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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I think it’s a perception and noticeability problem.

    I’ve been around a lot of guys who cc, and I only knew because it happened or come up in conversation or someone else told me. If I walked by them on the street, never would have noticed.

    Former friend from highschool, his whole family was military, gun nuts, who all cc and they made sure you knew it. The dude went into national guard and was ecstatic about getting deployed to the local large city during a police brutality protest.

    For a lot of people, I feel like the later is the more common experience with cc than the former, despite the former being the truly more common one


  • Kind of

    The vast majority of the time we use our social security numbers as a personal ID number. Drivers licenses also will have unique numbers on them which you can query off of, so too do passports.

    By law, no one is required to have any of those three. People having a social security number is pretty common, but getting one of those is the easiest of the three.

    Because none of them are a legal requirement to be a citizen, each one has multiple document set requirements, and if you have the other two, the third is trivial to obtain.

    The documents you need if you’re not leveraging another form of ID are basically a set of documents that aren’t that difficult for your average person to get their own copies of but harder for some one else to forge and claim to be another person


  • I think it’s that a large pool of stocks going up for sale with no context seems suspicious. Stocks are inherently a gamble on the future price will be higher than current price, so by selling you’re withdrawing your bet which could be interpreted as you knowing that the bet won’t pay off and that other gamblers owners paying attention might panic and try and sell too, which then could trigger a feedback loop. New buyers might see a bunch of people trying to sell and then think to themselves the bet isn’t a good one and won’t buy, making the current sellers reduce the price in the hopes of actually selling off and not left holding the bag

    A lot of “could” and "might* in that scenario, and it does play out from time to time (see NFTs, 2008 housing market). It also won’t play out if the reason for the sale is known and isn’t based on lost faith of the bet



  • In all seriousness going to LEO gets the job done the vast majority of the time, medium and high earth orbit have very few use cases with the exception of geostationary which SpaceX has gone to.

    Going to the moon is very energy intensive and you don’t get a ton of benefit for it so there’s no real point to going there. Apollo was a jobs program and a dick waving contest with Soviet Russia to prove who could put the biggest nuke anywhere on Earth. Going to the moon has very little scientific/practical value outside of political stunts which Apollo and Artemis programs definitely are



  • I think the problem is Valve lost control of the messaging, which led to bad expectations.

    At least in the US, a computer hooked up to a TV to play games means it’s a “console” and not a computer. Maybe we can blame Nintendo back in the 80s for going out of their way to avoid calling the NES a computer (despite it’s name in Japan being Famicom, Family Computer), but the distinction exists today despite technologically no real difference. You know this, I know this, Valve knows this. So Valve wants to make a computer you hook up to your TV so they can get you to use their money printing machine Steam in the living room too.

    If you read Valve’s marketing material on the Steam Machine, they don’t use the word “console” once. It’s always either by name or the terms PC, computer, or system. They likely don’t mention the word “console” because to date, video game consoles follow a different business model, one where the model subsidizes the shit out of the hardware and then make money on the back end with game sales/licensing.

    Current “console” hardware starts in the <$500 price bracket, and with so much third party media marketing calling the Steam Machine a console, that got people’s mind set on pricing expectations of that market.


  • Realistically, computational power

    The more number crunching units and more memory you throw at the problem, the easier it is and the more useful the final model is. The math and theoretical computer science behind LLMs has been known for decades, it’s just that the resource investment required to make something even mediocre was too much for any business type to be willing to sign off on. Me and my fellow nerds had the technology and largely dismissed it as worthless or a set of pipe dreams

    But then number crunching units and memory became cheap enough that a couple of investors were willing to take the risk and you get a model like ChatGPT1. Talks close enough like a human that it catches business types attention as a new revolutionary thing, and without the technical background to know they were getting lied to, the Venture Capitalism machine cranks out the shit show we have today.



  • For pure entertainment or passive turn-brain-off type games I’m inclined to agree with you. Mario Party isn’t exactly changing lives out here.

    Games that tell a story though, they can be extremely impactful just like any form of story. Through stories I myself have changed my world views, taken new perspectives in life. Star Trek The Next Generation’s season 6 episode Tapestry changed my outlook on risk taking especially in my professional life, my username reference to the Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask got me to overcome my extreme fear and anxiety of being rejected by friends. Was I much younger when I experienced those stories, sure, but they still changed the course of my life.

    My day job is working on satellites, I’m a hobbyist carpenter, been teaching myself to play piano, frequently go camping/hiking into Colorado’s mountains, work on a project car, and sure this evening I’ve been playing Factorio but I’ve been doing so while sipping wine that I made myself.

    You could call me many things, but I don’t think boring fits.


  • In short: sometimes nothing at all, sometimes self survival

    In practice, when a state becomes a part of the United States it concedes total independence, giving itself to the jurisdiction and control of the federal government. In exchange, a state is given representation in the federal government to influence what laws make up that control and because after a few different rounds of early government structures post colonial independence, the federal government was kneecapped in terms of the types of laws it can pass. If a law passes Congress and survives a legal review by the federal courts, strictly speaking a state has no choice but to agree and cooperate. At best a state could work with other states to repeal laws a single state doesn’t want/like.

    The vast majority of the time states operate in relative good faith and follow federal law. When a state does openly defy the federal government, it depends on the exact law being ignored. Marijuana is illegal on the federal level where mere possession of it lands you in jail, but many states turn a blind eye to citizens using it and states like Colorado make bank off of taxing the sale of it. This kind of stuff happens a lot and the executive branch makes a judgement call on if it’s politically worth punishing a state in defiance.

    This current administration has proven repeatedly to be very vindictive and retaliates against even the perception of defying their rule. The last time a state continued defiance against the federal executive branch this nation threw itself into civil war and lost 2% of its population in the process.



  • It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

    If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

    tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care



  • Someone who works in said US defense industry here

    Neither defense nor war really apply to what we do, but between the two defense is the more apt description. The DoD largely uses a strategy of deterrence, where the technology we develop and training done for the “war fighter” is just public and visible enough that no other major country wants to take the risk of going into full open conflict with the US. Since most efforts go into deterrence, and deterrence is a defense strategy, it does become the more appropriate word.

    Sure the US loves its proxy wars, but those don’t throw the entire nation into wartime. Plus, in a round about way proxy wars help with the deterrence since we get an outlet for the decades old stock piles of arms that we no longer want and want to replace with the new stuff. If our waste products are being useful in places like Ukraine, it helps build up an idea of what it is we keep for ourselves, again building up a deterrence of openly and directly attacking the US




  • You wanted an example of where the accusations of rape directly led to ruined lives, and I gave you one.

    Sure, in the example I gave the motive behind the accusations was racism, but the accusation was still about rape. The original commenter was pointing out that any and all accusations must be met with suspicion in order for “innocent until proven guilty” to function.

    What that doesn’t mean is that any and all accusations of rape should be dismissed because the accuser is a woman. There’s a difference here

    Should the police believe someone when they claim they’ve been raped and should the police investigate? Yes.

    Should the police, court of law, court of public opinion believe a rape accusation purely because the accuser is a woman? No.