Just gonna leave this here!

That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!

The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.

A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!

Most of the games I buy today are less than $10 anyway. What I want from games has really changed, and a lot of the time I’m just playing free Roguelikes rather than commercial games.

We didn’t buy most games when I was a kid, we rented them. There were countless games we paid $5 to rent for a week and that was plenty of time to finish the whole game and return it.

I only had one rich friend who had like a hundred games he owned. He let me borrow some of them but most of them I had already rented and finished myself. There were only a few games I ended up owning myself, such as Tecmo Super Bowl and the Legend of Zelda.

Some games could also be bought used for a lot less than full price (at stores such as The Games Exchange). They also bought games back from you when you were done with them!

If I could time travel to live back then as an adult I would rent everything and only buy a game if I foresaw wanting to play it long after a week was up.

The issue with “easy mode” is that it can be disabled. Scammers can and will find ways to trick grandma into disabling easy mode on her devices and then get her to install malware.

No, the ram is integrated into the CPU.

They’re still working for a company that engages in mass data collection and selling people’s private info to the highest bidder. A union at the company doesn’t make that ethical.

Not sure what that means. He’s not Jesus. There’s no need to worship him! We can take the good and criticize the bad.

Luigi could’ve passed the screening check to become the guy’s bodyguard. Maybe he even would’ve had a better opportunity to escape.

Many, many ruthless tyrants and other nasty people have been killed by their own bodyguards over the years. And these are often guards who have been properly vetted.

How vetted are these Uber rentacops gonna be? No criminal record doesn’t mean you can trust the person if you’re some ruthless bastard with a lot of enemies.

There’s a big cultural difference. Taiwanese workers, like Chinese, Korean, and Japanese workers as well, have a much higher tolerance for long work hours and less pay.

All of these East Asian cultures have long-standing social norms against complaining and refusing to work hard. It’s a collectivist culture of work that puts the success of the company ahead of the individual’s interests. In return, companies tend to be loyal to workers so it’s very common to stay at one company for your whole career.

We westerners used to have similar values back in the 1950s and earlier. That all changed during the counterculture.

A lot of FOSS development isn’t rich developers donating their free time, it’s paid developers who were hired by their company to work on an open source project the company deems crucial to their business.

It is enshittification and it’s how they make money. But my point is that fixing enshittification doesn’t fix daring apps in the long term.

I can’t blame enshittification on this one. The dating app model doesn’t work, period. Even in the case of a completely free, non-profit app, you still have the problem that as people pair off they leave the dating pool.

The fundamental problem is that there’s a nonzero subpopulation of people who either have no interest in or are incapable of forming a stable long term relationship. As the dating pool filters over time, these folks get more and more concentrated in the population. This leads to the experience getting worse and worse for people who are interested and capable because they keep matching up with the wrong people.

The issue is if those new singles enter the rough zone (full of people who have not had much success) they’re going to have a very bad experience. Probably the best experience is for then to pair off against other new singles and depart. Some will end up doing that but others will end up stuck in the mud like everyone else.

And that’s the point. When it works, they lose 2 customers forever.

It’s a filtering process that removes all the diamonds in the rough. All that’s left is the rough.

And how much do you use dating apps now?

More like a brothel for sex addicts.

I love Zelda 2’s map. It’s quite large but doesn’t take too long to traverse due to the overworld movement. The forced encounter zones as you get further away from Hyrule Castle make it feel very epic though and getting to the Great Palace feels like a big achievement!

The process is simple and simple enough to do safely with automatic equipment without exposing workers directly to the lead. However Europe seems intent on phasing out lead acid batteries completely via suppression of demand with taxes.

Lead acid batteries truly are an example of an old and highly reliable technology with some tradeoffs. Yes, everyone knows lead is toxic, however modern battery designs are very well sealed so they never leak. The other tradeoff is that lead is very heavy such that lead acid batteries are too heavy for electric car use. However this last tradeoff doesn’t matter so much for stationary (such as a household) or low power (such as a motorcycle or ebike) use. In fact I would go so far as to argue that lead acid batteries are safer than lithium for some uses due to the latter’s fire risks.

Lithium batteries are not simple to recycle. They’re full of plastic which is wrapped in many fine layers like a roll of cling-film that’s been baked together. To recycle they probably have to be burned and the lithium re-smelted from them and then remanufactured in an energy and materials-intensive process.

From what I can tell, lead acid batteries in Europe have taxes applied to them to pay for recycling. Other places don’t have these taxes so lead acid batteries are very cheap there.

Having said that, I watched a video of a guy in Bangladesh recycling lead acid batteries by hand just using simple tools and a pot to melt the lead over a wood fire and a simple mold to pour the lead plates.

It’s a very basic, easy thing to do. It’s just labour intensive so it ends up very expensive if you have to pay Europeans to do it.