Real world experience can help, but what we have now is also too stupid to recognize when it’s succeeding or failing. It just greedily gobbles up inputs and feedback indiscriminately.
There’s currently no way to know if the necessary advancement, to advance independently of humans, is 2 years or 2000 years away.
Even so, nature tells us that advancement probably isn’t coming at all. It’s not needed, so long as there are billions of humans available to partner with.
Makes sense. Google has been replacing skilled engineers with tail-eating AI regurgitation engines, which are getting progressively worse as they eat their own shit.
But I’ve been told those regurgitation engines are about to get really smart and replace all skilled labor.
So maybe it’ll be fine.
Or maybe, as we’ve already started to see, more and more useful stuff will only be available via the Internet wayback machine, until they kill it.
I’m actually a beautiful woman. They will both have to agree to substantial surgeries before they agree to play me.
David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, with a made-up have surgery scene mid-film to explain the change.
Earth, obviously. Or rather, where we think we left it…
Some other good answers already but here’s a sound byte version:
It’s currently expensive to borrow money, and then the borrowed money isn’t as useful as it used to be.
Interesting! I learned something here. Thank you.
Interesting bit from Wikipedia:
Had Metternich not stood in the way of “progress”, Austria might have reformed, dealt better with its problems of nationality, and the First World War might never have happened.[94] Instead, Metternich chose to fight an overwhelmingly fruitless war against the forces of liberalism and nationalism.[95] Heavy censorship was just one of a range of repressive instruments of state available to him that also included a large spy network.[72] Metternich opposed electoral reform, criticising Britain’s 1832 Reform Bill.[96] In short, he locked himself into an embittered battle against “the prevailing mood of his age”.[97]
Sounds familiar. He’s certainly not the last person to do so…
Dark theme and accessible color contrast enforced by default.
If the site owner makes stupid choices, my browser should ignore them.
Edit: And an automatic switch to light theme if I decode to print something, obviously. I wasn’t raised in a barn.
There’s tons of free options for XMPP clients and servers.
I do this on purpose, to annoy any friend who catches a ride with me.
Walking up to my Ford Tempo, “I thought you drive a Cadillac?!”
“That’s its nickname.”
If it’s an acquaintance, I try to ignore it and let it go. It’s awkward, but I’m probably not the only person who finds them attractive. I focus on what I think it takes to be a comfortable positive interaction for them, even if my natural reactions probably do show through.
If it’s a close friend, I would feel free to - in private - mention to them the effect of their (current) wardrobe, and just ask if they mind my enjoying the view.
“X is showing, when Y. It doesn’t bother me, I love the way you look. But I thought I would check if you’re aware and comfortable with it. I’m probably the tallest person here, I can just stand a bit further away, today, if you need me to.”
My saying something in private gives a chance to adjust, if what is showing is not what they were hoping for.
If exactly what they intended is showing, they can call me a prude; I can say sorry I thought better to check; and we can laugh it off.
And, of course, I try to respect whatever preference they share, regarding how they want to be looked at.
Are you radically different than your younger self?
Oh yes. Younger me was an intolerable little shit.
Are there key elements that have stayed the same? > Most parts?
Lots of stuff. Getting older is mostly additive, hobby wise. I’m just worse at all the physical aspects of each hobby.
Do you feel as if you’ve followed the “roadmap of life” or forged your own path?
I had a pretty clear plan and stuck to it. Make the pretty beep beep computer box dance, and charge people money for doing so.
Have there been “chapters” or do things all sort of slide into one contiguous flow?
Definitely separate chapters. 0-2: Literally full of shit. 2-22: Full of shit, because I didn’t know any better. 22-32: Full of shit, but working on improving. 32-42: Getting my shit together. 42-62: Still full of shit, after all that effort. 62-Dead: Probably still full of shit, honestly. Hopefully in a fun way, by now.
Mine is a collection of notes that I want to reference later. Sometimes I share a link with someone who is interested in the same topic.
The front couple of pages have my social media biography and a link to my public resume. Stuff that looks good if a potential employer searches for my name.
The rest is poorly organized notes for my own future reference. Admittedly, “I wrote a blog article on that. I’ll send you the link.” is a common phrase I utter, to friends, in person. I never check back if they read it. Once in an incredibly long time someone later tells me it was pretty helpful.
I did setup a bot to automatically post links onto my existing Mastodon account, from my RSS feed. I’ve gotten occasional positive feedback on Mastodon, for doing so.
"The Cheat is one handsome fellow!
…
That was definitely an ugly bird."
Physical attractiveness is pretty much the same across all humans,
I take your point, and I used to believe that, but I learned my view was pretty narrow, compared to the options/tastes expressed by the diverse people I’ve met, since.
Lol. I get it, but it doesn’t have to be a big deal. Just don’t explain. They’ll just figure they need to figure out different ways to stimulate, which is true anyway.
Trying to explain the universe around us by anthropomorphizing natural phenomena? I’m not so sure. It could be seen as useful in the sense of philosophical exploration.
Yeah. A lot of religions’ explanations for things are only wrong in the sense that Newton’s Laws are wrong. Later physicists made drastic improvements. Einstein’s equations are strictly more correct, and don’t fail in the situations where Newton’s equations fail (near the speed of light).
But Newton’s work was a way to start understanding, and a set of ideas for Einstein to start from. We don’t despise Newton for those failures, we celebrate the incremental progress.
Lots of religion’s efforts to explain the world act like that, just from before we even had scientic methods.
Edit; And to be clear, I still have no respect for the charred remains of any hard-line Newton fans who attempt space travel without applying newer equations.
I’ve hated every piece of art I ever created, and everything I ever wrote, until at least a few weeks later.
I’ve learned to control the impulse to delete, until the thing is about a month old.
But I give myself permission to delete anything older than a month old, that I still don’t like.
I also try to only delete stuff by percentage. So if I’m pruning old art or articles, I’ll enforce only deleting the 20% I dislike the most.
This way I know that any piece of work I really hate, I’ll give myself permission to get rid of, eventually, if I still really hate it, later.
I do my best not to feed money unnecessarily into Amazon, because they’re well on their way into abusing their near-monopoly advantage.
I can’t change how the world treats a company that shrugs off news of their employees peeing in bottles, and doesn’t seem to care about heat exhaustion in their own staff. But I can control how I react to that news.
I use separate dedicated online retailers for groceries, hardware, and toys. I generally get free or very low cost delivery, directly to my door, within a week. My delivery timing is actually more reliable than it was with Amazon, back when I still ordered a few things from them, after they started enshitifying.
I’m generally always using a retailer who has a presence in my city, so if I need to return something, I just return it at the store.
The quality of the return desk experience is usually what determines which specific retailer I buy from, for each category.
(Which is ironic because I almost never need to return anything. I’m shockingly good at fixing stuff, so if I get something mildly broken, I just fix it and use it. But I really hate it if it’s a hassle on the rare day that I do.)
Shit. I didn’t think this through well enough. Can I change my answer to yours?