UBI is kind of cool but it has some massive flaws. For example: Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up and since there are no rent/price controls (because “that would be communism”) we’ll be right back to where we started. What you want is Universal Basic Services. Anything you need to live is free. Literally impossible for anyone to game that system and equally impossible for people to slip through the gaps, but it’s also never going to happen because “that would be communism”
So yeah this is why capitalism has go to, because any attempt at actually making a just and fair society will be dismissed as “being communism”
It’s super frustrating that my state banned the ability for cities to have municipal internet, it makes organizing to make gigabit Internet a municipal utility much harder
Yeah, why TF is the internet so shitty in US? I get 500 Mbps down/10 Mbps up for $80/month. It’s disgusting. I’d rather have 100 Mbps symmetric. Or better yet, 500 Mbps symmetric. My parents pay around $20/month for that, and they live in rural India. Even they got fiber, but I have to deal with fucking coax cables. The only local provider with fiber and symmetric speeds doesn’t operate in my side of the town. Why does everything in US have to be designed to fuck the end consumer? It’s really frustrating.
You can do your part by fighting for socialized housing (tenants collectively own the property and rent goes to upgrades) and municipal cable. The rewards are well worth it. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) wait around for a bloody revolution to fight back against capitalism. Every little thing you can do to wrench power from the capitalist class even something small like joining a union helps a lot if we all do it.
The ideas of „you can only own a building you live in“ and „companies can’t own residential buildings“ keep popping up in my head. Any reason that can’t be the solution?
Probably. Do you have any deprogramming resources handy? I‘d really like to have answers to people who think we need to have rich overlords to live appropriately.
“Anarchy Works” by Peter Gelderloos is one of the most compelling arguments I’ve ever seen for debunking the idea that capitalism and trade are normal behaviors for humans, and it’s honestly a smooth and pleasant read. Just the introduction alone is enough.
Definitely. I do though. Books have always helped me to make sense of the things I see. Life has been rough and an early dip into psychology helped to stay mostly sane.
Seeing that the world is still struggling although our efficiency is through the roof makes me think there must be a reason for it.
Easiest answer is capitalism and we know that our gains accumulate at the top, not spread through the population. Still, I‘d like a more science based explanation and solutions.
That way I can stand behind it without needing to follow blindly. Tried that. Doesn’t work for me. I hope it makes sense for you. :)
The biggest trick is to break people out of their capitalist programming. Instead of rebuttals, just ask questions.
“We need landlords”
Why?
“Because they provide housing, duh”
Ok, but what about housing do they provide? They don’t build the buildings, they just own it.
“Sure, but they do the repairs”
They do, but why do tenants have to pay someone else to live there in case a repair is needed? What if the tenants owned the building together instead?
Asking questions is a good idea. But I‘m convinced there is a lot more needed than this.
I don’t think people think that we „need“ landlords, just that this is the system we have and they are not used to thinking for themselves.
If you remember the kids in school that were popular: they mostly had cool sneakers or were sweet talkers of some kind. None of them actually were smart or did anything particularly interesting. Same goes for CEOs today.
The reason we have capitalism (in my opinion) is because we are braindead as a group. The overwhelming majority lacks the skills to judge character, skill or even experience. We elect people without social accomplishments to public offices.
That is also why hiring in companies is such a mess. Companies looking for specific keywords in a cv or letter will never get the best specialists because the people they hire are specialists and gaming the system, not at their job.
We‘re naturally drawn to narcissists because they are good at selling themselves. We should be looking at the quiet person. They are normally 8 times better than the loudmouth.
I don’t have a definitive answer for that. Right now I‘d go with that, yes. The goal would be to move away from renting as you age. Everyone should own their living space sooner or later. There are options for this. Where I live you can rent-buy something. It’s renting but you also reduce the price you‘d pay for buying it. It’s very rare though afaik.
Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up
Sigh. People make this braindead argument every single time this subject comes up. No they can’t. Markets do not work that way. It’s literally just a repackaged argument against minimum wage and it has been thoroughly debunked in that context.
Unless you live in a city with rent stabilization, yes landlords will do that. Groceries will likely not have that problem, because of other market conditions. The first to increase their rents will be luxury apartments. Once the Internet is done laughing their asses off about $5000 rent, other landlords will use realpage to gauge the market and increase in tandem. Landlords literally do not care if their property is occupied, because the money is in the land and we’ve commoditized housing.
Don’t try to mischaracterize me. For UBI to work, we need national rent stabilization and significant efforts to build non-market housing across the nation. I’m not against UBI, but it can’t just be added without other changes.
Saying we should do X and Y before we do Z, is functionally the same as opposing Z itself. Shit, that is how most polices are rejected.
“We can’t send money overseas, we need to take care of our own first, or things will never get better”
“We can’t increase funding for our own services, we need to find out how to optimize their spending first, or things will never get better”
“We can’t impose extra regulations on services, we need to do that on the vendor/supplier level, or things will never get better”
“We can’t impose extra regulations on vendors/suppliers, because most of them are overseas, we need to spend resources overseas to stop it at the source, or things will never get better”
On, and on, and on we go. Meanwhile, people starve. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I never specified in either direction which should be done first. Ideally it would be an omnibus bill, but both should happen. The order doesn’t matter to me. Don’t pretend that ubi is a solution in and of itself.
It becomes more and more meaningless when you start to talk about any form of regulation or extension of basic rights. Plenty of countries are coming around to the idea that housing is a basic right. It’s hard to raise prices when your competition is literally free. UBI + market regulations + basic human rights are all required. No solution exists in a vacuum and anyone who considers it as such is missing the point
Have you seen how housing prices rose when interest rates were low? Markets work that way because consumers outcompete each other, at least in the housing market. You need a surplus of supply, like the corn market, to keep costs low.
Like @espi wrote, you need fierce competition in all markets.
We literally just witnessed this with COVID shutdown. Im not sure why you think people getting handed money will not increase pricing as that is usually how things work.
