If AI hasn't actually, really, been here for even a single fiscal year then it explains away everything. Suddenly the fact that it's made zero impact on productivity, that no one is making any profit on it, all of that becomes justified. "It's still early."

I think you've nailed it.

I clearly remember 2023 being the year where AI and ChatGPT hit the mainstream. Looking back, nvidia's stock price had already doubled in the first half of 2023.

Polluted waterways make me sad.

It seems like a huge pervasive part of modern culture is that success and fortune equal never having to get your hands dirty, never worry about the details, and never learning to figure shit out because you can just pay somebody else to do it (or ask the "AI" to).

Obviously some amount of specialization and delegation is good. That's how you get a society.

But to just exist passively is something else. It's bad for us, and I don't mean that as a moral judgment. Nobody needs certain skills to justify their existence. I mean it in the clinical sense, like that you can be sedentary with more than just your physical body.

My experience being born into religious conservative white america is that phrases like "I don't believe in" or "I don't agree with" are just the politically correct language and/or dog whistle for "I hate that shit but I need to act polite."

It feels like there are about 100 million of us in the states scratching our necks like Dave Chappelle and saying "y'all still got any of that 'regime change' we been handing out?"

Yeah, it’s pretty blatant. A bit after it hit the scene I got curious and started asking it about how many people various governments have killed. The answer for my own US of A was as long as it was horrifying.

Then I get to China and it starts laying out a detailed description for a few seconds, then the answer disappears and is replaced by the “out of scope” or “can’t do that right now” or whatever it was at the time.

It makes me think their model might be fine, but then they have some kind of watchdog layered on top of it to detect the verboten subjects and interfere. I guess that feels better from a technical standpoint, even if it is equally bad from a personal/political one.

I don’t think I’ve seen the old hard-R written out in quite some time. Let nobody say Musk and his indentured servant team have never accomplished anything. They just accomplish the bad things.

Acting openly horrible has been hugely successful with their base. Maybe it’s gone far enough that all the low information voters out there will start seeing how crazy things have gotten. I know the women in my social circle are pissed, and they’re pretty much all white suburban moms. That’s a group that could have a big effect here.

Am USer. I have no explanation, but I can assure you that being up close to this shit doesn’t help it make any more sense. I come from a conservative white family in a mostly white area, and sure I can see how people get into that insular world and are conditioned to reject rational inquiry, but at the same time we live in the information age, people!

I just watched this episode a couple days ago. Some of it is way too applicable to current day, particularly the part about how it takes a huge tragedy for the population to realize that maybe we should make society nice for other people.

If Deborah Ann Woll wants to be in their show and Deborah Ann Woll is not in their show, I fear a lot of bad decisions are going into the production of their show.

I am 100% on board for B5 characters lying in wait to jump out among the trek memes.