I had wildly different experiences with teachers within my own schools growing up. There was legitimately no standard that valued this kind of nuanced exploration of the world. Just a focus on standardized tests. It was almost entirely on the individual teachers to spend more of their time and effort to go any further than that.

I had some great teachers that made everything interesting and taught us more like the classes I eventually had in college, but I definitely have had more that were like this one math teacher I remember who, when I asked about why we had to do a math problem in a specific way we were learning about, answer something along the lines of “because I say so.”

And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,

I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.

As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.

The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.

Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.

People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.

People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.

I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.

But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.

So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)

There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

Wars are plenty profitable if you’re a lot bigger than your opponents and can force them to be subservient to your business interests. It’s not a fluke that the richest country on earth is also the one with the most frequent wars.

Similarly, Rick Rolling is eternal. It’s kind of got a negative feedback loop. If it gets overused, people stop using it for a while, which just makes people more susceptible to it when it pops up again.

Did I miss something and they dismantled the mass surveillance state, reigned in the police, and stopped funding endless imperialist military ventures while I wasn’t looking?

Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.

It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.

This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.

Yeah. It’s more like:

Researchers: “Look at our child crawl! This is a big milestone. We can’t wait to see what he’ll do in the future.

CEOs: Give that baby a job!

AI stuff was so cool to learn about in school, but it was also really clear how much further we had to go. I’m kind of worried. We already had one period of AI overhype lead to a crash in research funding for decades. I really hope this bubble doesn’t do the same thing.

That’s a problem for the poors and whoever is holding the bag after I retire.

No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.

Maybe my brain just saw it was about Kennedy and something about space and filled in the rest. It’s weird.

At first I ready the title as “Kennedy Space Center” for some reason and I was really confused.

Anyone got a recommendation for an open source alternative to discord? Basically just need voice, text, and screen sharing for a group of friends of like, 5-6 at most on at any time.

Even if I gotta pay to host a server, I’d rather do that than pay discord extortion money to avoid ads while still getting my data stolen.

This is why there’s that trope where the bad guy gets killed in the process of, or just after, getting redeemed. So the story can have its cake and not have to deal with any of the icky justice afterwards. How jarring would it be to have the bad guy turn around, save the day, and then the heroes still kill them or drag them off to a trial for their crimes? So justice has to be meted out by fate rather than having to complicate our heroes.

*when was the last time they did it in America?

For me, I just recognize that AI, or any technology isn’t the problem. It’s context it exists in, who gets to use it, and how.

We shouldn’t have to choose between automating boring or dangerous jobs and letting people live dignified lives free from the fear of poverty. We shouldn’t have to choose between having AIs that can generate all sorts of interesting media quickly (even if a lot of it isn’t that good yet, it can still serve its purposes, like say, quickly mocking up an idea to see if it’s worth going forward with it.) and ruining the livelihoods of the real artists that made it possible. We also shouldn’t have to deal wit the mountain of garbage that will be created and shoved in our faces by corporations that don’t understand what the limitations of the technology are.

These are all capitalism problems. We should probably do something about that instead of asking dumb questions like if AI can really make “art” or if it’s copyright infringement.

It strikes me as a mostly non-technical problem. As a method of interfacing with computers/games it just doesn’t offer anything that useful and runs into a lot of practical problems that won’t magically get better with faster processors or smarter software.