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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The byline at the bottom of the article jumped out at me:

    This is a professional journalist and doctor of microbiology. She has spent many many years in education and practice to reach her level of knowledge and ability. Then some editor says “hey I need 1500 words in a story we want you to write covering dudes injecting their junk for cosmetics and athletic performance enhancement. Can you have it done by Tuesday?”. I can just imagine her eyerolling as she accepted the task. Dr. Beth Mole, don’t worry. We still respect your credentials and achievements and understand you just have to pay the bills too.








  • My suggestion (though I’m open to any idea that works) is fines/penalties/settlements for shit like this comes out of their retirement funds.

    My favorite reform approach is for law enforcement officers being required to carry professional insurance. Police are often referring to themselves as professionals. Let them carry insurance like doctors do for malpractice or professional engineers do.

    To ease the transition, I propose that the department cover the base insurance premiums for each officer. If an officer has a judgment against them that raises their insurance premiums, the officer is now responsible for paying for the overage out of their own pocket. If the officer continues to exhibit behavior that results in judgments against them, their premiums will continue to rise eventually to the point where the bad officer cannot afford the overage premiums and will then have to stop working as police because they are not carrying the required insurance. So bad officers will self select out.

    There’s also another angle where the base premiums will likely be calculated based upon the entire department. If there is a badly behaved officer, this will raise the base rate of all officers too, so the department has a financial incentive to get rid of bad officers because they are too expensive.


  • I have never intentionally put words in your mouth. The best I can figure after rereading our entire thread is that you’re jumping around on different points but giving no clues in the conversation you’re doing that. As in, I’m responding to one of your points, but you’re providing a rebuttal for a completely different point of your own.

    In this conversation I’ve been trying to restate what I’m seeing as your interpretation in an attempt to confirm we’re communicating, but then I get another response indicating we’re not communicating.

    There’s two possibilities I see as to whats happening here:

    • your thesis and points are not logically consistent

    OR

    • we are simply not able to communicate effectively with one another today

    For the purposes of civility, I’m not going to make a judgment one which one these it is. I’ll let you give your downvote button a rest and simply bow out talking more with you today. Maybe in the future we’ll have better luck with one another.


  • Robot automation has not lowered the quality of a Ford vehicle

    I never said that and the quality of a ford truck is irrelevant to the assembly worker who lost their job due to automation.

    You need to back up because you have gone down a tangent alone.

    I agree we’re down a tangent, but I’m following the logic of your responses. This is a response to your original thesis: “AI robots can be utter shit”. Then you introduced the ford example for automation, which isn’t shit for assembly.

    Which point to you want to back up to that would change our conversation path?

    The notion that people won’t eat sawdust bread is demonstrably false with many historical examples proving you wrong.

    I’m glad you saw those. I specifically chose sawdust in my example because of those events in history. Those support what I’m talking about. When the adulteration of the food became bad enough, people stopped eating it.

    Your stipulation about zero flour is a moving goalpost and a strawman fyi

    My “zero flour” comment is a response to your original thesis where you said: “quality of service can drop indefinitely.”

    It can’t be indefinitely. There’s a point where people will stop consuming it when it gets bad enough.


  • And yet youtube is still the dominant video host.

    Youtube hasn’t descended to being unusable yet.

    You’re missing the point entirely. If instead of luxuries you look through the lens of necessities perhaps you’ll see. Like replace cookies with bread and try tell me people will choose to starve first. Like obviously not.

    I think you’re missing the point. If we substitute bread in the example I gave and they’re putting sawdust in it, then yes people will not buy bread made with zero flour, but instead made with sawdust. Yes, people will stop buying bread in that situation because they would die anyway because the bread doesn’t produce nutritional value.

    Ask a ford employee 30 years ago about robot automation. Like this is not a new thing in the 2020s. The rich have a playbook for this.

    Now you’re speaking against your original point. Robot automation has not lowered the quality of a Ford vehicle. If anything it has increased it. A robot can have assembly tolerances much tighter than a human. Where is the lowering of quality from a robot making the vehicle that your original thesis demands?


  • AI robots can be utter shit and they will still be leaps and bounds more efficient than the task specific automation that has been replacing human workers for decades.

    I disagree with this, and we already have live examples today that are good analogs. Youtube is being flooded with AI generated slop. AI generated scripts, read by AI generated voices, over top of AI generated images.

    I never seek these out, and actively avoid them when I can tell what they are before clicking on them. In that first 2 seconds of AI generated voice, I can tell this is slop and stop watching it seeking a human generated video instead.

    As long as the rich maintain their monopolies quality of service can drop indefinitely. Doesn’t matter if AI robots suck ass when no human employed company can compete and every other option is just as ass.

    It can’t. At some point the quality of the product drops to a level it is no longer a product. Lets say we’re in your theoretical dystopian future where the monopoly exists for cookies. There is no other place to buy cookies except from the monopoly. You posit that quality can drop indefinitely as there is zero alternative sources for cookies. So lets say the monopoly cookie brand was deciding to substitute some of the wheat flower with sawdust as a cost saving measure with the consequence being yet lower quality cookies. At a tiny fraction of sawdust you may notice it, but the sawdust cookie may still be better than no cookie. The monopoly continues to increase the sawdust content until the cookie contains zero wheat flour and is entirely substituted with sawdust. I believe even you would concede you would no longer buy the sawdust cookies at this point. Further, you would have stopped buying them earlier when the sawdust content became so high that the cookie was inedible to you even though it contained some wheat flour at that point.

    This same thing will apply to Youtube. If the only thing left to watch on youtube is AI slop because no human creators exist, then there is no point in watching youtube anymore.

    The point here, is that even with a monopoly on a product, as soon as the quality drops below a certain threshold (and this point is different for every consumer), the product stops being a product to them.





  • Under which rock does he live?

    Under the rock where reading comprehension exists apparently.

    Where he was prompting for “What is 2+2?” to the LLMs, the accuracy of the answer was immaterial. At that step he was comparing two systems and simply needed a static question to give both system to compare the internal processes to determine why they arrived at different outputs (or a what appeared to be race condition/infinite loop for one) when the result should be identical to both irrespective of how right or wrong the answer is to the prompt. The LLM answer from the LLM could have been “ham sandwich” and it still would have served his purposes.




  • Yes, colonoscopy prep sucks. I had to drink 4 liters of fluid, wait 6 hours, and do it all over again. I lined up 10 glasses and drained one every 12 minutes for 2 hours.

    There’s also a version of the prep that is only 2 liters. Its more concentrated, but I can do that easier for me than the 4 liters.

    Another vote for getting colonoscopy screening. I had two precancerous polyps they found. Confusingly, precancerous doesn’t mean they are cancer, but rather the type of polyps that turn into cancer. Both were removed during the procedure. With that there’s no more actions or risk needed except a followup colonoscopy in 3 years. If they found no polyps its a followup in 10 years.

    Also if its a colonoscopy screening, and because of the ACA, the entire procedure is covered by insurance as its a wellness screening. If they are doing a colonoscopy because you’re reporting problems, then its a “diagnostics” colonoscopy and you can get charged for it. The price tag on mine was slightly over $2500, but was 100% covered because it was a screening. Get your colonoscopy before you have problems and spend your $2500 on something else you want in your life!

    Call today and get an appointment for this. When I called the soonest appointment was about 5 months out. Call today to get yours booked.

    We lost a family member to colon cancer. She was 34 years old.

    Don’t put this off. Get it done, people.