any reddit thread increases dramatically when the poster pre-emptively complains about all the toxicity they expect to receive. Whereas when you just ask straight without going into a whole speech about comment quality, you get much better replies. Particularly because it’s hijacking your own thread; changing it from whatever question you wanted to ask into an analysis of the comments.