I am owned by several dogs and cats. I have been playing non-computer roleplaying games for almost five decades. I am interested in all kinds of gadgets, particularly multitools, knives, flashlights, and pens.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.

    Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.

    I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.















  • The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life’s work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.

    There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.

    I’m sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.



  • I would be happy to see it replaced by something better, but I don’t want it to disappear. Having any kind of reference for source reliability, even just as a reminder to think about it, helps provide perspective on political posts.

    We live in an era where it has become normal to dump masses of bullshit online in the hope that sheer volume will convince people it’s true. Pointing out the credibility gap between NPR and Fox News is important.



  • Getting a university degree is essential for a lot of professions, but it should not be your only purpose in attending. It’s an opportunity expand yourself as a person while training for a job. Take some classes in non-technical areas that you know very little about. A few of them may lead to lifelong interests. Even if they don’t, they will give you a broader view of the world and the people in it.

    Even if you end up loving your job, there is more to life than work.

    I have a computer science degree and work as a developer and consultant. The most important things I learned in college were from some anthropology classes I took out of curiosity. Technical knowledge is not that hard to acquire. Gaining new perspectives on the world is a lot harder to come by. Take advantage of the opportunities.