Immigration is such a horseshit issue. Why are people dumb enough to fall for this shit?

Immigration will be “solved” come January, but not because Trump will actually do anything about it, but he’ll just say the problem is solved and then stop talking about it.

Too late for that.

Small acts of rebellion. Take extra long breaks. Automate parts of my job and then don’t tell anybody that I did it. Break some shit on purpose and act like it was an accident. Steal as much stuff that isn’t nailed down as possible. The list would go on, but I’d honestly have no idea what I would actually do in that situation.

I’m certainly not giving it 100% at whatever job I’m working at. I would say form a union, but that’s hard to do when you are working for 56 hour workweeks plus commute, not including overtime. That’s assuming the 7 day workweek remains 8 hour shifts rather than moving down to something like 6 hour shifts with an unpaid lunch break.

More wine, Your Grace?

On that note, Melchior would make for a metal af middle name.

I’d like to believe that the only reason 2020 got so ratfucked in the first place was that Trump was intentionally not putting the screws on anybody to do their jobs.

A second Jan 6th won’t happen, at least not this year. A MAGA mob will show up at the capitol and be met by a fully prepared and well armed national guard, because Biden is the commander in chief and he’s going to take threats like that seriously.

If the house declines to elect a speaker, Biden could in theory put pressure on them to pick one. The constitutional crisis can swing both directions - yes the Republicans will likely try to avoid certification, but then Biden could threaten to not step down unless the certification happens, or hand over the reigns to VP Harris anyway by resigning. I don’t see it working in their favor to try something like not certifying or not electing a speaker, because they don’t have the luxury of Trump in the white house to look the other way at their bad behavior.

I imagine that a university level coding assignment and the backend code that runs the Twitter.com website (albeit just fractions of it) are several orders of magnitude apart from each other in terms of size and complexity. I don’t know shit about programming though, I took C++ in high school and got a D+. Should’ve called the class Introduction to D++.

This emoji has two meanings:

1. the “original” meaning is based on the “shaka sign” from Hawai’ian culture. It’s often paired with the phrase “hang loose”, which generally just means to relax, have a good time, etc.

2. When mobile telephones first started to become mainstream, they would have an antenna that extended up and out of the phone chassis a speaker and a receiver that you would speak directly into, so people picked up this gesture that mimicked the shape of a cell phone. Pressing it against your cheek with the pinky finger in front of your mouth and the thumb covering the opening of your ear would be accompanied by saying or mouthing “call me” was pretty universally understood and was one way to communicate the desire to speak on the phone from a distance where you could still visually see someone but shouting was ineffective or impractical.

edit: some people have clarified that the gesture predates cell phones, which makes sense.

I could have full conversations with CleverBot a decade ago, but nobody was calling that AI then or even now. People generally recognized it for what it was - a heuristic model chatbot. These LLMs are just overgrown chatbots that still lack the capability of understanding anything it says to you other than how certain words relate to one another.

.com websites didn’t disappear after the dotcom bubble burst either. AI is definitely in a massive bubble right now, but something being in a bubble doesn’t mean it’s going to vanish completely. The AI companies with some substance backing them will weather the upcoming storm.

Full disclosure: I don’t hate AI, but I hate that management-types are fellating themselves to the idea of it or the things than it can potentially do, rather than something that is providing them some kind of concrete benefit right now. I’m also mad at consumers for being stupid little sheep and paying a premium for anything that companies just happen to slap an “AI-powered” sticker on. It’s like organic produce 2.0 - you have to have it, but we can’t explain why, nor can we elaborate on what it does better than it’s contemporary.

Judge shopping and legislation via court ruling have called into question the fairness and legitimacy of a once ironclad judicial system. It’s being gamed right now by the wealthy and powerful to get what they want.

He won’t do a second debate release his medical records, or go on 60 Minutes, but he’ll stand in front of a fry cooker for a 20 minute photo op because he thinks Kamala Harris lied about… *checks notes* working at McDonalds? And what exactly does this prove? Is anybody really going to be fooled into believing that the dude born into wealth and living in a gilded tower will suddenly manifest some empathy for the common man’s plight by working one shift at a Mickey D’s?

Like 90% of the consumers using this tech are totally fine handing over tasks that require reasoning to LLMs and not checking the answers for accuracy.

Unfortunately, a lot of smart people are under his spell too. I had to listen to the CEO of a medium sized company wax poetic about how he’s a super genius and the greatest boon to human ingenuity in a century, desperately trying to hold my tongue as I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull.