Not to poopoo your point too much but inflation only happened after covid because a recent war gave justification for greedflation. You can’t really argue money is losing value when CEOs are raking in record profits during an economic downturn.
It happened because a large number of people had a pool of unspent money, some/much of which was the stimulus packages, who were competing for similar goods such as housing.
We should do away with using money for necessities. You want a pool, pay for it. A safe and sanitary living space? Free. Stop making people rely on something with no inherent value.
How do you determine what is a necessity and how much of that necessity is free?
Is electricity a necessity? Should it be free for everyone? Should the person who owns the massive mansion get it all paid for? If we say its only for a certain amount of electricity, does the person who doesn’t use all of their allocated amount get compensation somehow?
What about food then? I don’t think anyone would think lobster and caviar should be free. So let’s just do food basics like cheese. Artisan cheese is expensive. So we need paid for artisan cheese and basic government funded cheese product. So now we have a two tier food system where poor people live off gruel and soylent green, while the rich can afford real food.
The only way to solve these issues is to find agreed method of representing value that people can use on what they want.
No one can complain that someone else is getting something for free, because they also get the exact same thing. No one can defraud the system because everyone gets the exact same cheque. Well, unless you bump off grandma and collect hers too.
So you want to tell me that companies aren’t buying out competition and with a monopoly they then rise prises as they want?
Explain to me how markets work if the only company selling or renting houses is not lowering their price when demand lowers? Or when they intentionally are not renting flats in order to keep demand high?
For the very problems you stated, I’m in favor of UBI. Capital would take some time to adjust to the new system and for a moment, misery would be alleviated for a metric shitload of people. When it’s ripped from our hands by greedy capitalists, it could act as a unifying, radicalizing force and bring us closer to a revolution. There’s a loooot more to it than my few sentences. But a UBI given to everyone with no means testing would be an objectively good thing. And its a bit like Pandora’s box. Once it’s here, you can’t take it away without serious social ramifications. I’ll leave a couple of articles that touch on this because it’s something the left ought to be taking more seriously, however I haven’t had a chance to read the two of them all the way through yet. I’m at work and things just got busy but here ya go one, two
I like the idea of UBI too. I hope it happens and that we transition into a UBS model once its success is shown to the world. That being said it’s important to front that with me not being in support of the neofeudal UBI that silicon valley techbros push for. That would be a disaster.
Hard agree on all points. It’s a bit of a bummer that Andrew yang of all people was the one to start the national conversation about UBI because his whole deal just pollutes the discussion from the jump
Also for a guy with a Math pin he ignored key parts of the UBI research he used for his position and repeatedly misrepresented the figures in it.
The projection that the economy would grow because of UBI was in the part of the Roosevelt Institute study that posited the money would just appear from the sky whereas the growth rates projected from tax financed UBI were almost zero as would be expected.
I felt like it should be paired with government contracts for something akin to a private dorm room (room, cafeteria with meal plan, laundry, computer lab, wifi, etc.) that negotiates a price that is then what the ubi is pegged at. Folks are guaranteed being able to have at least that option or can utilize it for something else.
UBI is a way to make capitalism more fair. One important fact about capitalism that seemingly everyone forgot is that competition is a requirement for it to work.
If there is fierce competition in all markets, even if everyone is getting UBI, price hikes are impossible.
It’s a fantasy though. An extremely competitive market would be nice, but in reality it would be a race to the bottom and those who started with more cash would win out, buy up or starve the competition and monopolise, giving them the extra space to be lazy and pass on profits to their shareholders, who dictate increased prices to increase their margins.
This doesn’t stop anything though again. Unless you tax them out of business, they will still be a monopoly and will fix prices for their profit. Less profit is still profit.
If you tax them too high they will either seek recourse via illegally bribing politicians (or “lobbying”) to have those taxes removed, or monopolise with legally distinct businesses where wealth is concentrated in the few regardless.
Right, they are a monopoly until there is competition. That’s OK. You tax them higher until it becomes profitable for a competitor. That’s not ‘out of business’, just high enough.
But you can also accept the monopoly if the offer is transparent and good enough.
The colluding is a problem. It is the problem. It’s unavoidable. In every system there is corruption. This cannot be solved but has to be dealt with case by case.
To be fair, it’s pretty communist. The problem with anything like that in America, is that anything remotely “communist” is regarded as bad because of the cold war (and other various conflicts with Nazi/communist countries) where anything communist became associated with being a traitor. So supporting communist anything, even if it’s genuinely a universal good, makes you a target for people who think you’re supporting stuff like what China/Russia/former communist countries did (when they were communist)… most of the problems in those countries aren’t related to communism, but rather authoritarianism that serves to underpin most communist regimes; which, bluntly put, is how most capitalism operates. Without something like unions, or organized labor, or collective agreements (usually a result of a union), the boss has 100% of the power over what you do, when you do it, how you do it, and what you’ll be paid for the task. Literally a small group (aka, the board of directors and c-suite) have total authoritarian control over what happens and you have zero say in it. Either you agree to their terms, or gtfo, and find another authoritarian business to work for on their terms.
But nobody talks about the authoritarianism in modern society, people are either on the “eat the rich” or “communism is bad” bandwagon with both extremes having their own problems and misunderstandings about what they’re actually fighting for and against.
I’m against authoritarianism, and in favor of Communist control (aka, for the people, by the people), and while that’s a nice sentiment in the American Constitution, it’s the authoritarian business owners that either make up, or otherwise bribe or own the entirety of the government. Good game everyone.
Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up
They already can, and do. If they do it too much, people leave that area. With a UBI, there’s nothing that says you have to live in a big city, it would be easier to move to bfe, where it’s always going to be cheaper. It’s not ideal of course to uproot and leave, but it’s possible, and it’s that possibility that keeps prices somewhat under control.
unless you have conditions that require you to have quick access to hospital, or doesn’t allow you to work in physically intensive labor like farms, or require certain infrastructure like elevators and access to wheelchairs, etc. i can see that working for some people, but not for everyone. and the people that would be left behind could be dramatically affected by this situation
Moving to more rural areas is what causes rural areas to build hospitals, and doctors to open clinics and offices. There are plenty of jobs everywhere that just involve sitting on your ass in front of a screen, or standing behind a counter. Even in rural areas.
