Ideally the answers aren’t just political soapboxing.
That people in medieval Europe thought the earth was flat. Even had a history prof in college repeat this (granted she was an American history prof, so 🤷♂️. Makes the modern flat Earth movement even more perplexing.
My favorite bit of evidence for this is in Dante’s Purgatorio. He opens several cantos by mentioning where the sun is in the sky at different points on the globe at a given time, in Rome, India, and the island of Purgatory, which he puts antipodal to Jerusalem, so halfway between Chile and New Zealand.
The whole bit about Columbus proving it was round is bogus. He thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, which is why he said he could hit the East Indies before dying of starvation by sailing west. Lucky for him there was a whole other continent in the way. Could you imagine traversing the Atlantic, the entire breadth of North America, and the Pacific?
many people still ignore, or dont believe white privilege is still pervasive in western countries. aside from the racists, some people of those groups do not want to discuss it ever because they still benefited fom all that abuse, strip mining of resources centuries ago.
White people often forget (or don’t realize in the first place) that, if you’re a black person in USA, the police is actively looking for an excuse to put you in jail so they can make you do slave labor
That they need to buy cases and cases of water in plastic bottles which they throw in the landfill instead of just drinking their perfectly good tap water.
Depending on your municipality, sure.
Don’t know why you got downvoted. I drank tap water in India and threw up 3 times before leaving the office. I’ve seen the data center water and it looked worse.
Ummm, my tap water isn’t “perfectly good.”
Ummm, my comment was addressing the millions of people whose water IS perfectly good but they buy bottled water anyway.
Well mine is actually perfectly good safety-wise, but it tastes like shit. I eventually got a reverse osmosis system so I don’t waste any bottles anymore. Instead I waste water. BUT… But, when I’m at other people’s houses, if the water tastes fine, I drink that and refuse bottles. This is the best I can do.
In most of Europe, it is.
Plenty of people saying their tap water is not good. Just buy/install an RO for your tap ya dummy. They aren’t that expensive or difficult to install. Or some kind of brita-type filter. I’m lucky enough to have an in-fridge filter. Cold, clean water on tap. It’s the best.
Bottled water companies don’t produce water. They produce plastic bottles.
They probably don’t even produce the bottles. They probably just put the water in the bottles.
Good point. And it’s often just municipal water too. So uh… Tap water.
I live in the US, I’m not drinking the tap water lol. That being said you don’t have to buy cases of individual plastic water bottles either.
And yet millions do. Maybe there’s something actually wrong with your water, but the vast majority of municipal water in the US is perfectly fine.
If the tap is chemically fine, but still tastes awful, I get buying bottled water instead
Why would you buy bottled water? Buy a filter
Money is real.
Either a strong religious belief or the belief that success is the result of hard work.
Most people here have been using AI in some form for their entire lives without knowing it. It just did its job quietly with nobody noticing. Then venture capital (or just capitalism itself) ruined everything and broke the contract: publicly acquired data must be given back to the public for free.
I could pontificate at length about the terminology and how it has gotten fucked. The blending of the terms itself is part of what makes it difficult to have a reasonable and nuanced discussion.
Let’s take a moment to separate out AI from machine learning from deep learning from LLMs.
AI is fucking old. It used to mean “any algorithms that create intelligent behavior”. Not a particularly useful definition these days, but it used to mean things like pathfinding and searching.
Machine learning is a more useful phrase: a set of algorithms to solve problem where we don’t know “how”, but we have examples of inputs and outputs. For example, I don’t know how I would define cute, but if someone showed me a bunch of photos I could probably say which ones were cute, not cute, and unsure.
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses a specific set of algorithms: neutral networks.
LLMs are a subset of deep learning that use “transformers”. Which is a specific architecture that does a lot of things quite well, like determine how proteins fold, how drugs interact, how words interact in a sentence, etc.
If you’ve used Google Maps at any point since it was created, you’ve used classical AI.
If you’ve used email, you’ve used machine learning.
If you’ve used a photos app that lets you search for similar pictures of people, you’ve used machine learning.
If you’ve had more than one prescription filled in the past five years, your pharmacist has used AI (even if they don’t know it) to check potential drug interactions.
Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate that the field I spent my whole life researching has been coopted into a way to siphon money from people into the coffers of the richest fucking parasites, but when people say “fuck AI” they have either lost the nuance or never had it. Everyone that hears the message experiences on the surface and it does them a disservice.
When the luddites broke the textile looms, did they hate the machines or did they hate the loss of their livelihoods?
When the early industialists broke into factories and smashed their equipment, did they hate the machines or did they hate the captains of industry that forced them to work inhumane hours in terrible conditions?
When people say “fuck AI” do they hate the math that, until this point, has led to a better world for us all, or do they hate the system that has enshittified it into one of pure exploitation?
This whole mess feels like a distraction to me. Tech should be a social good. It should be helping people. Not to say it’s without problems, but now when we say “fuck AI” it leads us to pushing back against technology itself rather than the system that’s using it to hurt people.
I like my professor’s view in AI from over a decade ago. AI is the term non commercially viable research. Once something becomes viable it gets rebranded, like automatic text recognition, computer vision, machine learning, llms. It worked great until generative AI was good enough to impress average people, then it became a great way to attract venture capital. It’s still not quite viable so the rule holds, but we are in a very messy and public era where several products are likely to emerge and separate from the AI title.
that I actually give a fuck.
I don’t.
That “intelligent” and “smart” mean the same thing.
Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is knowing to not put it in a fruit salad.
Tomatoes are both a fruit (botanically) and a vegetable (culinarily). “Vegetable” doesn’t have a botanical definition, so the old aphorism about tomatoes “not being a vegetable” is trying to conflate terms from two different domains and hoping you don’t notice.
And a large number of “fruits” aren’t even a fruit. We’re kinda bad at naming things sometimes
A large number of culinary fruits aren’t even botanical fruits, yes. Most of them are botanical berries (and some things that aren’t botanical berries are still culinary berries). Conflating the two linguistic domains causes lots of problems!
One of the biggest misconceptions is that internet discussion is political action.
11/10 answer
Pandas reproduce just fine in nature. The myth of them being bad at fucking and making babies was a myth started from before we understood zoochosis. No animal wants to have babies in a prison, it’s not just pandas.
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How about religion? Is that an option?
That the world is a zero sum game. That in order to have something, someone else has to go without. That in order to be great you have to drag others down.
It’s the driver for misogyny, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, and so much else.
A lot of those aren’t necessarily a “zero sum game” strategy and more of just that many people are genuinely judgemental, ignorant piles of shit.
It’s a mix of things! Many racists don’t think of themselves as racist and primarily worry about actions to empower minorities because of the zero sum thinking, not so much because it’s helping “the wrong people”
Exactly. If we could lose that somehow the world would be so much nicer to live in.
It has been my experience that, if you could identify these people, they are the best to avoid. Excising these people from your life can very quickly prove it.
Capitalism is worse. It’s literally Monopoly. We’ve all played that shitty fucking game. With capitalism you get perpetual inflation. A negative sum game. A zero sum game at least implies some basic conservation mechanics, perhaps even a fairness. A negative sum game is a total debt based economy. Waste is a feature. Disposability and commodities go together like peas and carrots, and that ethos sadly reverberates across ecosystems until the planet is dead but you got those pounds or dollars or pesos or whatever. Can’t eat them. Can’t really do Jack shit with them.
The rich gonna wake up some day soon and find the farmer has a well oiled rifle. They’ll make rich fertilizer… 🤑
Yeah I agree that isn’t true
These people must fail to understand how consensual sex works
Probably never had it
People tend to assume if someone is smart in one thing, they’re smart with everything else too.
That’s not usually the case.
And also assuming that someone who’s not smart in one area is not smart in any area.
Good point I like that answer. Conflating knowledge on a specific topic with general intelligence.
Similarly, people who assume that anyone who struggles with English as a second+ language is an idiot
This one always surprised me
Yup this is me and my dad, he’s great with handy work and has built numerous homes. I am good with technology and can build a server and make my own software. Put us in opposite roles and were both dumbasses.
Or if they are rich, they must be smart or a genius, because they got rich while everyone else did not, its further from the truth, since most of these people come from wealth to begin with. adjacent, same goes for these succesful youtubers/streamers/influencers, these top ones we see all the time dint come from rags to riches, they came from being rich or very well off.
