I used Swappa to buy my last phone. Not certified, but much cheaper. The condition of phones is “graded,” and the sellers have an incentive to keep their reputation on the platform high. I had good luck, the one time I used it, at least.

Yeah, I used aircrack to gain access to one of my neighbors wifi and used it for about a month when I moved into my first apartment. After I got my own connection, I set up a guest network/SSID that was open,

Ideally, children would be educated and trained better to think critically; making people harder to manipulate through emotion. But, pragmatically, yeah, marketing/propaganda strategies are useful and even necessary for progress.

Your article made me wonder if there were any theories about ethically appealing to emotion, and I found this (psychological/political) theory interesting: https://semihcakir.com/blog/the-affective-intelligence-theory/. As I understand it, it posits that when people have low anxiety, their thinking is just habitual, but when they experience anxiety, they open themselves up to new information.

Available jobs are below the worse time during COVID, and I’m pretty sure the number of CS grads has greatly increased (but couldn’t find a good chart).

Liberal three-percenter lore?

I mean, I do think non-violent disobedience can be effective, but the state usually makes it violent. State sanctioned protests where most obey most of the rules isn’t disobedience. Is a good start though, and I hope things progress (in a good way).

Israel, Iran, or the US?

Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.

I think there’s a massive oversupply of software engineers world-wide, and investors and executives are heavily pushing offshoring to countries where there are even more engineers that are even more desperate to find work. The ideology or focus of the entire US investor/executive class seems to have shifted as soon as Musk gutted Twitter. I fear this may be another, “these jobs aren’t coming back,” kind of thing the manufacturing industry went through. Perhaps we’ll see a boom of bootstrapped start-ups ran by engineers (or preferably worker-cooperatives), but that’s extremely hard to do.

Idk, the author of “Civil Disobedience” did it. It’s a valid resistance method, or just a way to keep yourself morally consistent. Every kind of resistance has a good chance of bringing harm to yourself.

I personally didn’t file one year; kinda just kept putting it off because I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay my taxes (was a 1099 worker, and suffered some major financial blows that year); nothing ever happened, but it definitely was a risk. I probably won’t do that as an “act of resistance” next year, but will probably try extending as long as possible.

We let the rich, who aren’t necessarily the smartest people, get too rich, so they gained too much power. Worldwide problem though, as their influence doesn’t stop at borders.

Kinda weird GPT4-Chan wasn’t referenced. A guy fine-tuned GPT-J on 4chan, then deployed bots to write posts. I guess it was more of a stunt than academic or scientific, but training on 4chan improved the model’s performance on a truthfulness benchmark.

Yeah, that’s how they sell it. Problem is, studies have shown the fraud in these programs isn’t much of an expense, in the broader context. And, Trump has granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, who stole $205M from Medicare, which tells you they don’t really care about that. These programs are actually pretty efficient, and spending funds to investigate small-time fraud would often cost more than just letting it happen. It’s not like tons of people wish to be on our shitty social programs that don’t even supply enough help for the people that absolutely need it.

Kinda depressing that all of big-tech seems to have given up “innovating” (finding applications for publicly-funded research), and have become rent-seeking dinosaurs.

From the people I know, who do depend on these programs and like Trump, they don’t believe they will have their benefits reduced. The think the other people, “taking advantage” of the system will be kicked off. It’s being sold as reducing fraud and abuse. The right-wing has been pushing this framing for decades, and many people have bought into it.

but it turns out all that cash was going toward a workforce of over 700 Indian engineers, rather than an AI.

I doubt much of that cash was going to their workforce. Should have though.

I agree that AI is overhyped and these billionaires are dumb out-of-touch psychopaths. All these people are in a kind of fascist/accelerationist cult (e/acc, Dark Enlightenment, etc). They’re also trying to focus on automating the well-paying white-collar jobs away now. It was possible to automate fork-lift drivers away decades ago (I’ve worked in a factory that did just that), it’s just usually cheaper to pay someone a low wage to do it.

Guess I just prefer languages that do it this way:

class AClass {
  var aProp = 0

  fun aMethod() {
    aProp++
  }
}

Though I suppose confusion and bugs can happen when you do something like:

class AClass {
  var aProp = 0

  fun aMethod(aProp: Int) {
    // `this.aProp` is needed to access the property
  }
}

A lot of the immigrant labor has been at least slave-like for decades too. Under constant threat of deportation on their “employer’s” whim. Fairly common for “employers” to take documented worker’s documentation to hold them hostage. Reports of some farmers housing and working workers fenced-in, having them working under gunpoint. Some farmers have been caught buying and selling immigrants amongst each-other. I remember a report of a meatpacking plant calling ICE on its own employees to have them deported after they started asking for better treatment, then just hiring more immigrants to replace them. Hell, I even remember near where I grew up, you could see the shed-like shacks from the road on one farm where they kept the migrant workers; no electricity, didn’t look like they had any running water either.

I’ve always found needing to manually add a class instance parameter (i.e. self) to every object method really weird. And the constructors being named __init__. Not having multiple dispatch is kinda annoying too. Needing to use decorators for class methods, static methods, and abstract classes is also annoying. Now that I think about it, Python kinda sucks (even though it’s the language I use the most, lol).

Haven’t used it yet, but venice.ai looks interesting; they have a good privacy policy. Right now, I just use ChatGPT with the “improve models” setting turned off, and use “temporary chat” mode. I don’t really trust OpenAI to be doing the right thing though. I’ve used 14B models locally, but they aren’t as good as 72B+ models.