Growth doesn’t just happen. People have to go places and build. UBI would make that process a shit ton easier.
I mean, sure… but it’s hard to build specialized medical facilities for people who need them in every rural area they decide to live, right? and it’s basically impossible to keep them running when there’s only a few people that will need them in that area, no? at some point, the places they can choose to live will be heavily informed by the disabilities they may or may not have.
eventually, you will probably end up with highly concentrated areas of people who have similar disabilities that can be treated in that area (as well as their loved ones, medics/physicians, people who provide food, transportation, etc…).
I don’t want to come across as against UBI, I think it’s a very interesting first approach. but I also definitely don’t believe it’s a solution by any , you see…
It turns out the specialized medical needs are kind of special, and they fly people to where there are facilities when they’re needed. And only affects a special portion of the population. For everyone else it doesn’t matter.
For fuck sake people crossed the entire US in a god damn wagon while risking being shot at by random tribes and eaten by bears. What’s stopping people now is that they can’t afford food or a place to park the damn wagon without getting harassed by the cops.
I’m fairly certain that those kinds of positions are “offered” on the expectation that they won’t be filled so they can fill them with cheap foreign labor.
That’s because no one pays attention to the huge developments in infrastructure or the amazing new technologies coming to market - e fuels like sequestered carbon jet fuel made from excess renewable power, and no it’s not a science fiction dream it’s happening now. Of course we should have more funding for these things but they are happening.
A huge part of that problem is that people resist even the slightest positive change, paper straws are fine but I bet there are people who like this post who also liked posts complaining about them - if we stopped organized sports and spent that half a trillion on transitioning local infrastructure or establishing carbon sequestration systems with productive use of captured carbon (e.g. building materials that get landfilled at eol) we could move much faster, but no one will give up a single football game to save the planet they’d rather bomb something and feel like a hero
Bread and circuses, working as intended. We wouldn’t want people coming home after a day’s work and putting anger and frustration into something productive, would we?
We also got to see the rise of the Internet and the home computer revolution, as well as smartphones later on. We are the last ones to know what the world was like before all that. When you had to bike your ass to the local library just to look up a cake recipe, and "please allow six weeks for delivery" was the standard.
Anyway, does anyone wanna play Pogs? I got some cool new slammers here...
Go back just a bit further to the days of AltaVista and I'm good. When it was still possible to store an entire website's markup and its images on one floppy disk. When people were running servers out of their basement and jumpstarting the early web.
Edit: The Fediverse certainly has that 1996 "wild west" feel to it though, I gotta say. We're just missing webrings and ugly-ass tiled backgrounds.
I did a bunch of school works when google didn’t yet exist. It was a wild ride searching obscure sites and finding information in green webpages with lots of blinking texts and colors. Had to borrow the 5 cds encyclopaedia from a friend to get any historical information for some works. Wikipedia was barely starting and having info there for some things was amazing.
Damn days of downloading a random mp3 file 128kpbs quality of 3.4 MBs that took 1 or 2 days with computer turned on all night long.
Considering the captcha doesn’t actually know, and just judges if you are correct based off of other users entries I would click on it. My guess is most users would click it, but it’s ambiguous enough that you’d probably pass the captcha either way.
"Fast" means "close" or "almost" in German. Yeah, I agree. They almost had me convinced there were no alternatives to their little browser-data-collector-thingy.
There’s WebKit and KHTML based ones, although I don’t know of any mainstream browsers that use those aside from safari or iOS. Other niche options exist for Linux.
That and konqueror where what I had in mind. I guess there is also gecko and ie as well as the ones I listed in my original comment now that I think about it.
Orion is by the developers of Kagi (a paid search engine that is actually as good, if not better, than Google) and has ad-blocking and anti-tracking built in natively. It's awesome.
And yet it’s still using chromium, which means it’s still perpetuating all of the issues that Google is currently pushing. Things like Web Environment Integrity API, which is designed to make adblocking virtually impossible and make tracking easier than ever. Or Manifest V3, which is basically purpose-built to block adblocker extensions from running, by limiting the amount of control they have to edit webpages.
Saying that the browser is fine because it respects privacy is a little bit like saying your stoner uncle is cool because he buys alcohol for you and the rest of your 12 year old friends. It’s not really something we should be praising.
What are you even saying? You went off rail really fast I said there are chromium that respect privacy. There are other. And there are good browsers that don’t depend on chromium
Chromium is compromised... not just Chrome itself. Anything downstream of Chromium is gets all of Google's recent malware like adblock-prevention and web-DRM baked right in.
No matter the downstream projects' goals, they are still working from a compromised upstream source.
Yet every single android user do not have a choice. Use a good chromium based browser OR use a chromium based webview PLUS Firefox gecko with security issues since Sandboxing is lightyears behind chromium. Get off your 🚬 🐎
Yea, no you are using chromium webview AND Firefox you utter imbecile , go lick chrome boot. Are you really this dense? Have fun pretending. You just got both chrome issues and Firefox issues instead of just having chrome issues.
For me the only reason to drive manual was becase automats used to be less effective. With current generation, the computer with its 12 gears is much more ecological then my macho hand lovingly stroking my cars stick can ever be…
My biggest thing is that they make people pay more attention. I dont think better drivers drive stick, i think the stick makes YOU a better driver.
Less eating, drinking, phone holding, texting etc. You have to know speeds and rpms for which gears. It keeps me from speeding knowing this street is a 4th gear street. When i end up driving a auto car, i will often loook down and wonder how i got to the speed i am at, though that may also be due to the fact its not my car and im just not used to the sensation of speed.
