[–] 11 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

to say that he was executed for breaching UN resolutions is simply factually false

Yeah, this part is nonsense.

I do think it's fair to say "the US executed him" as a shorthand for "the US hunted him, caught him, turned him over to people who said they would execute him, and then those people executed him".

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  • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago

    Yup. I've been in academia and in private business. Academia pays terribly and expects a fuck-ton more work. I'm sure there's places where you can just sleaze by without doing much, but I never saw them. (Which isn't to say that all academic work is good work. I saw people who got far doing poor research, but they were also working very hard at it.)

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  • [–] 9 points 3 weeks ago

    I think "support the working class" doesn't have to mean "do whatever they say". We're all generally propagandized into oblivion. Like, the US working class has been concerned about immigrants and trans women in sports but it's not pro-worker to go after those things.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 weeks ago

    I have some similar feelings to AI here. The advantages of self-checkout are only present because we've made existing systems worse to the point where something not-great is now a better option.

    In the 1980s, a grocery lane would have a check-out clerk and a bagger. Sometimes two baggers. You would put your items on the belt and they'd be scanned and bagged (well, so that eggs weren't crushed, freezer items were together, etc) about as fast as you took them out of the cart.

    By lowering wages and reducing staff, this got worse. Now the check-out clerk is poorly-trained and probably quitting/being laid off soon and the bagger has been laid off. Mysteriously, the human-checkout line is now kind of slow and frustrating!

    Having individual customers do the check-out themselves is even worse (so frequently, someone gets the machine stuck yelling about putting items in the bagging area, or just stares vacantly at the screen), but by parallelizing the process it comes out to usually slightly faster.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    The companies won’t pay the 10% out of their own pocket, as they most likely couldn’t. At least here in Germany, supermarket margins are pretty thin.

    This doesn't pass a quick reasoning check:

    1. Self-checkout machines cost the store capital investment (they introduce some new technology, there is a larger number of devices)
    2. Self-checkout machines cost the store operating budget (more devices means more parts to be serviced)
    3. Stores have added significant numbers of self-checkout machines

    So the stores must be getting better margins at self-checkout than at human-checkout, or they wouldn't introduce it.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    The problem is that they can't just talk about climate problems they need to take action. And since the Democratic party isn't going to support mass-executions of industry executives and billionaires, they'd have to talk about incremental changes. I'm not sure how they sell something like "we forecast that these new regulations will result in a 1 degree average temperature reduction over the next 4 years" (which would be huge). And that's imagining that the party as a whole is able to agree on something hard enough to shove it past the Republicans.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    I think what you're saying here is that by "it's not possible" you meant "it's not possible to hold companies liable for their chat-bots' words and still have those companies producing chat-bots." I agree. I think that would be the correct outcome.

    There would be some very narrow spaces where LLMs would be usable, but mostly they would cease to pollute everything. Unrelated to AI, I'd like to see lots of regulation that blocks externalizing costs. For example, maybe it's also "impossible" for Walmart to operate in the US if they don't have all their employees getting state assistance. That would also be good. Maybe it's "impossible" to have a beef industry without massive pollution and deforestation. Also good. Et cetera.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    How would that be technically impossible? Or difficult? Companies are currently liable for the actions of the human agents, and I don't think the implementation needs to be different.

    Maybe you mean socially impossible? Like, the major providers have a lot of money behind them and so why would they allow themselves to be liable for anything?

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  • [–] 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 child)

    Sure. But if you read the original post, it's about someone saying that jews are not safe in Canada. And this is then contrasted with how bicyclists are being killed in Canada but jews are not being killed. Directly contradicting the presented narrative.

    So then you might wonder: why did someone feel that Canada was unsafe? And you'll find that the answer was "because they heard a few people criticize Israel."

    In my own experience, the people saying "jews aren't safe" or "this is antisemitism" often aren't jewish or representing any jewish people; they're just pro-evil.

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