Yeah, I’ve learned some discretion over the years. I once told a story that dead ass got me sent to therapy.

Me telling an EMS war story that brings the vibe to a crashing halt.

America in one picture

I don’t know that I’d agree that the EU and the articles of confederation are comparable. There were a few big differences, including states printing their own currency without a common exchange medium (as opposed to the Euro), and that the mechanism for funding the federal government was (IIRC) entirely voluntary. States could just choose to not send money without consequences, and most or all made the obvious choice of not funding the federal government. The articles of confederation also had a few things about it that were more progressive than the constitution; for example, if I’m remembering right, it offered automatic citizenship to all native Americans, which pissed a lot of the farmer-settlers right off.

This is how nations destabilize. States perpetuate themselves through maintaining the exclusive monopoly on violence and using that monopoly to secure certain guarantees for or against its people. The Roman empire saw a similar decline of administrative willpower and rises in both vigilantism and shitty little civil wars between the wealthy elite who really ran the show (spoiler alert). I’m convinced that Balkanization of the US is, at this point, inevitable. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good or bad thing in its own right. On one hand, it might be better for both the states and the world if we went to more of an EU type structure. On the other hand, a nuclear armed independent Texas.

This is really cool, but it would have been cooler if they’d named their scouting missions Hugin and Mugin, since they’re Odin’s ravens that scour the earth for secrets to give to Odin.

I fuck with this energy, let’s get it done!

I don’t know if I can; it’s not, well, in my lane as a bicycle/pedestrian committee member. I still show up and advocate for lane narrowing and traffic calming at the city council meetings.

Edit: disregard. I thought you meant lanes, you clearly mean sweepers

I’m trying to secure wholly separate bike lanes, or at least flexi-posts, anything but a sharrow or a line of paint. Tbh, I dunno how that’ll work with a street sweeper.

Day 30 of being fucking bewildered that I, a non-voting member of my city’s bicycle commission, have stricter ethical laws binding me than those for judges and politicians.

Yeah, that’s him. I was curious and looked him up a while back. Tay get really open about speaking for economic and social justice. He’s more or less always been that way. Chocolate Rain, is, IIRC, a song about the realities and struggles of being black in America.

Is this ceasefire deal in the room with us now?

Not to mention everyone buried under rubble.

Good point. I think a bigger problem than the customer facing AIs is going to be the internal ones that make shit up. Someone on here claimed to be working somewhere where they gutted their HR department and replaced them almost completely with an LLM that was fed their documents. They claimed the AI had already told them several blatantly illegal things. Any company that does that is just begging to get sued to death, and I’m sure the investors will be reeeeeaaaaal happy with the, what, 1% they saved by killing HR? I mean, HR aren’t the good guys here, but just imagine a company being brain dead enough to say “hey, let’s get rid of the people that keep us from getting sued to death and replace it with a chatbot lmao”.

It’s got to be more than that. This is a little like saying that there are at least two stars in the sky.

If I was a Cisco investor, I’d be looking to move my money elsewhere. All these companies laying people off, shuttering whole ass teams, and replacing them with non-proprietary and, frankly, unproven LLMs are going to blow their own legs off here pretty soon. I have a feeling that a pretty dramatic change is AI pricing models is coming soon, since all of these companies are providing access to their models for a fraction of the cost to run them, and the VCs are going to want their money back. Is chatGPT good enough at, what is it, 0.004 cents a token? Maybe, I guess, if the ghost of quality control doesn’t haunt you at night. Is chatGPT still good enough at 0.1 cents a token or more, or with surge pricing models? I sincerely doubt it. If openAI implements surge pricing, stay on the lookout for articles about some company or user getting a surprise bill for a million dollars, AWS-style. Given the current quality of LLMs, I don’t think that the cost shakes out for what you get.

I would be very proud to say I had them on hand, but I don’t. I’ll look around, and share if I find them.

Beautiful stroadside shopping

There’s a number of other studies that show that, overall, letting people go unhoused is far, far more costly than just fucking housing them. It’s not just paying for the cops and demo teams to chase them around, you’re also paying for excess use of medical services that wouldn’t be taking place otherwise, lost revenue because of people wanting to avoid the homeless, and a bunch of other things that all just pile up. It doesn’t help that some startups have entered this space and you’ve got cities like San Francisco paying them something like 40 or 80 thousand a year to keep the homeless in a fenced off area in a tent grid. It doesn’t really fix anything, it’s just another shitty, expensive band-aid whose funding could have gone to fixing the problem but didn’t.