On another note, i think on average manual trans are less prone to failure. I know alot of cars that have essentially been junked due to an auto trans problem, but a manual just needs a new clutch every one and a while. Though this might be less common on newer cars compared to 90’s and early 2000’s cars.
And with the rise of EVs auto transmission failures will be a thing of the past. Except for the few sports EVs that for some reason have a multiple gears.
Electric motors have so much torque even at low revs that a gearbox is unnecessary for most people. If you can get enough torque for a fast start in 5th, there’s no reason for the gearbox, you might as well save the extra complexity and keep the car permanently in 5th.
Combustion cars have gearboxes because they only work well at a narrow range of revs. Bicycles have more gears than cars because humans have an even narrower range of revs where they work best at.
EVs still have peak operational variables, things like heat. Having 2 gears solves the heat problems. Quicker acceleration and better efficiency. Just because it’s expensive right now doesn’t mean you won’t continue to see them on high end vehicle and start to trickle into the mid range stuff.
Why is a electric motor overheating dangerous? Surely any electric car is going to have a system to throttle itself if overheating is an issue, and it will need that with or without gears.
The fastest accelerating electric cars are single speed, presumably because it’s not worth changing gear when you only have 2 seconds.
I can see why it might be useful in specific product categories, but when it’s not helpful for price or performance or reliability, that’s going to continue to be niche. The real problem electric cars need to solve right now is cost and a gearbox isn’t helping with that.
Nobody buys a 600bhp car to have itself throttle its performance. Well nobody with half a brain which says a lot about Tesla sales.
As far as acceleration is concerned most drivers who care about performance don’t really care about 0-60 these days. It’s about 70-120 and how they perform at the upper end. Single gear EVe suck at anything above those speeds. Only the high end models are fast enough to hide it.
Also acceleration isn’t power limited. It’s traction. It’s not gear shift or power that keeps everything with normal sized tires at about 2.5.
A second or third gear in sport cars will be a thing. There are plenty of valid use cases once you make it past, “this is a boring commute appliance”.
EVs have a single reduction gear and no transmission or gear change. Most are rated for around a million miles and only require a gear oil change every few years or so.
It doesn’t make me a better driver, it’s a continual distraction. I recently switched from a manual to an automatic car and I now have far more available headspace to pay attention to the world around me.
Oh so if you are a professional juggler it would be completely valid if you keep juggling all the time while driving? Dont think the police will see ‘you just dont know how to juggle as well as I do’ as an excuse if they stop you.
Also what about eating, drinking, talking on the phone while driving? Obviously those are only distractions if you havent properly learned to eat or talk, right? Shifting is a distraction, period. It gets less distracting the more you are used to it but it is never zero. There is absolutely no reason to shift manually nowadays (except for racing obviously).
What an incredibly stupid take, none of these things have anything to do with the behavior of your car. You sound like somebody that can’t accept their own shortcomings and instead wants the world to change according to them. Or you’re mentally challenged. Either way, there’s no point in talking to you.
For speed control I wish every car had easy to use cruise control and speed limiting, I hate having to constantly worry I’ve crept above the limit and will get a ticket especially on long boring roads littered with speed cameras.
Imagine just being able to concentrate on what’s around you and where you’re going without needing to be endlessly worrying about engine revs, speed enforcement, and the potential cost of getting either wrong.
I dont understand how constantly having to (partially ofc) focus on shifting could get you more focused on actually driving. If anything, it takes away your attention from the road.
Shifting is just part of driving. It means you have to pay attention to speed, Rpm, and braking points. It just makes driving more engaging, which reduces distraction. It doesnt make driving easier. If anything it makes it harder. But the benefit is that it reduces complacency.
When i am driving. I am driving. Im not doing makeup, eating, messing with the radio, texting etc. Part of that is driving stick. It keeps you engaged in driving. Thats not to say its impossible to be a distracted driver in a manual, just that its easier to get distracted in an auto.
It is definitely NOT part of driving as it is not required, obviously. Dont confuse ‘a method used for driving’ with driving itself. If in the past cars were made so that you are driving upside down, people like you would argue using the exact same words. ‘its part of it’, ‘its harder so you focus more’, etc. It makes zero sense to keep an outdated distraction for the fictional benefit of reducing other distractions. The missing stick doesnt make people eat or use their phones while driving, thats what bad drivers have been doing for decades. People that care about safety try to minimize distractions, which includes shifting without doubt. You are free to use the stick, it is not banned yet and is not as big of a distration as others (mainly because of hundreds of hours of practice), but you cannot argue that it is not a distraction at all.
I drive a manual because all through the 90s a manual was a lot more reliable and cheaper to fix than an automatic. I also hated the automatic gear selection. It was always in a gear I didn’t want. I recently had a rental car which was a Ford with a 10-speed automatic and yeah they have come a long way. I’ve only ever owned manuals but I think my next car will be an auto. I hear reliability is good now.
i very recently learned how to drive. Learned manual because it is still the majority of cars on the roads here… Looking forward to the majority of the vehicles being automatic! It makes a lot more sense
You mean like the big beautiful boaters trump-feed talks fondly about? Or the landlords that don’t generate any actual value but get rich by literally leeching off of others (who largely do actual work that generates actual value?)
I went to a Korean hot pot place one time and ordered the hottest broth. The waitress, who barely spoke English, asked if I was sure. I said yes and when they brought it out I was sweating buckets but still loved the food. The waitress actually brought out a fan and stuck it next to my table. 10 out of 10, Would sweat again
I’ve done the One Chip Challenge, regularly dump Carolina Reaper Sauce on my food, have eaten Ghost Pepper raw twice.
But none of it compares to the regular spicy noodles and beef dish I have eaten from the local Thai place. Southeastern Asians are just a different breed when it comes to Spices.
Thai papaya salad was what got me into hot food. I was at a Thai restaurant with Thai friends, and they told me to try it. It looked like coleslaw to me, so I grabbed a bunch and started eating it. First couple bites were fine, but then the heat came. And the salad was the only thing that provided any temporary relief. I had so much of it. I loved it. I’ve tried it other places, never been as good because they will use jalapeno instead of the tiny Thai chilis.
