Car are always being bought and sold. Some people jump from car to car every few years; I’ve known people who always lease precisely because they trade what they have every year or two for something new.

I’ve been an EV driver for the last few years; my brother called today to tell me he had just bought a used Bolt for his wife. As things happened one of his grown children had their car completely fail on them this week, and so he and his wife decided to buy themselves a new car so they could sell the old one for cheap to their child. With gas prices as they are they found a gently used Bolt EUV. They pick it up this weekend.

So in their case they didn’t go out and buy a car just because gas prices were up — but the decision between gas and EV was triggered by the price of gasoline.

/r/all is gone if you’re on New Reddit. It redirects to your personal feed now.

/r/all is apparently still available on Old Reddit — at least for now. Who knows how long any of that will still be around.

The only “conservative” belief they adhere to imo is the want for smaller government … because they do in fact want a dictatorship.

Don’t believe it for a second. Conservative “smaller government” is always about getting rid of some long-term bureaucrats who know what they’re doing and government programmes conservatives don’t like, and then growing Government by massively increasing internal security apparatus (police, border control, military, prisons, etc.).

Every conservative government always want to go “tough on crime” or “expel (il)legal immigrants” — and that always winds up with a massive increase in government size and expenditures. You don’t get those things without a significant number of boots on the ground, and once you have those boots on the ground they’ll find every excuse to use them — just like how ICE is terrorizing blue cities in the US, or is being used to supplant airport security.

“Smaller government” is just conservative code for “wielding more control over citizens”. Every time.

Sure — as with every tool. Hammers are great for many things, but don’t do all that well driving screws. Money is one of the most used tools humans have ever devised, but you can’t use it for everything.

AI in coding may only be good for a finite set of situations — but that set is massive. You’re dealing with regular languages that can be mathematically proven to be correct (in the sense that they will generate a working program, and not in the sense that they program will in fact function the way the user intends). This is a less open-ended scenario than something like an AI generated video, and so it’s easier for AI to excel at it, especially for non-novel algorithms.

But if you use it like an idiot, you’re going to get burned — and this guy was an idiot who doesn’t understand what he’s doing, or the tools researchers in software development have made over the last few decades. AI shouldn’t be touching your production environment — at all. And it shouldn’t have to — code needs to be stored in a versioning source repository of some sort (and backed up so you are unlikely to ever lose it), deployment needs to be fully scripted and should be able to rebuild your environments from scratch (from code right to production), and developers and development tools (like AI tools) should only have access to development environments, and not production environments.

So unless you’re a total dumbass, an AI agent (or even a shitty human developer) should never have the kind of access to do what happened here. They violated some pretty basic principals of software development, and got burned. This guy sawed his own hand off because he misused the tools to take a bunch of shortcuts, without building in any backups or reproducibility. The AI isn’t the proximal fault here — trusting it when you have no way to reproduce your environment when things go wrong is the problem, and that’s 100% on the human sitting at the keyboard (PEBKAC).

AI is like a circular saw. Are circular saws useful?

Of course.

Can you cut your entire hand off if you don’t use it correctly? Absolutely.

But that’s true of virtually every dictator. You don’t get to be a dictator without a plethora of yes-men who are willing to implement the whims of the dictator without question. Dictators need True Believers to implement their plans, and oppress any opposition. That’s a basic facet of any dictatorship.

I’m willing to bet you could convince a subset of those people that such an LLM is in fact the second coming of Christ. So not just some tool “approved” by God, but that the LLM is the God itself.

Then (to the “true believers” minds) whatever it says will be unquestionable. And then whomever is pulling the strings behind the scenes can commit whatever atrocities they desire.

I’m familiar with TempleOS — but it really doesn’t have any applicability here. It’s just something written by a guy with some mental illness who thought God was telling him what he wanted in an Operating System. But even for the faithful it’s just a tool — like how a temple itself may be an important holy place, but isn’t itself worshipped by the people who use it. Nobody considers a church to actually be their God.

That’s vastly different from an LLM that purports to be itself divine. We can setup an LLM that actually claims to be the second coming of Jesus, and there will be people will do whatever it tells them to because of belief. If you suck in enough people for enough years slowly enough to build up a cult following, and abuse them just enough to keep them in line, you’ll be able to tell them to do all sorts of truly atrocious things — and some subset will in fact go through with them.

And yes, people can do that already (see Jim Jones, David Koresh, or any other cult leader that convinced all their followers to kill themselves and their families) — but an LLM could have a vastly larger reach around the globe. We may not need for the LLM itself to become Skynet — one or two bad actors behind the scenes of a “divine” LLM might be enough to bring down humanity all by itself.

Mark my words — but we’re going to see a time (in our lifetimes) where a group of people is going to worship an AI as “divine”. And you won’t be able to convince them otherwise. An AI-centric cult is all but inevitable at this point. And it will be self-reinforcing.

TIL 20% of Americans live in a persistent vegetative state.

I have way too much self-respect to ever show my face on FOX 🤣.

I was on one of those “especially rebellious mod-teams”. We were even interviewed by Ars Technica about it all at the time.

On advice of a majority of our users, we took our sub offline and kept it that way until Reddit booted us as mods. Honestly, this was the outcome I was expecting — hell, I was pretty open about goading them into it. What was the alternative — to cave to the platform that was abusing us so I could keep working for them for free?