I think he’s an okay businessman. That’s about as much praise as I’m willing to afford him. He’s definitely charismatic enough to convince a room full of investors that the ideas he’s pitching are worthwhile. Part of that is that his passion for these projects are genuine, and when you put somebody in a room with a passionate guy, the enthusiasm tends to rub off on them just a little.

Most of his investments that garnered him his wealth are just him being at the right place at the right time. Getting in on PayPal when Ecommerce was in it’s infancy and partnering with Ebay to take advantage of shopaholics who just couldn’t help themselves. Buying his way into Tesla right when EVs were primed to take off and pushing hard for an economy class variant that could be mass produced rapidly (in an already-made factory that Toyota closed down, no less!). Founding SpaceX and pouring a shit ton of his own money into rocket and aeronautics R&D right around the time the U.S. Government was looking for cheap contractors to take over the space program. I think the only project he miscalculated on was buying Twitter for way too much money when social media was really starting to stagnate.

His politics are fucking weird, though. Him being a Trump nutter is really not helping his “I’m a genius” image. I find his personality to be pretty repugnant. I already didn’t like him because back in the early days of Tesla he pushed all the management to essentially become slavedrivers for the line workers. I live in California near the plant and I had friends who worked there in production that got nearly worked to death, extreme overtime and weekend shifts, few breaks, the only saving grace was the above average pay that kind of kept them trapped in that hell of a job for way too long. Then the whole Thai soccer team incident happened and I was so over him. Haven’t heard anything about him since that has made me feel like he deserves to be the richest cunt in the fucking universe.

Trump has had multiple assassination attempts on him this year, and each time it happens Trump blames Democratic rhetoric as the motivating force.

Of course, anybody who took even a cursory look into the motives of each would-be assassin (and let’s be frank, it’s a big stretch to call some of these guys assassins - getting caught with a loaded weapon near where Trump is located is apparently enough to be considered an assassination attempt, even if Trump was never in any danger) they are often Republicans who absolutely hate the Democrats, so they wouldn’t be listening to their political rhetoric anyway which has been nothing short of “Political violence is not the solution, let’s win at the ballot box in November.”

Meanwhile, Trump is promising to be a dictator on day one, promoting eugenics, deploying the armed forces to deport legal residents, threatening to prosecute and jail his political opponents and revoke the 1st amendment rights of his critics, but refuses to answer calls to “turn the temperature down”.

Regardless of it’s performance, it’s astronomically overvalued. Tesla’s market cap is larger than 5 of the nearest rivals combined. The value of their shares doesn’t reflect reality.

But reality inevitably catches up. Their last quarterlies were not looking good. The market is saturated with EVs now and Tesla is going to struggle to attract new customers, especially with the divisive politics of Elon Musk. About the only reason Tesla is still dominant in North America is because they are still the cheapest in town, but that is reflected in the shoddy build quality and bare bones interior.

It won’t be $30k, it won’t be full self driving, it won’t be ready for production by by 2027, it won’t replace all cars on the road by 2075.

It’s shocking that people aren’t calling him out on the fact that he also promised every Tesla on the road today would be capable of becoming a robotaxi, which was just an outrageous lie at the time and evidently they are no longer working towards making that plan a reality anymore if they’re designing dedicated autonomous vehicles. Letting him pitch a new robotaxi idea feels like letting him get away not having to face any consequences for his blatant bullshit.

Twitch already does this for their livestreams and has been doing it for years. I’m just surprised that YouTube has taken this long to get around to injecting advertisements into the video stream. Although I think if YouTube decided to try ad injection the adblocking community would fire back with something novel to thwart their efforts and the eternal arms race would continue.

Maybe it’s because I’m not from hurricane country, but I’ll never understand why people refuse to leave when told. Are they afraid looters are going to get their stuff? Then just file an insurance claim when you get back. People seem so obstinately stubborn about it for no discernable reason.

I think as long as we continue to develop newer and better medicinal techniques, we’ll reach the point where we can keep our bodies together long enough to enjoy old age as much as we do middle age.

I see a lot of really cool medical advancements on the horizon from regrowing natural teeth all the way to literal “reverse aging” of brain cells, none of which are going to grant us immortality or multi-century lifespans, but will probably make it so that we can go into the twilight years with less pain and more cognitive function than our ancestors who had to endure the agony without being able to die in dignity.