Can we stop this "Introvert" BS? An "introvert" is someone who will tend to keep their thoughts to themselves. Nothing more. This "the extroverts are the sports guys and the introverts are the intellectuals" is completely made up and people will not like you more or less depending on wether you wear your heart on your tongue or not.
Extraversion tends to be manifested in outgoing, talkative, energetic behavior, whereas introversion is manifested in more reflective and reserved behavior.
Guess what kind of activities the average outgoing and energetic teenager will pick to indulge in compared to the more reflective and reserved teenager. Sports.
This is exactly the kind of made up division I'm talking about. There is no such thing as "someone who 'emotionally recharges X or Y way'".
First of all: Why exactly would Wikipedia - edited by thousands - be wrong if the way you put is "what they are defined as"? Wouldn't people have written Wikipedia that way then?
Next, there is no such thing as "emotionally recharge". Our "emotions" aren't a battery. Also, there is "recharging process" or anything. Generally speaking: Activities that make us happy in that very moment "recharge" our batteries. Parents of young children will confirm that this not neccessarily a task that gives you respite, but can be the most exhausting thing ever, still you'll come out of it with more energy than before.
And we all - everyone! Yes, you too! - have varying ways of doing that. Sometimes, we'll want to be around others and it'll do us good, sometimes we want to be alone and it'll do us good. While all people will have tendencies towards one way or another, no one has a defined "recharging mode". No one.
And lastly: The main issue with this division into "introverts" and "extroverts" is not that it's impossible to divide people by that line. You can, as you can with many, many other lines one could draw. The issue is that people offhandedly attribute all kinds of stuff to this division. All of a sudden, extroverts are "loud" and "confident" and "energetic" and "sports guys". Even IF we applied your definition... how would the way someone wants to take a break in lead to them being even one of those things? It's just not logical.
I mean, as a nerd with no interest in prom, it wasn’t all bad. My hs has us still do graduation almost as normal (masks and spacing, ofc), with the only major difference being that it was split across multiple days so we could fit everyone on the front lawn.
The fact that they had to do the speeches six times was the only reason I was slightly glad to have missed out on being valedictorian/salutorian
pretty boring tbh. most of it was the same, just with masks on, and classes online. thankfully, mu part of australia was mostly unaffected by covid, so final WACE exams were basically the same. the big send off was already done before hand
Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
All it can do now and ever will do is destroy the environment by using oodles of energy, just so some fucker can generate a boring big titty goth pinup with weird hands and weirder feet. Feeding it exponentially more energy will do what? Reduce the amount of fingers and the foot weirdness? Great. That is so worth squandering our dwindling resources to.
I really don’t know whats going about the Anti-AI people. But is getting pretty similar to any other negationism, anti-science, anti-progress… Completely irrational and radicalized.
Sorry to hurt your fefes, but I don’t like theft and that is what AI content ALL is. How does it “know” how to program? Code stolen form humans. How does it speak? Words stolen from humans. How does it draw? Art stolen from humans.
Until this shit stops being built on a mountain of stolen data and stolen livelihoods, the argument is over. I don’t care if you like stealing money from artists so that you can pretend you had any creative input into an AIs art output. You’re stealing the work of normal people and think it’s okay because it was already stolen once before by the billionaires who are now selling it to you.
Yes, please apply the logic of stealing form large multi-national corporations to individual artists. Sterling logic.
I know why my boss makes more money then me. Because he is my enemy in a class war.
If any of these AI models draws art that is slightly too close to looking like Mickey Mouse the Disney corporation is sharpening the lawyer axe. I wonder why. But sharing is caring, right? Why would they do that?
Oh right because they want to decide what their intellectual property is used for. A right that wasn’t afforded to basically every single artist whose stuff was used to train these models. These artists often rely directly on selling their art for their daily survival. Maybe they would have liked some money to sell their art for this purpose? Maybe they didn’t want to sell it at all? Doesn’t matter, they weren’t asked. If you don’t have an army of lawyers, the corporations will do as they like. Which is why Disney is save, while normal artists are fucked and weren’t even asked in what hole they would like it before they were.
So shut the fuck up about sharing is caring, it’s easy to say that if you are the one taking advantage. I don’t know what field you work in, but I hope you lose your job to a robot that they trained on recordings of your work. You can tell me then how good it feels to share your skills.
Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
We definitely don’t need AGI for AI technologies to be useful. AI, particularly reinforcement learning, is great for teaching robots to do complex tasks for example. LLMs have shocking ability relative to other approaches (if limited compared to humans) to generalize to “nearby but different, enough” tasks. And once they’re trained (and possibly quantized), they (LLMs and reinforcement learning policies) don’t require that much more power to implement compared to traditional algorithms. So IMO, the question should be “is it worthwhile to spend the energy to train X thing?” Unfortunately, the capitalists have been the ones answering that question because they can do so at our expense.
For a person without access to big computing resources (me lol), there’s also the fact that transfer learning is possible for both LLMs and reinforcement learning. Easiest way to explain transfer learning is this: imagine that I want to learn Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science. What should I learn first so that each subject is easy for me to pick up? My answer would be Math. So in AI speak, if we spend a ton of energy to train an AI to do math and then fine-tune agents to do Physics, Engineering, etc., we can avoid training all the agents from scratch. Fine-tuning can typically be done on “normal” computers with FOSS tools.
all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
IMO that can be an incredibly useful approach for solving problems whose dynamics are too complex to reasonably model, with the understanding that the obtained solution is a crude approximation to the underlying dynamics.
IMO I’m waiting for the bubble to burst so that AI can be just another tool in my engineering toolkit instead of the capitalists’ newest plaything.
Sorry about the essay, but I really think that AI tools have a huge potential to make life better for us all, but obviously a much greater potential for capitalists to destroy us all so long as we don’t understand these tools and use them against the powerful.
