I think it’d be pretty tricky to get a fire going at that size and get the photo taken before the thin plastic of the tent melted or burst into flames. The tent in the picture is fine, which I honestly think would be impossible with that setup, even if you tried to be quick

Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the probable outcomes if America did implement structural changes these days. That has like a 1% chance of actually being something positive. I think perhaps the most recent, best possible time for significant reforms was somewhere between 1930-1990. It depends mostly on the specific kind of reform (basically whether or not women or minorities were relevant to the change, farther in the past would be worse outcomes for them).

But some things like campaign finance reform, how many seats there are in the House, Supreme Court Reform, etc could’ve been accomplished with a relatively high likelihood of positive outcomes.

Basically before the complete collapse of proper journalism, when broadcast media was still king and most politicians still tended to compromise and were at least mostly interested in actually governing. It feels like post 90s, our governing body has passed some sort of tipping point where the majority of members are simply gaming the system, obstructing others from actually doing anything and shooting down any and all reasonable compromises. The actual productivity of Congress seems to be in total free fall. Bad actors pretty much always existed, but they only became a crippling number somewhat recently. (Or at least this seems true for the last 100 years, I have no idea if Congress was this dysfunctional in the early 1800s or something)

I’m not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country’s democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven’t adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they’d require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.

I’ve often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.

But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we’re still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We’re the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc

Sadly true

In the book version of Hitchhiker’s guide to Galaxy highly advanced elevators are given limited precognition in order to proactively be on the floor and open just as someone wanting to use an elevator arrives. So maybe in some highly advanced future where we inexplicably still use cars our turn signals can see a few seconds into the future and turn themselves on before we turn.

I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.

I’ve always kinda wondered about this. I’m not an audio guy and really can’t tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons ‘experts’ telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.

So I’m curious if there’s just a natural variance in an individual’s ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?

Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can’t. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.

I mostly agree, with the caveat that 99% of AI usage today just stupid gimmicks and very few people or companies are actually using what LLMs offer effectively.

It kind of feels like when schools got sold those Smart Whiteboards that were supposed to revolutionize teaching in the classroom, only to realize the issue wasn’t the tech, but the fact that the teachers all refused to learn and adapt and let the things gather dust.

I think modern LLMs should be used almost exclusively as an assistive tool to help empower a human worker further, but everyone seems to want an AI that you can just tell ‘do the thing’ and have it spit out a finalized output. We are very far from that stage in my opinion, and as you stated LLM tech is unlikely to get us there without some sort of major paradigm shift.

For like 99% of people arguing that ‘voting is useless’ they are also not working towards any other method of improving society. Either by working towards unions, or effective means of protest or even violent revolution. They’re just opting out and doing nothing of value while feeling smug about being ‘above’ such petty squabbles.

If you are the 1% actually doing something of value that isn’t voting. Congrats, I guess? But I think I’m far more likely to convince someone to vote, which is at least somewhat helpful than I am to convince them to join a revolution.

This. Also in real life, people with specific talents know they’re rare and charge accordingly. Pornhub is full of average stuff and if that does it for you great (though I’d argue anyone considering themselves a ‘porn addict’ is unlikely to be satisfied with basic porn)

I hate that they took away my analyst title. I’m not a software engineer dammit. I don’t even have an IDE installed and haven’t done any programming in 10+ years.

but are either unhelpful or misleading

Honestly that just sounds like a lot of Reddit users in general

So many people complaining about comic book artists that draw boobs as big as their heads, but apparently that’s literally a thing that can happen.

It’s not worth it if I no longer control my own hardware

Am I remembering yesterdays door locking or today?

The professional workaround is ‘are they eligible for rehire’. If you’re laid off it’s a yes, if not it’s a no.

Agreed. It’s comical how he’s seemingly able to rapidly build stuff that requires experience in multiple high end fields and then he even surrounds himself with his own tech and is not buried under maintenance hell for it all.

My alternative head canon is that he’s actually only good at building AIs and Jarvis and Friday are the ones who actually make all of his crazy ideas work.

I mean if you were going to divorce your partner, then by all means take the red pill. You’d probably both be better off then. I was speaking of presumably happy marriages.

Sure, but you’re throwing away your current spouse and kid in favor of a do over. That’s pretty cold.