HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
1d ago
I daresay it would work again today if only the school administrations could grow a pair.
That, and you do need parents to be on board with it. And unhappily, there are always parents who don't give a shit about what the kids do so long as it doesn't involve them, or they will listen to the kids bitching about not having their phones, or they will blow up about "this is racism/discrimination/some other attention-grabbing thing" because you took her phone off my little Chanterelle and she needs that phone!
HereAndGone2
1d ago
His own looksmaxxing experiments include steroid usage at a young age, taking meth to stay lean, and altering his facial structure by hitting facial bones with a hammer/fist.
If you're hitting yourself in the face with a hammer, it's not your looks that are the problem. It's your sanity.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
Marriage is about love, primarily in the context of family life and family formation.
I think the problem is we have replaced love in that context with self-fulfilment. Love is romantic love, it's not "we're spouses, we're parents, we've built a life together, we stay together and don't jump ship at the first rough patch". So once X or Y has 'fallen out of love' with Y or X, then it's time to shut it down and move on to the new partner Z. Oh, the kids will be fine, they'll adjust!
I think love changes as it matures, but if someone confuses the first fizzy giddy romantic feelings of new love as how it is supposed to be and should remain like that forever, then they are not going to be able to cope with "oh but I don't feel the way I used to feel" and then we get the whole no-fault divorce and constantly moving on and looking for the next best thing and distrust between men and women that we get now.
This, of course, is different from abusive situations or marriages where one or both parties are not able to handle the demands, where the best thing indeed may be to separate.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
You or your competitor decides to keep all their important data in one place (probably Anthropic) because there's no logical reason to have data spread out across 3 different types of software, a commercial payroll software, commercial accounting software, and a government funding portal.
My nightmare scenario. Government signs a contract with, say, Microsoft and now we have to store everything where Copilot can get at it and I loathe Copilot, Edge, etc.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
The collective action problem is other parents. And of course, other kids.
You can't control what happens in other people's houses when your kid goes over to a friend's house. Maybe the parents are lax, maybe they don't care if their 12 year old kid is watching porn, maybe they have no idea. Boys are going to dare one another over "did you see this?"
HereAndGone2
2d ago
encourage parents to give teenagers a bedtime
Do you not remember being 12/14 and arguing passionately that you were now old enough to be allowed stay up late(r)? Maybe you can force 15 year old Teen Kid to go to their bedroom, but you can't force them to go to sleep (and you can't lock them in, either).
HereAndGone2
2d ago
I'm old enough to remember the first attempts at age verification on fanfiction websites and yes, it was trivially easy to tick the "oh indeed I definitely am of legal age in my country to access these mildly spicy stories and not 13 pretending to be 18" boxes.
Verification today will need links to real-world data to make sure that you are not 13 pretending to be 18, and that will open up a whole can of worms (e.g. so what if the site storing all this data gets hacked? now somebody can sell the details of every 15 year old in the USA on the dark web).
HereAndGone2
2d ago
Banning phones in schools (which I think is so obvious, it's surprising and embarrassing many schools haven't already done it)
How do you make it work? Try it, and somebody will start screaming about how this is harassing 17 year olds who are old enough to [do legal thing] but you are imprisoning and enslaving teenagers yet again; parents will go on radio shows about how they absolutely need to be able to contact little Krissanteemum at any time of the day; a child genuinely will need their phone, not have it, and something bad happens; teachers will be accused of picking on and victimising minority kids, and the list goes on.
Yeah, you get Johnny and Susie to hand over their phone which is kept in a locker in the secretary's office. Haw haw dumb authorities, that was my burner phone! I still have my real one!
HereAndGone2
2d ago
The problem isn't the content as such, it's what people do with it. The big news stories around "somebody think of the children!" generally turn out to be "14 year old was picked on in school, just this time it's done online instead of face-to-face, and they committed suicide". It's "pervy creeps used photos of kids posted on social media to generate child porn". It's "guy who should be fed into a wood chipper pretended to be 12 year old online, gained confidence of real 12 year olds, then blackmailed them for nudes".
Unless we can solve human nature, all the age verification laws in the world won't solve anything.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
What made me even more dubious about the entire grand project than I had already been was the news that now they were generating their own data to train models on. We've scraped every single bit of text produced by humans in all of history to date (ahem ahem I take my leave to doubt that, what you mean is 'we've scraped all the available English language text online') and now we need even more to feed the gaping maw of Behemoth, so now we have to invent our own synthetic text generated by AI.
Do they not remember "garbage in, garbage out" or, indeed, Flanderization? Generating your own synthetic data off sythetic data and using that to create more synthetic data and synthetic demographics is getting further and further away from reality, then some poor fool uses the conclusions your AI served up so prettily to make real world decisions and it turns out that in fact 15-24 year old mixed race lower middle class exurban teenagers with sports scholarships do NOT want to wear pink clamdiggers topped off with stovepipe hats. That's your entire chain of stores' summer wear stock now useless even on sale.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
For everyone here, nut perhaps especially the AGI believers, have your feelings changed at all over the last few months?