How will these reasonable AI tools emerge out of this under capitalism?
How does any technology ever see use outside of oppressive structures? By understanding it and putting to work on liberatory goals.
I think that crucial to working with AI is that, as it stands, the need for expensive hardware to train it makes it currently a centralizing technology. However, there are things we can do to combat that. For example, the AI Horde offers distributed computing for AI applications.
And how is it not all still just theft with extra steps that is imoral to use?
We gotta find datasets that are ethically collected. As a practitioner, that means not using data for training unless you are certain it wasn’t stolen. To be completely honest, I am quite skeptical of the ethics of the datasets that the popular AI products were trained on. Hence why I refuse to use those products.
Personally, I’m a lot more interested in the applications to robotics and industrial automation than generating anime tiddies and building chat bots. Like I’m not looking to convince you that these tools are “intelligent”, merely useful. In a similar vein, PID controllers are not “smart” at all, but they are the backbone of industrial automation. (Actually, a proven use for “AI” algorithms is to make an adaptive PID controller so that’s it can respond to changes in the plant over time.)
A deep neural adaptive PID controller would be a bit overkill for a simple robot arm, but for say a flexible-link robot arm it could prove useful. They can also work as part of the controller for systems governed by partial differential equations, like in fluid dynamics. They’re also great for system identification, the results of which might indicate that the ultimate controller should be some “boring” algorithm.
This has been going on since big oil popularized the “carbon footprint”. They want us arguing with each other about how useful crypto/AI/whatever are instead of agreeing about pigouvian energy taxes and socialized control of the (already monopolized) grid.
Pollock’s paintings are art. a bunch of paint buckets falling on a canvas in an earthquake wouldn’t make art, even if it resembled Pollock’s paintings. there’s no intent behind it. no artist.
because if you teach me to pronounce some japanese words without teaching me what it means, i may say them perfectly, and even trick some people who don’t see my face into thinking I’m speaking native japanese, even though i don’t know what the fuck I’m saying. the fact that i tricked some people into thinking otherwise does not make me a japanese person.
Any work made to convey a concept and/or emotion can be art. I’d throw in “intent”, having “deeper meaning”, and the context of its creation to distinguish between an accounting spreadsheet and art.
The problem with AI “art” is it’s produced by something that isn’t sentient and is incapable of original thought. AI doesn’t understand intent, context, emotion, or even the most basic concepts behind the prompt or the end result. Its “art” is merely a mashup of ideas stolen from countless works of actual, original art run through an esoteric logic network.
AI can serve as a tool to create art of course, but the further removed from the process a human is the less the end result can truly be considered “art”.
As a thought experiment let’s say an artist takes a photo of a sunset. Then the artist uses AI to generate a sunset and AI happens to generate the exact same photo. The artist then releases one of the two images with the title “this may or may not be made by AI”. Is the released image art or not?
If you say the image isn’t art, what if it’s revealed that it’s the photo the artist took? Does is magically turn into art because it’s not made by AI? If not does it mean when people “make art” it’s not art?
If you say the image is art, what if it’s revealed it’s made by AI? Does it magically stop being art or does it become less artistic after the fact? Where does value go?
The way I see it is that you’re trying to gatekeep art by arbitrarily claiming AI art isn’t real art. I think since we’re the ones assigning a meaning to art, how it is created doesn’t matter. After all if you’re the artist taking the photo isn’t the original art piece just the natural occurrence of the sun setting. Nobody created it, there is no artistic intention there, it simply exists and we consider it art.
there’s something’s highly suspect about someone not understanding the difference between art made by a human being and some output spit out by a dumb pixel mixer. huge red flag imo.
and yes, the value does go. because we care about origin and intent. that’s the whole point.
if the original Mona Lisa were to be sold for millions of dollars, and then someone reveals that it was not the original Mona Lisa but a replica made last week by some dude… do you think the buyer would just go “eh it looks close enough”? no they would sue the fuck out of the seller and guess what, the painting would not be worth millions anymore. it’s the same painting. the value is changed. ART IS NOT A PRODUCT.
there’s something’s highly suspect about someone not understanding the difference between art made by a human being and some output spit out by a dumb pixel mixer. huge red flag imo.
Translation. I can’t argue your point so I’m going to try characters assassination.
if the original Mona Lisa were to be sold for millions of dollars, and then someone reveals that it was not the original Mona Lisa but a replica made last week by some dude… do you think the buyer would just go “eh it looks close enough”? no they would sue the fuck out of the seller and guess what, the painting would not be worth millions anymore. it’s the same painting. the value is changed. ART IS NOT A PRODUCT.
Pretty ironic to say art is not a product and then argue that its monetary value would decrease, which can happen only if you treat art as a product.
Imagine if instead of a physical painting Mona Lisa was a digital file and free on the internet, would people think Mona Lisa is less impressive as an art piece because anyone could own it? I think it’s artistic value wouldn’t decrease, only its value as a product would decrease because everyone could get it for free.
it’s not a product in the sense that its value does not come from its function, otherwise it would not lose value when it would be revealed to be of a different origin, but otherwise exactly the same. i spoke of the monetary value just because it’s quantifiable; it’s not otherwise relevant.
if Mona Lisa was free and digital it would be as valuable as a digital Mona Lisa could be. being free and digital doesn’t make it pointless, without agency or intent like AI art is.
It seems like you’re agreeing with me on the reasoning why AI art is art, you just refuse to accept AI as art. So let’s try a different way. Who says art has agemcy or intent? Clearly it’s not just “everything made by humans” because if I showed you the toilet paper I used to wipe my ass we can both agree that it’s not art. Neither is the comment I’m writing right now. So there needs to be something more that separates not art and art. The two most common ways would be the intent of the artist and the perceived intent of the viewer.
If it’s what the artist intended the am artist can prompt AI until AI generates the image the artist intended. Since the artist intended the AI generated image to look that way the intent is inherited from the artist.
