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“Why sex?”

10/10 starter question, no notes.

The most asinine, self-centered thing I’ve seen today has got to be you assuming that the emotional state of your employees, which the goods and services you offer depend on for sales, is something that they should simply magically suppress for the sake of customers.

Do you think this employee is going to check the mood of each customer?

Buddy, if every customer going through the checkout line at the grocery store I work for had this pin on, it would make judging how much small talk people want loads easier, and would save me, and them, a huge mental headache. That said, if only I were to choose to wear that pin, I don’t think indicating to customers how up I am for small talk would make me an asshole.

If you were my boss, and wanted to deliberately disregard my mental state because you felt it would make you a few more bucks, that would make you the asshole.

Get your priorities straight.

Always demand a human support representative until it gives you the option to, then the actual human will usually manually process your refund if you complain about how the initial refund never happened.

Bonus chance of success if you’re a Prime member and say you’re thinking about cancelling.

I think if I found out my country was doing a genocide with an unimaginably higher ratio of civilians murdered, I’d decry both acts, and not actively support the ongoing justifications made for a genocide by an apartheid based regime.

The train also only runs between Erkner Station, and Tesla Sud, which is literally just the station right at the Tesla manufacturing facility in the area.

“It’s also free to not just Tesla employees, but regular passengers as well.”

That’s great and all, but are everyday people taking trains to go see the outside of a Tesla factory, then leaving again?

To counteract the somewhat clickbait-y title:

[the adult] was hospitalized on Aug. 22 and has recovered.

There has been no evidence that H5N1 […] has been spreading from person to person.

the patient in Missouri is the 15th human case of H5 reported in the U.S. since 2022. Since the beginning of 2024, 14 poultry and dairy workers have been infected.

There’s still no indication it’s spreading between humans, and it doesn’t seem to be “raising anxiety,” at least not in any significant way. “This will be of enormous interest” - DR. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert

I don’t know of any super high-quality ones that run well, but the Open Assistant project, (now archived) collected responses from voluntary participants (myself included) to build what is now considered a very high-quality dataset of chat conversation pairs, truly open source, and all voluntarily submitted instead of scraped.

The models are reasonable for fine-tuning, but aren’t very good compared to newer models from large companies.

I find those kinds of chatbots useful, but those aren’t the ones I encounter 90% of the time. Most of the time, it’s a chatbot that summarizes the help articles I just read, giving faulty interpretations of the source material, that then goes on to never direct me to a real person unless I tell it multiple times that the articles it’s paraphrasing aren’t helping. (and sometimes, they have no live support at all, and only an LLM + support articles)

TLDR; “weak people have to conform to social consensus otherwise they get hurt I guess?”

I, on the other hand, am a big, strong, high T alpha male, that isn’t worried about what anyone thinks! I am a free thinker, and I know my opinions are correct because I instantly based this entire opinion on a subjective, anecdotal view of the world that I then extrapolated meaning out of, the best evidence! /s

Oh yeah, it’s definitely useful for that!

Since LLMs are essentially just very complicated probabilistic links between words, it seems to be extremely good at picking the exact word or phrase that even a thesaurus couldn’t get me.

I primarily end up using LLMs through DuckDuckGo’s private frontend alongside a search, so if my current search doesn’t yield the correct answer to my question (i.e. I ask for something but those keywords only ever turn up search results on a different, but similar topic) then I go to the LLM and ask a more refined question, that otherwise doesn’t produce any relevant results in a traditional keyword search.

I also use integrated LLMs to format and distill my offhand notes, (and reformat arbitrary text based on specific criteria repeatedly for structured notes,) learn programming syntax more at my own pace and in my own way, and just generally get answers on more well-known topics a lot faster than I would scrolling past 5 pages of SEO-“optimized” garbage just designed to fill time for the ads to load before actually giving me a good answer.

I have never once found an “AI” feature integrated by a corporation useful.

I have only ever found “AI” useful when it’s unobtrusive, and something I chose to use manually. Sometimes an LLM is useful to use, but I don’t need it shilled to me inside a search bar or in a support chat that won’t solve my problem until I bypass the LLM.

I’ve used LLMs to save me hours of time reformatting text and old notes, and restructure explanations so I can better understand and share them, used AI speech to text models to transcribe my voice notes, and used diffusion models to generate better quality mockups for designs that were later commissioned in better quality, with no need for any changes.

I can understand not liking AI, or not needing it yourself, but acting as if it has no use is frankly ridiculous. You might not use it, but other people do.

I think this says more about corporation’s attempts to integrate “AI” into everything, instead of it being a user choice, than it does about the technology itself.

There are people who think that “positive” or “negative” words have a magic-like effect on natural processes.

From what I’ve seen, this was originally popularized in 2004 by Masaru Emoto’s book “The Hidden Messages in Water,” where part of his claims were that snowflakes would develop differently in containers labeled with negative or positive emotions.

Naturally, this turned out to be a complete lie, but many people, such as those in the original post, still believe that words can somehow influence things like mold development on food.

I, too have seen the ability of Sci-Hub to give me free access to research papers.

It’s terrifying how easy it is to get access to scientific literature for free! Wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

Several parables in the Bible foreshadow the insight of quantum entanglement about paired photons having opposite spin

Interesting, I wonder what their evidence is for that-

by contrasting two men in their relationship with God. The Prodigal Son contrasts two brothers, two churchgoers are contrasted in Luke 18:9–14 , and two brothers are further contrasted in Luke 21:28-31

Just… 2 people being compared?

LOL

Having cheaper energy from renewable sources?

They think it’s more expensive due to the very first time they saw renewables used when they weren’t as cost effective as oil, and have been propagandized to with that narrative ever since by billionaire-owned media.

Never running out of oil?

They think there’s always going to be enough, and we can just take more from other countries or also use coal to fix that problem.

Being independent from unstable countries with bad human rights records?

They don’t care about anyone who’s not American, and even then, they’re very distanced from the reality of the working class.

Having cleaner air?

They simply never consider this as it’s never brought up by any of the media they watch. They also probably just don’t think it’s a big deal since “I can breath this air just fine already!”

Boosting local economy

See: people like Donald Trump saying clean energy would help china and harm the American economy

Investing in local and domestic research, education, and fabrication?

See above.

These people definitely want these things, they just don’t actually believe it will do anything in the first place to help with them, or simply aren’t aware that an issue exists at all because of the heavy pro-oil propaganda they’ve lapped up over the years.

The paradox of tolerance at its finest.