Not really. This seems broadly in line with what I expected: getting genuine human-level intelligence that can apply to general, rather than specialised, tasks is tough and getting to super-intelligence is tougher still. I am not going to say they'll never get there, but right now they've hit the limits until the next breakthrough (which could be something totally different from what they've tried up to now).
More generally, yeah they need to start serving up some steak with that sizzle. Now they need to make money, so having got people/businesses hooked on AI for doing general tasks, it's the time to start slapping prices on this. You want to keep chatting with your AI therapist/boy or girlfriend? That's going to be a subscription rate every month from now on. You can't imagine your work life without AI to write your emails or vibe code for you? Then your employer needs to fork out for a licence, bunky.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. No more "even better model for even cheaper coming next week!" and if you're already using AI, then they'll try to lock you into whatever model that may be plus SaaS rates on top of that.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
I mean how dumb can you be to not see things like this?
That's the question I asked with the story of the divorced Irish woman from a little while ago. All I can think is that sexual attraction is one hell of a drug, worse than heroin or meth or fent or crack or all of them put together. It turns your brain to mush and you can't literally see what is in front of your nose when your hormones are all addled with "I have to be in a relationship, will I ever get anyone, the years are going by" plus "this guy is charming and interested in me". You end up ignoring "okay yeah so he hits me sometimes and is verbally and emotionally abusive and a loser and I'm the one supporting the household and kids, but otherwise everything is just fine!"
I swear, with all the failures in my life, the one thing I am absolutely thankful for is that I never, ever, succumbed to romantic love. How fucked-up would I be right now if I were running like a bitch in heat after some guy, any guy, please somebody stick with me I don't want to be alone?
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Gentlemen, what women want is Dracule Mihawk. And I, for one, have no problem with that 😁
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Thanks to everyone who replied, I have a better grasp on what AI (at present) can and can't do for me.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
you can absolutely leverage AI to do the data processing steps required after you download the files.
But I still have to do the downloading myself, and by that stage it's quicker for me to go "I need to sort out the 9 employees for centre 2 and sum up their gross wages in that period" with Excel rather than hand-hold an AI through all the steps about "no, don't include that staff member but do include this staff member" and so forth.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
the easiest solution would be to see if any of these have some kind of "Export to csv" option
Most of them would have, but if I go that far by myself, it's probably easier just to sort and filter manually and forget asking AI. This is the kind of routine work which I think is not considered when the talk about "administrative work will be automated away" is going on, be that alarm about job losses or boosting about 'it'll make everyone so productive'. Yeah, if all I did was write emails and reports, sure it'd be easier to tell Copilot 'just email Jenny about I got your email' but it's not. It very much is not.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
The Culture might not even care, unless the p-zombies came after the Minds.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
gas prices are over 4 dollars, there's an upcoming 8% surcharge on shipping, and airlines are increasing their prices with some even slowly shutting down routes.
The irony is that this is what the "reduce dependency on fossil fuels/get rid of oil" crowd want, and we see now what it means in action. Not a tidy "everything now runs on wind and solar power" but "you can't get goods in, you can't get a flight to where you want to go" and advice like that from my government to do chores at night when running electrically powered items like washing machines, and walking to work instead of driving.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Love is not between two individuals but a joining of families, so things such as what the partner’s parents do, or social standing, can matter more because each family is inheriting the other family’s reputation. The first questions my parents asked when I told them about my now-husband was what did his parents and brothers do, how did they spend their time. What they were really asking was: Can they protect you? Will they be able to provide for you? Will they tarnish your name?
That was also in the West up until quite recently, though mostly amongst rural people. In my parents' generation, they too would have wondered about any possible husbands I brought home; the joke is/was that what parents ask is "Who is he? What does he do? What does his father do?"
So the whole "marry for romantic love as individuals without any family input" thing is (1) urban and (2) still relatively new.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Culture War appropriate? Okay, I'm hearing everything about how AI is coming for our jerbs/gonna make us so productive, eventually only six humans will be working in the entire economy and the rest of us will be livin' large on that sweet, sweet UBI from all the yuuuuge economic gains.
But what does that mean in actuality if I'm not a software engineer type?
For example, a Substack comedian (literally, that was his day job) has a post up about AI and how this is all hysteria, nobody is going to lose their jobs, it's merely the usual sort of dip in the economy and the sectors most affected are:
And here’s what the Dallas Fed says are the three most common occupations in the “most exposed to AI” sector:
Most AI exposure: first line supervisors of retail sales workers; secretaries and administrative assistants; customer service representatives.