If it’s what the viewer perceived we can reach the original question I postulated. If an image makes you feel something and you can’t know if it’s made by the artist or by AI, how do you know it’s art or not? If we take by whether you perceive intent of not then you’re attributing intent to art and it doesn’t matter how it was made. If you feel something and after the fact you find out it was AI generated image then it doesn’t invalidate what you felt.
You can come up with whomever to validate intent or agency and I’ll show you how AI wouldn’t play a role in that decision because AI isn’t sentient. It’s a tool like a camera or a paint brush or just chalk. We give the intent by using the tools we have.
AI is a tool used by a human. The human using the tools has an intention, wants to create something with it.
It’s exactly the same as painting digital art. But instead o moving the mouse around, or copying other images into a collage, you use the AI tool, which can be pretty complex to use to create something beautiful.
Do you know what generative art is? It existed before AI. Surely with your gatekeeping you think that’s also no art.
I’m so sick of this. there are scenarios in which so-called “AI” can be used as a tool. for example, resampling. it’s dodgy, but whatever, let’s say the tech is perfected and it truly analyzes data to give a good result rather than stealing other art to match.
but a tool is something that does exactly what you intend for it to do. you can’t say 100 dice are collectively “a tool that outputs 600” because you can sit there and roll them for as long as it takes for all of them to turn up sixes, technically. and if you do call it that, that’s still a shitty tool, and you did nothing worth crediting to get 600. a robot can do it. and it does. and that makes it not art.
So do you not what generative art is. And you pretend to stablish catedra on art.
Generative art, that existed before even computers, is s form of art in which a algorithm created a form of art, and that algorithm can be repeated easily. Humans can replicate that algorithm, but computers can too, and generative art is mostly used with computers because obvious reasons. Those generative algorithms can be deterministic or non deterministic.
And all this before AI, way before.
AI on its essence is just a really complex and large generative algorithm, that some people do not understand and this are afraid of it, like people used to be afraid of eclipses.
Also, you seems not to know that photographs also take hundreds or thousands of pictures with just pressing a button and just select the good ones.
cameras do not make random images. you know exactly what you’re getting with a photograph. the reason you take multiples is mostly for timing and lighting. also, rolling a hundred dice is not the same as painting something 100 times and picking the best one, nor is it like photographing it. the fact that you’re even making this comparison is insane.
If you know how to use an AI you also know how it’s working and what are you going to get, is not random. It’s a complex generative algorithm where you put in the initial variables, nothing more.
the AI itself doesn’t know what it’s doing, neither are you. the fact that you’re putting in words to change the outcome until the dice fall somewhat close to where you want them to fall doesn’t make it yours. you can’t add your own style to it, because you’re not doing it.
Please, do not extend your lack of knowledge to me. Thanks.
Also, most traditional artists never develop a style of their own. If you believe that every single artist has its own unique style… You’d be much incorrect. That does not make it less of an artist.
I remember back in the day when lots of people followed the Bob Ross style to do some nice paintings. Luckily you are here to gatekeep them from doing art.
Nothing forbid anyone to train an AI with its own drawings in its own style.
Once again, AI is a tool. Like many others used in digital art. It’s just a statistically driven generative algorithm. People can use a tool as they please to make art, same as they can use any other tool, and you have not the authority to gatekeep an artist of doing art just because you think their tool, their style, the object or anything about the artist does not fit with your morals.
And they also can, and will, mix it with other tools to produce the piece of art they want to create.
Also all this discussion about “the style™” could be just disproven given the fact that if you weight your variables and use a specific dataset you can generate consistent images in a determined style. And some AI artists does have a representative style due to this… So…
People said exact same thing about CGI, and photography before. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody scream “IT’S NOT ART” at Michaelangelo or people carving walls of temples in ancient Egypt.
the “people” you’re talking about were talking about tools. I’m talking about intent. Just because you compare two arguments that use similar words doesn’t mean the arguments are similar.
Intent is not needed for the art, else all the art in history where we can’t say what author wanted to express or the ones misunderstood wouldn’t be considered art. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Note that one of the first regulations of AI art that is always proposed is that AI art be clearly labeled as such, because whomever propose it do know the above.
I get you but it’s really not necessary. In case of (somewhat) realist art you can still recognize AI artifacts, but abstract art is already unrecognizable (and this is the precise reason they want AI art to be marked, so they won’t embarrass themselves with peans over something churned out by computer in few seconds), not to mention there is also art created by animals, and it is considered art but it’s not created with intent, except maybe the intent of people dipping dog’s paw in paint. Thus we again just get to the distinction that art needs to be created just by living things? It’s meaningless.
Anyway, i guess next few years will make this even more muddled and the art scene will get transformed permanently. Hell recently i’ve encountered some AI power metal music which is basically completely indistinguishable from normal, but in this case it mostly serve to show how uninspired and generic entire genre is.
Technology is a cultural creation, not a magic box outside of its circumstances. “The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the creators, users, and perpetuators” is tautological.
And, importantly, the purpose of a system is what it does.
So you’re using a different specific and niche technology (which directly benefits and exists because of) the technology that is the subject of critique, and acting like the subject technology behaves like yours?
“Google is doing a bad with z”
“z can’t be bad, I use y and it doesn’t have those problems that are already things that happened. In the past. Unchangeable by future actions.”
No one wants to ban technology outright. What we’re saying is that the big LLMs are actively harmful to us, humanity. This is not fear mongering. This is just what’s happening. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are stealing from humanity at large and setting the planet on fire to do it. For years they told us stealing intellectual property on an individual level was a harmful form of theft. Now they’re doing the same kind of theft bit its different now because it benefits them instead of us.
What we are arguing is that this is bad. Its especially extra bad because with the death of big search a piece of critical infrastructure to the internet as we know it is now just simply broken. The open source wonks you celebrate are working on fixing this. But just because someone criticizes big tech does not mean they criticize all tech. The truth is the FAANG companies plus OpenAI and Microsoft are killing our planet for it to only benefit their biggest shareholders
I did not believe in Intelectual Property before. I’m not going to start believing now.
