FriendOfDeSoto

Are we moving towards an AI jihad? A jihaid, if you will.

Hormuz doesn’t fit in the Dune: Planet Earth narrative for me. We should stop using oil for the sake of the climate yet we don’t. We don’t have to go through that strait with so much trade. We just don’t want to take the detour and price increases. The Dune universe depends on the spice for navigation and I think there isn’t another source. We are still so dependent on oil out of habit and/or stupidity. The mullahs really aren’t the freemen. They are more of a side arm of the Harkonen clan that was provoked by the thoughtless action of the emperor’s real estate developer triggering their typical c@![ish behaviour.

I wonder if the more modern mobile network protocols require slightly more power than the 2-3G of old. It’s probably a rounding error; it would run forever™ minus an hour or so.

It would probably be a miracle if you hadn’t re-farted some molecules.

Yes. The context was internet services.

Giving up Meta products wouldn’t be terrible. But it wouldn’t solve anything. The greatest environmental footprint is left by streaming, I think.

We should all get off the internet, yet here we are. Hypocrisy is the prequel to Idiocracy.

When potatoes came over from the New World, a lot of Europeans grew them as decorative plants. New shit makes people do weird stuff.

Not everybody is trying to make a business with so-called AI. The peddlers are just the loudest.

The companies promise their models can do all this stuff for paying customers. If the models were truly that capable, the so-called AI companies ought to be doing everything with them and be raking in the dough like mad. Which they’re not because they know the limitations of the models. It’s what economists call the bullshit gap between marketing and reality. And by economists I mean me.

A memory wipe would make sense. Or they go back in time, say, to punch some more dinosaurs, come back, and there is just Bob at her station and nobody bats an eye because the timeline was changed. A reverse Sela (the RomYarLin from TNG) move. Because I’d like both of these solutions, I’m very positive they’ll find a far less satisfying one.

I think you could save this one still. People knew his name before he was elected leader because he was imprisoned by his racist government. That’s not really a good thing.

Aung San Suu Kyi, for a short time while in power before she tolerated genocide on her watch, would have sort of fit in the Mandela category as well.

Strange New Worlds is en exercise of writers writing themselves into exceedingly narrow corners if in the end they want to connect to TOS. They had a descendant of Khan on the crew, half the crew dated her, yet none of that comes up when they meet the actual Khan. I wonder how they will connect that story point.

During the wedding episode, nobody sees Trelane as Trelane. They see other people he inhabits. In the daily soap ep, only Pike sees him, and he isn’t around later. So they kind of got that right, I think.

The first coherent space opera was Babylon 5 where one creative mind oversaw everything and in the end wrote all the scripts. The reboot Galactica is another example. You could tell The Expanse was all made up by these two guys. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, a Stargate possibly. But Trek and also Doctor Who all change with their changing writers and over the decades. There are periods where certain people are in charge and there is stability in story and focus. But then their tenure ends and somebody else comes in. And if it all made sense and everybody loved it the same way we’d have nothing to bitch about.

I remember the day when the training wheels came off my bike and it was glorious. The feeling of success you can only feel as a child when you have mastered something you think you should do. They didn’t come off because they were no longer cool. They were never cool to begin with. And you didn’t have much say in the matter anyway.

I am willing to believe that balance bikes to proper bikes is a better learning experience, according to the boffins. That doesn’t mean though that anybody who learned on training wheels is inferior. People who learned to ride a bike like that also won the Tour de France.

That’s ucked fup.

Funny enough it almost never means they care.

The further into the future you are trying to predict the weather, the more the reliability drops. The last time I heard a meteorologist talk about it, it was 5 days into the future for a specific location. Anything more than that was as reliable as reading tea leaves. You can say it’ll rain in Asia 10 days from now but you cannot say with any certainty it’ll rain in this village.

The climate which we ruined will provide us with punishment. Warmer oceans will give us stronger tropical storms. But they’ve gotten pretty good at detecting and outlining their likely paths. That sort of predicting is likely to improve with more storms and more data. Another suitable punishment is torrential train causing flash flooding. In the places with good satellite cover, they can see that and warn people with an hour’s lead time or thereabouts. The time span is short but the prediction accuracy is good.

We as consumers are not good judges of the weatherpeople. We look at our phones and form an opinion. But we don’t investigate where the data came from, which LLM may have added its hallucinations, and what other corners may have been cut to get us this information, which we don’t pay for. So we see it’s pissing down outside, the forecast was for blue skies, ergo the weatherpeople are getting worse at their job. When it is more likely the quality of the free data declined or somebody asked ChatGPT and Claude.

Language has an influence on how one thinks. But this shower thought smacks of too great a generalization to me.

If a guillotine is not okay, how about a piece of cake? It has the French Revolution connection but looks cute and delicious.

The Marie Antoinette quote is probably apocryphal but wgaf.

A home doesn’t equal having a toilet either everywhere on this planet. I remember walking through areas of Shanghai in the early 2000s where chamber pots were collected and emptied in the morning. Erecting a roof is easier than hooking up to water and sewage pipes.

There are places on this planet where mothers just breastfeed in public and nobody cares. There are places where they only do it in private. And then there are places where it’s something in between. Some do it in private because they don’t want creepy stares. Some dgaf any more because they haven’t slept for longer than an hour at a time since giving birth. More reasons exist for either preference.

You laid the creepy landmine yourself so that’s the most likely explanation for any down vote. Also, as a young parent you will learn that nobody cares about your thoughts on parenthood outside of a small circle of close family and friends. The same applies to being shown pictures, or worse, videos of your kid.

Any slightly controversial post illustrated with an image has the look of attempted rage bait too.

I’m not debating you on fashion choices. I’m pointing out that you yourself use class to describe folks. You can’t fight against the class system when you write of “working class” yourself. And in a way that answers your question: it is ingrained in people.

(the typical getup of a white, working-class British lad)

You perpetuate it yourself.

The origin of left and right come from the French revolution. In the first assembly, the pro-monarchists were sitting on the right and the “let’s try something different” folks sat on the left. So strictly speaking, the US political spectrum was entirely on the left (until a narcissist was elected and wouldn’t mind being crowned king).

What’s in a label? The problem is the lack of debate. This team think that makes every idea from the other side stupid by default. A parliamentary system will fail when people stop talking to each other.

And socialism is really only a red rag with a yellow hammer and a sickle in the US. It’s your cold war hangover. Socialists or social democrats exist in most democracies.