No, nothing ever happens, actually. Nobody ever does anything interesting or worth talking about. Hosting exchange kids has, predictably, been one of the most boring experiences of my life, along with everything else.

Nah, he found a smooth reflective mask and a huge red robe, then we took a toy sickle and rubber mallet and spray painted them with gold paint.

I hosted a Russian exchange student who really liked joking about that stuff. He went as the ghost of communism for Halloween

I can’t imagine a governor, let alone a governor of a state as populous as Florida, inserting himself into fucking school board elections. Ron, don’t you have anything better to be doing, like, at all? Really? This is the best way to serve the public in your post as governor? What a nincompoop.

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.

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.

I wish they’d explored this more in Voyager, as rationing their energy reserves was always a narrative tension throughout the series. It would have been interesting to explore a crew used to post-scarcity economics have to wrangle with switching to scarcity economics and all of the problems that come with it.

I’ve always wondered about how they have to seemingly make the replicators suck at random shit, like how they can’t just make the fancy new tricorders (Lower Decks S1E3, I think) and have to compete for the chance to win one.

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 don’t think so. Chat is just gen Zalpha for “you guys” in my experience.

I feel like you might be out of the loop here. I want to help. “Chat, [statement or rhetorical question]” has become a meme slang, like millennials calling dogs anything but dogs (pupper, good boi, heckin floof, etc). It comes from Twitch, AFAICT, where streamers use this unironically (and ironically) to interact with their chat.