The same I think that corporations having a hold on media is bad for humandkind I think that small artists should not have a "not usable by AI"hold on what they post. Sharing knowledge is good for humanity. Limitate who can have access or how they can use that knowledge or culture is bad.
The dead of internet have nothing to do with AI and all to do with leaving internet in hands of a couple big corporations.
As for emissions… are insignificant relative to other sources of CO2 emissions. Do you happen to eat meat, travel abroad for tourism, watch sports, take you car to work, buy products made overseas? Those are much bigger sources of CO2.
You dont think polluting the world is going to have a net negative effect for humanity?
What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What’s the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.
Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.
What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what’s the point in the first place?
What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What’s the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.
The whole point is that much like industrial automation it reduces the number of hours people need to work. If this leads to people starving then that’s a problem with the economic system, not with AI technology. You’re blaming the wrong field here. In fact everyone here blaming AI/ML and not the capitalists is being a Luddite.
It’s also entirely possible it will start replacing managers and capitalists as well. It’s been theorized by some anti-capitalists and economic reformists that ML/AI and computer algorithms could one day replace current economic systems and institutions.
Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.
This sadly is probably true of large companies producing big, inefficient ML models as they can afford the server capacity to do so. It’s not true of people tweaking smaller ML models at home, or professors in universities using them for data analysis or to aid their teaching. Much like some programmers are getting fired because of ML, others are using it to increase their productivity or to help them learn more about programming. I’ve seen scientists who otherwise would struggle with data analysis related programming use ChatGPT to help them write code to analyse data.
What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what’s the point in the first place?
As the other guy said there are lots of other things using way more energy and fossil fuels than ML. Machine learning is used in sciences to analyse things like the impacts of climate change. It’s useful enough in data science alone to outweigh the negative impacts. You would know about this if you ever took a modern data science module. Furthermore being that data centres primarily use electricity it’s relatively easy to move them to green sources of energy compared to say farming, or transport. In fact some data centres already use green energy primarily. Data centres will always exist regardless of AI and ML anyway, it’s just a matter of scale.
No. I’m just not fear mongering things I do not understand.
Neither am I. When you’re defending whatabputism, it’s best you at least try to represent the arguments of the person you’re arguing with accurately.
False equivalence is a classic. Biotechnology is not a technology, for example, it’s billions of technologies informed, designed, and implemented, by humans, technology is a cultural feature.
Technology as this thing free from the ethics of its use is tech bro ancap cope to justify technological pursuits with empty ethical value. You can think “banning human progress in any way” is evil. But that would make you wildly uncritical of your own beliefs.
Feel free to take your arguments back to e/acc, where that level of convenience induced niavety is considered rhetorically valid.
Technology is a product of science. The facts science seeks to uncover are fundamental universal truths that aren’t subject to human folly. Only how we use that knowledge is subject to human folly. I don’t think open source or open weights models are a bad usage of that knowledge. Some of the things corporations do are bad or exploitative uses of that knowledge.
You should really try and consider what it means for technology to be a cultural feature. Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn’t judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering “universal truths”.
And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does. Why that might get brought up in discussions about wanton resource spending for venture capitalist hype.
That’s not at all what I am doing, or what scientists and engineers do. We are all trained to think about ethics and seek ethical approval because even if knowledge itself is morally neutral the methods to obtain that knowledge can be truly unhinged.
Scientific facts are not a cultural facet. A device built using scientific knowledge is also a product of the culture that built it. Technology stands between objective science and subjective needs and culture. Technology generally serves some form of purpose.
Here is an example: Heavier than air flight is a possibility because of the laws of physics. A Boeing 737 is a specific product of both those laws of physics and of USA culture. It’s purpose is to get people and things to places, and to make Boeing the company money.
LLMs can be used for good and ill. People have argued they use too much energy for what they do. I would say that depends on where you get your energy from. Ultimately though it doesn’t use as much as people driving cars or mining bitcoin or eating meat. You should be going after those first if you want to persecute people for using energy.
It does not appear to me that you have even humored my request. I’m actually not even confident you read my comment given your response doesn’t actually respond to it. I hope you will.
Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn’t judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering “universal truths”.
No scientist or engineer as ever said that as far as I can recall. I was explaining that even for scientific fact which is morally neutral how you get there is important, and that scientists and engineers acknowledge this. What you are asking me to do this based on a false premise and a bad understanding of how science works.
And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does.
It both is and isn’t. Things often have consequences alongside their intended function, like how a machine gets warm when in use. It getting warm isn’t a deliberate feature, it’s a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. We actually try to minimise this as it wastes energy. Even things like fossil fuels aren’t intended to ruin the planet, it’s a side effect of how they work.
It’s a very common talking point now to claim technology exists independent of the culture surrounding it. It is a lie to justify morally vacant research which the, normally venture capitalist, is only concerned about the money to be made. But engineers and scientists necessarily go along with it. It’s not not your problem because we are the ones executing cultural wants, we are a part of the broader culture as well.
The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that’s what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it’s doing.
This is a systems engineering concept. And it’s inescapable.
The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that’s what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it’s doing.
Huh? Then why is so much money spent on computers to minimize energy usage and heat production? This is perhaps the biggest load of bullshit I think I have heard in a long time. Maybe there is some concept similar to this, but if so you clearly haven’t articulated it well.
Anyway I think I am done talking about this with you. You are here to fear-monger over technology you probably don’t even use or understand, and I am sick of lemmings doing it.
More likely you’re more interested in finding a way to disagree with the concept of posiwid than in doing basic research or listening.
It’s funny when y’all use “fear mongering” for people pointing out systemic issues with ai and its hype. Though it’s honestly tragic how uninterested you are in considering why AI and its hype is being criticized. Whatever makes the exploitative slave labor trained energy hungry silicon make venture capital money disappear, eh?
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