Don’t know what country you’re from but local versions of “how the f## are people voting for this person” are popping up and getting increasingly popular in most democracies.

The US being the US clearly have the bigliest, crassest piece of garbage of us all, but looks like we are all heading there. And I’m looking at whatever the US are going to do to reverse this trend because I need to see a glimpse of hope that this trend IS reversible and that I won’t die in a nazi dictatorship after my grampa fought to rid us of the previous one.

If I know anything at all after I’m dead, I will already have the answer to the biggest question from all major religions

the (false) sin/cos dichotomy

but… but… if sin/cos is false, that is literally tan ! (yes, I was frequently bullied in high school, why do you ask?)

Best (or at least most addictive) use of AI I’ve seen so far is https://anycrap.shop/

Hedonic threadmill: it’s the theory that we tend to a baseline level of happiness and on average, after some time, people who have won the lottery are as happy (or unhappy) as people who have gone bankrupt.

Look at us, we are apes, barely out of trees. We were fighting predators and cold and diseases that no longer exist. Just by being alive, we are the winners of millions of years of genetic lottery, through evolution, fights, love and ingenuity.

We have access to most of human knowledge through devices that fit in our pockets, can visit other countries that were legendary to our forefathers, instead of hunting wild beasts we have satellites that guide us step by step to the nearest McDonald’s.

Imagine time-traveling a few generations back, describing our life to our grand-grandparents, seeing their eyes grow wide. Now imagine, at the end, telling them how ennui got to us and we can no longer find meaning in our life.

can he swing from a web

no, he can’t, he’s a pig

Same here. I also found myself trying to express things in my language using English constructs or colloquialisms that don’t have a direct translation. And my English isn’t even that great, but I have to use it daily for work.

Thank you for taking a stand in favor of all the vampires out there who are being unfairly denied careers in law enforcement

Are there any vampire rules against throwing a tear gas grenade through your window?

also in my experience, while a lot of Germans are happy to chat with you in English in a social setting, business talk is usually expected to be held in German

Would you say you are good at creating a meal plan or a work schedule by yourself, with no AI? I suspect if you know what a good meal plan looks to you and you are able to visualize the end result you want, then genAI can speed up the process for you.

I am not good at creative tasks. My attempts to use genAI to create an image for a PowerPoint were not great. I am wondering if the two things are related and I’m not getting good results because I don’t have a clear mental picture of what the end result should be so my descriptions of it are bad

In my case, I wanted an office worker who was juggling a specific set of objects that were related to my deck. After a couple of attempts at refining my prompt, Dall-E produced a good result, except that it had decided that the office worker had to have a clown face, with the make-up and the red nose.

From there it went downhill. I tried “yes, like this, but remove the clown makeup” or “please lose the clown face” or “for the love of Cthulhu, I beg you, no more clowns” but nothing worked.

I am not using it for this purpose, but churning out large amounts of text that doesn’t need to be accurate is proving to be a good fit for:

• scammers, who can now write more personalize emails and also have conversations

• personality tests

• horoscopes or predictions (there are several examples even on serious outlets of “AI predicts how the world will end” or similar)

Due to how good LLMs are at predicting an expected pattern of response, they are a spectacularly bad idea (but are obviously used anyway) for:

• substitute for therapy

• virtual friends/girlfriend/boyfriend

The reason they are such a bad idea for these use cases is that fragile people with self-destructive patterns do NOT need those patterns to be predicted and validated by a LMM.

Yes, it’s like the rubberducking technique, with a rubber duck that actually responds.

Sometimes even just trying to articulate a question is a good first step for finding the solution. A LLM can help with this process.

Meeting notes are the ideal use case for AI, in the sense that everyone thinks someone needs to write them but almost nobody ever goes back and actually reads them.

But when I got curious and read the AI generated ones (the ones from Zoom at least)… According to the AI I had agreed on an action that hadn’t been even discussed in the meeting and we apparently spent half of the meeting discussing weather conditions in the various locations (AI seems to have a hard time telling the difference between initial greetings or jokes and the actual discussion, but in this one it became weirdly fixated with those initial 5 minutes)

The historian Zeev Sternhell has traced the ideological roots of fascism back to the 1880s and in particular to the fin de siècle theme of that time

(Wikipedia )

So if you could timetravel back a bit more and see if rebooting fixes this whole thing…

One of the few areas where representation is fair is assholery. There are real assholes from all genders, ethnicity and religious backgrounds.

You can be non-white, non-binary, non-wasp and still be an asshole. And other assholes will accept you, if it helps shield their evil agenda from the most obvious accusations.

And guess what political side has learned to leverage that fact? I’ll give you a few hints. Neonazi AfD in Germany has a lesbian leader with a Sri Lankan partner, the italian far right party (staunch defender of family values) has a leader who’s a never married single mom (and now she’s Italy’s prime minister), then you already mentioned Trump and Vance.

Don’t get me wrong, Usha Vance, Melania Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel aren’t being exploited. They are all formidable persons who got to the top by out-assholing everyone else on their side and by actively banking on their “non traditional” status to emerge in ultra-conservative environments.

So they don’t need to rationalize anything. It’s all already quite rational and by design.

Was Steven Seagal ever relevant? I mean besides the “so trashy that it’s occasionally fun”, guilty-pleasure type of relevance he briefly enjoyed in the 1980s?

measles…

Hahaha, I like how you think and I’d like to know more about you. For instance what is your mother’s maiden name?

It is! Hence the realization that I got older. Sorry, re-reading my comment above I wasn’t clear