I totally agree with that. I’ve also found Google worse about being influenced by SEO tactics (probably just because it’s targeted for that) and so you get bogus results like GeeksForGeeks that are often really poorly written and irrelevant, sometimes even wrong, up at the top.
Canada is a bit of a mess too, although different. We never really use miles, but we do use feet and inches and pounds pretty regularly. The construction industry is a real mess in particular because so many things are measured in either imperial or metric units
Refused to invent the engine? This is a new conspiracy to me
It’s true in a capitalist system for sure. Automation causes fewer people to be responsible for more profit, so fewer people see the benefit of it. Capitalists argue it will just cause prices to fall, but a) to what, if many people can’t find a stable job, and b) prices are quick to rise but slow to fall, nobody wants to take a loss on what they paid for/forecast, and businesses implementing this tech certainly aren’t expecting to have to lower prices. Less money getting you more value increases the value of money - also known as deflation, and something economists avoid as it’s quite painful.
Automation itself can be good for humans though. I don’t think people should be stuck doing a bullshit job nobody really needs just because we don’t want to eliminate a job. Our goal as human society should be for people to have more and more choice over how they spend their own time. Even if we eliminate basically all necessary work from human existence, creative works have intrinsic value to the people who create them at the very least, and often value to many other people as well - AI will never eliminate that even if AI becomes very creative itself.
Mandatory work should be something we try to eliminate, and replaced by people generally being able to choose to do whatever they want within reason. This is not something that makes any sense in a capitalist system, so rather than attacking automation and keeping capitalism just because that creates a more equal income distribution, we should be working toward replacing capitalism with something better, and automation is a part of getting there.
Yup, that’s how I see it too. I don’t like seeing ads, the creators do at least get more money, and the actual value I get out of YouTube is pretty high
Bard doesn’t truly think, it’s just going to be reflective of the most commonly written perspective in its source material
NL is neither a Nordic country nor ethnically homogeneous. Just like all countries with a history of colonizing other people, many of those people are now in NL. Stop blaming everything on diversity
It probably won’t, but I think it will get better.
I assume they can power the train AI by pantograph or third rail - no reason to have nuclear powered trains, this isn’t Factorio.
How many people did the Fukushima incident actually kill? Meanwhile people are actively being killed by air pollution and climate change caused by fossil fuel energy. Nuclear energy incidents seem worse because they happen over a short period of time, but it’s just like with airplanes - plane crashes are horrific and disastrous, but statistically airplanes are massively safer than even rail and especially road transport.
It requires good governance and adherence to safety standards and upkeep to be safe, but we’ve shown that we can reasonably do that for the most part.
Renewables should of course be the first priority, though lithium mining is also a significant health hazard - but really when you compare everything statistically and not just by the significance of individual events, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be trying to eliminate fossil fuels by any feasible means, and that includes nuclear power.
They just saw that video on Roblox and said “yeah that sounds great, let’s do that”
They’re active in comments, but they’re also a small minority
Yeah I don’t think this is completely true. I’m not in Gen Z but close enough and I do see that they’re a lot more accepting of a broad spectrum of attitudes toward sex, and that includes asexuality, but I think they’re also quite accepting of people being quite the opposite of that. I think where they get more weirded out and are willing to say so is when people - and because of patriarchy, it’s almost always men, but not always toward women - make sexual comments about real people who aren’t explicitly inviting that. That’s something that has been declining in acceptability over time anyway and Gen Z just more commonly takes it a bit farther, and has a better understanding of consent. But I’ve really never seen this “women aren’t capable of consenting” thing outside of a strawman for people who want to pretend it exists by misinterpreting real criticism.
What do you think about the argument that it keeps costs down when things are generally getting more expensive? In effect, you might actually still be benefiting from lower prices without ever knowing it.
I don’t know that I always buy this, but I can see the logic of it and I think it may be true sometimes, especially if things are competitive enough that being able to keep your prices down is more beneficial to business than putting the savings straight into profits.
Otherwise I think probably rather than customers seeing direct benefits from lower prices, an attempt to capture more of the excess profits of automation with taxation is needed.
Linux, if we’re counting the entire userland and typical components rather than just the kernel and its interface, definitely has worse (binary) compatibility than Windows, and potentially even Mac OS. The only saving grace is things like Flatpak which bundle the entire system tree they need with them and therefore have pretty long-lasting binary compatibility. But it’s quite normal to have to recompile some old software from scratch when some common system libraries get updated, really only core things like glibc have long-lasting binary compatibility, and you can’t even guarantee that compatible system libraries still exist even when compiling from source sometimes, because every project has a different approach to backward compatibility.
Now, to be honest, things are much better with containerization (like flatpak/snap/docker/etc.), but that doesn’t really help you much for software that’s older than those unless someone bothers to try to figure out all of the dependencies and package them up and it still works. The only reason why it seems to be okay is that Linux distributions recompile all of the deps for you every time something changes and you get everything all at once, so you rarely see any of that all break. But if you have anything compiled from source, and you didn’t statically link the whole thing, you’ll see the problem.
Sounds more like the Rules of Acquisition to me.
The only place I’ve ever seen this in Canada is at some private liquor stores. They have a tip prompt. I guess in theory someone could help you to decide what you want and make recommendations, but in practice how much does that happen and how much is it really worth? I think it feels like just shaming your customers for not paying your own employees’ wages, tbh.
If you’re actually in Tokyo - tbh this isn’t anything new most other places, I’ve been using self-checkouts for like 15 years, and I don’t really see much of a reason to have someone do a job that isn’t really necessary and just makes me feel awkward, standing there while someone basically does a robot job. But honestly in Japan it makes a ton of sense to try to introduce self checkouts. Part-time staff are incredibly overworked, there’s much fewer part-time workers available compared to demand, and most people who have worked a part-time job in Japan can attest that it’s incredibly easy to find a job that doesn’t pay very much and isn’t very fulfilling. It’s quite a different situation from full-time jobs, which are incredibly hard to find and still overwork you doing meaningless work.
Is it just that as a paying customer, you don’t feel that you should any of your own effort to that service? Because if so, that’s practically impossible, and maybe not even desirable. The best kind of working environment is one in which workers, customers, and employers all empathize with each other and do their best to make things easier. And as an example of something that customers are sometimes expected to do, there are a lot of cheap self-service restaurants in Japan like soba shops and such where you bring the tray to your table on your own and then clean up after yourself and bring it back to the tray return area. This isn’t common in all parts of the world, and someone who isn’t used to it might protest and say that they’re paying the wages of the people who work there, so why should they have to serve themselves? But it’s just part of the system there and it cuts down on the workload - you would be rude to not respect that.
If you think businesses are just pocketing the difference and it’s leading to greater profits, the only real way to address that is to either encourage greater competition and for example break up monopolies, or implement price controls. But it doesn’t make sense to employ people to do something when labour can be used more efficiently on something else.
Damn, where? There’s one chain of grocery stores in my area where you have to join their rewards program to get their sales, but it’s just an information grab - no credit card or anything, it’s free, but the points are pretty much garbage. Also, you really want to get the sale prices, because half the store is on sale at any given time and the regular prices are awful.
I agree with that - iOS looks good but Android is actually more functional to get stuff done in. Though, caveat being whose Android - some vendor customizations are horrifying