Sure, but without this flaw engineers wouldn’t have any personality at all.
I can differ 17 different kinds of glue by taste!
This effect was described by Dunning and Kruger.
High price = high quality.
The luxury pricing model has totally enveloped markets at this point and the correlation rarely applies now.
Absolutely. I’ve learned over the years that it usually works out pretty well to find out how much the cheapest dogshit option is and aim for an option roughly 1.5x the cost. Obviously not a blanket rule but it covers a surprising amount of common items and I’ve gotten plenty of long-lasting affordable alternatives that I actually enjoy using rather than having the crappiest version of everything.
My rule of thumb is the second-cheapest popular option.
Yeah I look for the cheapest option and go a step or two higer
Depends on what it is but as a general rule to start from it isn’t a terrible idea.
Veg I will go cheapest because I don’t care if a carrot has a curve. Cooking equipment I usually go midrange and try to find out WHY the really expensive ones are better, then look for those specific features if they actually matter.
My bike is quite a bit higher, though there is a very wide range for bikes. I went for the cheapest of the high end bike range at £600. Probably spent close to than in accessories and maintenance by now too. Although some maintenance costs are me buying tools I didn’t have before too.
As much as I’m laughing at people spending more than $50 on a kettle or toaster or toothbrush or what have you and calling themselves clever shoppers, I think it’s worth spending on anything that goes between you and the ground, e.g. tires, shoes, bikes, etc.
Though I’m sure that adage has also been incorporated into modern pricing models and every damn thing is a fucking scam to manipulate you into thinking you’ve made a shrewd and balanced decision when you spend just a weeee bit more.
I despise every company with a fiery passion.
Expensive doesn’t mean the shoes are good, but cheap does mean they are shit. Of course you also get different types of shoe that may not directly compare with others.
Then you also get different shops selling the same product at different prices.
I selected my toaster by visiting a store and physically fiddling with the levers. From 20€ onwards, the feeling got noticeably better until 120€ price point after which it got worse. The range ended at 300€ SMEG(ma) toaster that felt like what it sounds like. I’m happy with my 120€ toaster.
What store are you shopping at that has €300 toasters??? How could anyone ever get that much value from a toaster???
It’s crazy I know. They were bad quality.
You spent 120€ to toast bread! I don’t think you get it…
I toast a lot of bread and wanted a good toaster that will last a long time. I’m expecting to get minimum of 25 years of daily toasting out of it.
We are drowning in Temu trash. Maybe we should start to look at things from other than monetary perspective. I selected a good toaster and looked at the price tag afterwards. Apparently you can get shitty toasters for 20€ and 300€ but a good one costs exactly 120€
Idk some people use their toasters multiple times a day, and at that point it can make sense to spend more on a better toaster
It’s the best toaster apparently. Tbh I don’t know why I would care about the feeling of the lever but at least they have the best toaster lever money can buy.
For that kind of money I would expect it to make, cut and toast the bread for me.
That’s true but the other direction is generally true. Not always, but often high quality does come at a cost.
That’s a great one
With automobiles, there is an anti-correlation.
that is true, or just slapping a label like supreme, or tesla on thier products and people thinks its high quality. or with ELECTRIC toothbruses, 100-200 seems to be more likely to be defective than cheaper lines of the same company. Always seek out reviews and peoples experience on specific products. same goes with healthcare/insurance, paying more doesnt mean you will get better quality(it actually incentivized that customers dont seek out care due to potential costs), likewise if you get too cheap of insurance you will get cheap results, not decent and not so-so.
Fuck me that is a lot, think my electric toothbrush was like £20-30
the higher price one are the “smart toothbruses” its not worth it anyways. either go off-brand or buy the 1000-1500 oral braun series.
Mine was oral-b but didn’t cost much. Their pricing seems to be very high base price but often heavily discounted so it would be silly to buy at full price. Was one of their cheaper ones but it seems fine and better than my old one which was also oral-b, largely went for it as the toothbrush heads I have would still be compatible. The old one was wearing through the plastic but it was over 5 years old by that point, battery isn’t great either.
Replaceable batteries would be kinda nice to have as a feature but if other parts are wearing away by that point too it probably isn’t too bad.
Broke: You get what you pay for.
Woke: You don’t get what you don’t pay for.