That’s the part I didn’t understand about my fellow mods from other subs. Many of them caved pretty quickly. Their identities seemed to be so tied up in being a Reddit mod that they couldn’t let it go, even though the relationship was obviously very unequal. Too many other people stood up after witnessing the mod abuse to take over from those who got the boot, just asking for the Reddit boot to be applied to their necks instead.

Well, I wish all the mods the kind of treatment they forgave/ignored the last time around.

This is why most apps that do use such services use more than one. Lots of modern sites have buttons for “Login with Google”, “Login with Facebook”, “Login with Apple”. None of them want to lose access to the user data and analytics they get from these services — so I doubt one is going to jump into cutting you off or requiring payment while the others are still free.

It would take all of these services to (illegally) coordinate to suddenly start charging — and of all of them I don’t see that being in the interest at all for Apple. Apple’s login service uses Touch and Face ID on their devices, and is part of the selling point for those devices (extremely easy logins with no password). They’re not making their money off Single Sign-On (SSO) login services — they make their money off selling devices, and they make the case for selling these devices in large part by selling “simplicity”.

So if you’re worried today about a login service yanking the rug out from under you, you just implement many/all of them. It’s not significantly more work — all of them are based off OAuth — so long as your website or app can authenticate via OAuth you just need to use the APIs each company provides to implement the authentication, and you’re done.

Nothing them stops you as you get bigger form implementing your own login/authentication service — and if you ever get big enough, you too can offer it as a service for other websites.

And that’s just fine. Considering how many people do login with those services, I doubt any that use the SSO services will particularly miss you and the small subset of users who don’t want to let a third-party service confirm your login.

That’s not meant as snark — every app and website out there has some subset of users who will decry “I won’t use that because it does X”. And that’s fine. It’s a personal decision. But it likely won’t significantly affect development decisions, as it’s going to happen with some group for some reason anyway.

It is not good for small commercial entities that will be required to enact a ID verification system because it will increase the cost of entry to the market.

As someone who works in this space, I doubt it’s going to be an issue for smaller entities. We already have SSO for basic login identity from a variety of providers (Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple) — smaller sites already love to use these as it provides easy access to existing users, and saves a ton of coding for having to handle login information, password management, etc.

These same entities can handle the age verification. Now I can see arguments as to why centralizing logins and age verification like this could be a problem for users, but if I decided to start my own social media app tomorrow I’d likely rely on the big platforms to handle all of this (as we already see everywhere — heck, app for ordering pizza support Facebook, Google, and Apple logins), and save myself the cost and hassle of implementing this myself (never mind the potential embarrassment and liability should someone hack my site). Then it’s on those platforms to worry about age verification.

All of these services are currently free, and save you from a ton of coding around user accounts and authentication, so using them is usually cheaper then having to DIY it.

Trudeau was a fucking saint compared to Trump. You’d have to be severely brain damaged to think he did anywhere near the kind of damage Trump is doing down in the US.

Short answer — the internal “switch” is held in the on position by a magnet. Magnets become much less effective when they get hot, and while there is still water in the cooker the maximum temperature will be 100C. Once all the water boils off the temperature quickly rises — but the magnets stop being able to attract the switch when they hit around 102 - 103C or so and release the switch, turning the machine off.

So all has is a switch connected to a magnet next to the bottom of the pot. That’s it. Physics does the rest.

We have enough production in some areas — but not in others. Some goods are currently overly expensive because the inputs are expensive — mostly because we’re not producing enough. In many cases that’s due to insufficient competition. And there are some significant entrenched interests trying to keep things that way (lower production == lower competition == higher prices).

And FWIW, the US’s current “tariff everything and everybody” approach is going to make this much, much, much worse.

I am certainly not the friend of billionaires. I’m perfectly fine with a wealth tax to fund public works and services. All I’m against is overly simplistic solutions which just exacerbate existing problems.

This is where the problem of the supply/demand curve comes in. One of the truths of the 1980s Soviet Union’s infamous breadlines wasn’t that people were poor and had no money, or that basic goods (like bread) were too expensive — in a Communist system most people had plenty of money, and the price of goods was fixed by the government to be affordable — the real problem was one of production. There simply weren’t enough goods to go around.

The entire basic premise of inflation is that we as a society produce X amount of goods, but people need X+Y amount of goods. Ideally production increases to meet demand — but when it doesn’t (or can’t fast enough) the other lever is that prices rise so that demand decreases, such that production once again closely approximates demand.

This is why just giving everyone struggling right now more money isn’t really a solution. We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.

Of course, it’s only profitable to increase production if the cost of basic inputs can be decreased — if you know there is a big untapped market for bread out there and you can undercut the competition, cheaper flour and automation helps quite a bit. But if flour is so expensive that you can’t undercut the established guys, then fighting them for a small slice of the market just doesn’t make sense.

Personally, I’m all for something like UBI — but it’s only really going to work if we as a society also increase production on basic needs (housing, food, clothing, telecommunications, transit, etc.) so they can be and remain at affordable prices. Otherwise just having more money in circulation won’t help anything — if anything it will just be purely inflationary.

You know, I remember way back in the day when…

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