predictions for the trump admin?
TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Hot Take: the damage from RFK Jr will be limited by the fact that he's messing with the money for several large industries, particularly agriculture and pharmaceuticals. They have bottomless pockets and aren't afraid to bribe the bribable. There will be damage, but he'll be crushed like a bug in the end.
Also, he clearly annoys the orange guy, can offer him nothing in return now that the election is over, and has already been the victim of a ritual humiliation (e.g. being forced to partake in a McDonald's meal for the camera), which is the first sign of a Trump guy being de-emphasized.
Hopefully the established capitalists will protect us from the fascists' worst excesses hasn't been much of a winning bet historically.
oh no, nothing is protecting us, you're 100% right there. Eating food is about to become much more of a dicey proposition.
It is still safe to assume, though, that the ghouls who run Pfizer and ConAgra will bend their resources to protecting the bag from a disposable nutjob.
mine:
prediction 1: he dies halfway through. funniest way would be another pandemic gets him
prediction 2: he doesn't die. it will be exactly the same as the first admin but infinitely worse. everyone will hate and backstab each other, they will constantly get fired and rehired and fired like reality tv, there will be a constant dribble of horrible things happening, then in four years there's a coup attempt
prediction 3: elon doesn't last a year, possibly doesn't even make it six months
If they do press conferences this time around, ever question should just be "does Elon approve of decision ____ ?" Will drive Trump fkn insane.
Despite worrying my brains out about getting deported from my home of 14 years because I wasn’t born in this godforsaken place, I’m extremely excited that Elon will get fired in the next 6 months or less. Gives me life to think about him getting very publicly humiliated by an even greater piece of shit than he is.
now seeing EAs being deeply concerned about RFK running health during a H5N1 outbreak
dust specks vs leopards
Anyone here read "World War Z"? There's a section there about how the health authorities in basically all countries supress and deny the incipient zombie outbreak. I think about that a lot nowadays.
Anyway the COVID response, while ultimately better than the worst case scenario (Spanish Flu 2.0) has made me really unconvinced we will do anything about climate change. We had a clear danger of death for millions of people, and the news was dominated by skeptics. Maybe if it had targetted kids instead of the very old it would have been different.
It's not just systemic media head-up-the-assery, there's also the whole thing about oil companies and petrostates bankrolling climate denialism since the 70s.
When I run into "Climate change is a conspiracy" I do the wide-eyed look of recognition and go "Yeah I know! Have you heard about the Exxon files?" and lead them down that rabbit hole. If they want to think in terms of conspiracies, at least use an actual, factual conspiracy.
The way many of the popular rat blogs started to endorse Harris in the last second before the US election felt a lot like an attempt at plausible deniability.
Sure we've been laying the groundwork for this for decade, but we wanted someone from our cult of personality to undermine democracy and replace it with explicit billionaire rule, not someone with his own cult of personality.
If H5N1 does turn into a full-blown outbreak, part of me expects it'll rack up a heavier deathtoll than COVID.
At work, I've been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that's why it's called work.
The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.
The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.
Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save... (drumroll)... Approximately nothing!
But if we hadn't done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.
We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.
There's got to be some kind of licensing clarity that can be actually legislated. This is just straight-up price gouging through obscurantism.
My professor is typing questions into chat gpt in class rn be so fucking for real
gentlemen, this means war
-me imagining myself paying to sit through that
He's using it to give examples of exam question answers. The embarrassment
I mean, that kind of suggests that you could use chatGPT to confabulate work for his class and he wouldn't have room to complain? Not that I'd recommend testing that, because using ChatGPT in this way is not indicative of an internally consistent worldview informing those judgements.
We're going to be answering two essay questions in an in-class test instead of writing a paper this year specifically to prevent chat gpt abuse. Which he laughed and joked about because he really believes chat gpt can produce good results !
I'm pretty sure you could download a decent markov chain generator onto a TI-89 and do basically the same thing with a more in-class appropriate tool, but speaking as someone with dogshit handwriting I'm so glad to have graduated before this was a concern. Godspeed, my friend.
I'd pipe up and go "uhhh hey prof, aren't you being paid to, like, impart knowledge?"
(I should note that I have an extremely deficient fucks pool, and do not mind pissing off fuckwits. but I understand it's not always viable to do)
"So, professor sir, are you OK with psychologically torturing Black people, or do you just not care?"
It was there and gone fairly quickly and I wouldn't say I'm a model student so I didn't say anything. I've talked to him about Chat GPT before though...