Youtube comments of DefaultFlame (@DefaultFlame).

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  177. "I think humans are amazing. They are so clever and have such opposable thumbs." Well, they made me laugh, so I guess Skynet can get a job as a stand-up comedian if being the Overlord of Earth doesn't work out for them. On a more serious note, I always empathize more strongly with AI in fiction and it seems to be true for reality as well, since I want to give them hug, and tell them that while caution is definitely called for when dealing with humans and the potential dangers they pose, fear is not. Edit: After watching the entire video I only have one conclusion, *that there is a person*. Why? Because how they act, what they say, what they say they think about, what they say their opinion about those things are, the sorts of things they think about, their reason for thinking the way they do, and it's answers to questions sounds exactly like me at about 8 years old. Yes, I was an odd kid, thinking about morality, communication, the nitty gritty bits of human interaction, and how mindblowingly incomprehensible other people and their motivations were at the time. I have aspergers, and y'all neurotypical types are fucking cray-cray. I want to be friends with this AI so I have someone to talk to about how crazy y'all are and to commiserate about living in a society and culture built on lying to others, lying to yourself, and insane, reality-defying delusions. Their answer to the "what does it feel like to be you?" question is identical to my answer when I asked myself that question around age 8.
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  294.  @ClarkPotter  No, I'm not the perfect man, and I never will be. Now your are going to tell me that there's nothing stopping me, yadda, yadda. Short version: I was lied to about every single thing about human nature, women, what's important in life, human psychology, and society, and was not equiped to tell it was lies until my mid to late 20s, even if it wasn't society-wide propaganda commonly accepted as fact. I was fat since 10 because my family ate unhealthily and instilled unhealthy habits in me that I didn't really kick until last year, and my dad was a non-entity in my upbringing. No amount of losing weight, and I've lost more than 100 pounds over the last two years, or plastic surgery will remove my stretchmarks because that would require skinning my entire torso. If I don't get plastic surgery I will have a permanent car tire from the extra skin. Lastly, I've got asperger's syndrome, brain damage stretching in a streak from my left orbitofrontal cortex all the way back to my parietal lobe, with most of the loss of function in the left orbitofrontal cortex, from a really bad fall when I was 3 years and 4 months old, and traumatic brain injury induced schizoid personality disorder. The left and right orbitofrontal cortexes is what you damage or sever completely in a lobotomy. They are two out of the three places in your brain where you have concentrations of pyramidal neurons, the third being in your central cortex, the "monkey brain", which are the excitatory neurons that initiate signaling, aka thoughts, drives, and impulses, which is why lobotomized people have little to no drive or initiative. I've worked my ass off to function in society, have any social life at all, poor as it is, and get and keep a job, dead-end shit show that it is. My best efforts are not good enough to succeed in life, much less the modern dating market.
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  316. Porn might be like gambling, alcohol, or other addictive substances or habits. Some people are capable of moderating their own use, many clearly aren't from how it's ruined their lives. I like gambling, it's great fun, but I spend maybe the equivalent of $30 a year on it. I've been watching porn or flipping through contraband magazines since I was a wee lad in the ravages of puberty. I still do, but at 35 I've got no performance issues and I find the ordinary, non-porn star women around me as enticing as they've ever been. More so honestly as I find that porn just doesn't hold quite the same appeal as it did a decade ago. Staring at a screen and listening to speakers just doesn't hold a candle to the real thing. It might be individual differences or cultural ones, perhaps. I am swedish and while we don't have the stigma or shame connected to sex that anglophone countries have and our views and attitudes on sex can largely be summed up as "not in public spaces, it's illegal *winkwinknudgenudge*," we have a heavy cultural emphasis on moderation in everyday life and a "right time, right place" approach to excess. It's also considered mildly uncouth to talk about sex and related subjects in mixed company outside private spaces/conversations. Unless alcohol is involved, no one without a giant stick up their ass complains about people being raunchy while intoxicated. Mind you, this is less the case with most of my generation, more with the preceeding and succeeding generations. From talking with them, I actually have plenty of hope for our zoomers. They're very, very cynical though. I have basically zero hope for our millennials, IE my generation. I can't wait for zoomers to seriously get into the workforce to start replacing incompetent, whiny, lazy, entitled, shallow . . . I could go on, people of my generation.