Okay. I fall into the "secretaries and administrative assistants" bucket and I know Sweet Fanny Adams about AI. My exposure to it in the workplace is with the free Copilot Microsoft has bundled in with Microsoft 365 and, apart from annoying me with "Do you want me to write that email?" (no thanks, I think I can figure how to say "I got that invoice, thanks" all by my little ownsome), I see no use for it.
But! AI is going to be the wave of the workplace future! So, for all you who know and use the thing and are up on the different models, here's an example of a task I routinely need to do in my job. Can AI (Copilot or whatever) do this, or most of it, for me?
A request from our auditors:
- Please provide a copy of the Gross to Net Wages report for the period 1st September 2024 to 31st August 2025. Please outine which employees relate to [service centre 1] and [service centre 2].
- Please provide a copy of [service provider portal for government-funded services] report for the period 1st September 2024 to 31st August 2025 showing all income to both [service centre 1] and [service centre 2].
- Please provide details of any Debtors Balances owed to each service at the 31st August 2025.
Where this information is located:
- Wages on commercial payroll software, which is split between years (e.g. Payroll 2024, Payroll 2025, Payroll 2026) for each new package. Requires log-in with password. Packages are on my PC. So data for September to December 2024 would be on one package, and data for January to August 2025 would be on another.
- Government funding on portal, requiring log-in details. Sign in via Internet. Two different centres so have to remember to switch between them to find data.
- Debtors Balances - commercial accounting software package, requiring log-in details, sign in via Internet. Since we're not a for-profit commercial business per se, we don't have customers who get invoiced. So this would mainly be agreed funding to be paid out over a year or longer period, and the balance would be difference between agreed contract amount less monies received to date. Again, need to switch between centres as above for the government portal.
How do I use AI to take all this drudgery off my hands? Can I ask/tell it "here's the details of how to log in, now go ahead lil' Copilot and pull out all that info and make a nice, tidy spreadsheet out of it all"? Or do I have to hand-hold it every step of the way, in which case I am just as well off to do it all myself?
HereAndGone2
8d ago
And somehow the humans are 100% aware of the arrangement and there are few dissenters, although they can get uppity from time to time.
It seems to me that the Culture deals with this by letting the dissenters interact with other cultures/societies on their behalf as part of Contact. Also humans live extended lifespans but not immortality, so far as Wikipedia tells me, so the problem will eventually solve itself; even the most fiery rebel can't maintain that meaningfully within the Culture, and if they leave to join a different world, then they are no longer a problem:
Since the Culture's biological population commonly live as long as 400 years and have no need to work, they face the difficulty of giving meaning to their lives when the Minds and other intelligent machines can do almost anything better than the biological population can. Many try—few successfully—to join Contact, the Culture's combined diplomatic / military / government service, and fewer still are invited to the even more elite Special Circumstances (SC), Contact's secret service and special operations division. Normal Culture citizens vicariously derive meaning from their existence via the works of Contact and SC. Banks described the Culture as "some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works... Contact does that on a large scale."
HereAndGone2
8d ago
It all depends on how people treat service workers, and increasingly it seems to be entitlement and treating them like servants/trash. "I'm paying for this so I deserve to be treated with the bowing and scraping you'd give a duke" is the attitude.
Even years back, when I worked in a shop, I still remember the guy who was buying a newspaper and who didn't even bother to look at me as he paid, he kept his head turned chatting to his friend and literally threw the money down on the counter. That was just bad manners, but clearly in his mind, I wasn't even a person to be acknowledged.
Now add in drunks and lunatics, and I'd crawl over broken glass rather than work public-facing jobs again in service/retail industries.
HereAndGone2
8d ago
I have a modest proposal that service workers shouldn't have to deal with that.
As someone who worked in retail years and years ago, hollow laughter.
Managers won't take the side of staff because customers bring in money while staff cost money. And nowadays, with your business living and dying by online reviews, and anything less than 5 stars being seen as terrible, there's even more of a perverse incentive to appease even the loudest mouth, because that's precisely the person who will leave 1 star reviews everywhere and get up an online campaign to boycott your business. Throwing staff to the wolves is easier than telling bad customers to buzz off.
Thus, business owners are incentivized to let employees refuse to serve rude customers, rather than the other way around (importantly, the customer can't be fined after a sale).
Used to be the right of refusal of service, but that got neutered after all the lawsuits about equal treatment etc. (just think of the gay wedding cakes argument for one). You can technically refuse service so long as the reasons are non-discrimination, but today everything can be turned into "that's discrimination!" (e.g. Kamala and Hillary didn't get elected because sexism and racism, in Kamala's case, not because nobody wanted them as president).
Some places will protect staff, but generally customer facing is low ranking, high turnover anyway, and you're disposable.
HereAndGone2
8d ago
Agreed. If you're starting your own business you will be working like a dog. "I work 10 hours a week and make $$$$$" is a scam.
So try that today to keep young newport off the Internet and away from undesirable sites, and the same result; they took your phone but you have backups you can just reactivate and keep scrolling that [bad thing children should never see!]
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