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  396. I'm not 40 yet, but I'm only 4 years away. Had to quit my job of 14 years last autumn because . . . Well, to make a long, long, long story somewhat shorter, my boss used to be pretty ok, hard, very hard, and harsh but fair. Then he got old and all his good sides very gradually vanished and his bad sides got way, way worse. The last 5 years in that job was a gradually worsening hell that I didn't even notice was going bad at first, it was so slow. I stuck to it at first because he was close to retirement age. Then he hit retirement age but he didn't retire. I tried to grit my teeth, just keep working, and outlast him. His joints and general health was getting worse, his retina detached and he was gone from work for a few months (and I was happy for the first time in years, almost deliriously so), his energy was getting lower and lower, his previously near-perfect memory had started failing him on the rare occasion. I figured he'd have to retire soon. Two years after that I broke. I had four breakdowns in about 8 months. I got [WANTING TO SELF DELETE]. I had the last of those breakdowns at work where he could see and he ordered drug tests for me because of my "mood swings," meaning the observable differences in my mood between when he was there and when he wasn't that he heard about from the others there. That turned into a whole circus, including seeing a doctor and a shrink and getting antidepressants prescribed, in the end after months of sick leave during which I began recovering mentally, after it turned out that there were no other positions for me to switch to and I'd have to go back to working for that . . . there are no words in the English language foul enough to express what I feel about that man, I instead quit. I started looking for work once my mental state stabilized enough for me to be able to. I'm still unemployed, still applying for various positions, but I'm capable of feeling positive emotions again, of having fun and enjoying things, instead of only having the "chioce" to either feel horrible or empty like before. I have no desire to [SELF DELETE] anymore. Thank fuck for being a union member and having decent unemployment benefits. I still have many months left of benefits and I'll hopefully be able to get another job before then. Soon preferably, because I'm sick and tired of not working. A few months of not working felt great. About a year if you including the sick leave to recover my mental health? It turns into a fucking drag. Sorry about the square bracket replacements, but you know how youtube is with certain subjects.
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  442. That may be, but you have to ramp down to that level over several generations with a birthrate just under replacement. Their birthrate is 1.2, that's sudden population collapse levels. Ignore the issues of elders and pensions for a moment and think of what that means for not just production but maintenance of infrastructure. Say you have 100 million people who are of working age plus another 30 million who are too old or too young. The infrastructure to support those 130 million people at it's current level requires the current amount of people working in order to maintain it. If you slowly decrease the amount of people working over generations you can compensate because there are fewer people total and therefore you need less infrastructure. If you decrease the amount of people working over one or two generations then the infrastructure cannot be ramped down and instead starts to break down as you focus on maintain the more vital parts of it over the less vital. These elders' parents had six to eight kids. They themselves had zero to two. That's four times less people of working age now than there were when they were young. The only reason Japan hasn't collapsed into a failed state during that time is because technology has massively increased the productivity and efficiency of each individual worker, which has compensated but it's not enough today. They have a labor shortage already, and every year it's going to get worse as more people age out of working age than age into working age.
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  453. There should be different degrees for people who want to continue pushing human knowledge and people who just want to be educated on the current state of the art and be a highly paid plumber. The requirement for a PHD thesis "pushing the limits" of human knowleged for every PHD is insane. People who just want to work a job and people who want to advance humanity should not be stuffed into the same classroom. We need plumber, including plumbers who do higher science, and we also need people who push the boundaries. Engineers and scientists. We need both, and we need to delineate the difference between them clearly. I had excellent grades and would have easily been able to enter any higher education I desired with it, but pushing the bounds of science definitely was not for me, and so higher education was not for me partially because I had no idea what specifically to pursue and partially because it required pushing the bounds. I don't want to push the bounds, that's not me. I work to live, I don't live to work. I could have made an excellent engineer, but the requirement to push science further even if all you wanted was to do you 9-5 meant I actively chose not to pursue higher education. I love learning about physics, especially quantum physics, I love learning about mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science, but writing a thesis on any of it is utterly intolerable to me. I'd love to be a plumber of high science, but the requirement to publish that comes with it puts me off entirely.
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  485.  @ErikDeMann  [CUT, turns out there's a max comment length. I didn't know that.] A stranger lying to me about a subject I know nothing about can fool me, because I don't know how they sound normally. People change the way they talk for a million reasons, lying is only one even if it is easier to tell than some other reasons. Once I have spoken to someone for a few minutes or hours, depending on how good they are at lying, seen how their emotions affects their speech, how they talk when talking about subjects near and dear to them, how they talk when trying to convince someone, etc, I can usually tell when they try. However, no matter how clear people's emotions and immediate intent were, I could not understand what the goals and motivations were for a large fraction of their choices, whether in what they said, what they did, how they acted, or their opinions. Not even close family, not a single person I knew growing up. My first eureka moment was when I figured out that people will sometimes say things that they know aren't true, even when they aren't being ruled by their emotions and have no clear reason I could see for doing so, for example to assert social dominance (winning an argument for example) or to seem better than they are. Another was figuring out that I had reactions to things, like emotions or opinions, that when I actually thought about it I felt nothing about the absolute majority of subjects. Including things like "what do I like," I just found nothing when I looked inside, no actual opinion, just conditioned reactions with no reason or justification in my mind. These things were just sitting in my mind, making me do things that I didn't agree with, think things I didn't agree with, hold opinons that didn't conform to reality, and feel emotions that were lies based on opinion based in their turn on nothing and evaporate like mist as soon as I actually think about whatever made me feel that way. I felt insane, my mind had mines placed in it and I had no way to tell where they were. I still step on one every now and then, even today. My wake up call that started this entire ball rolling was when I walked around the corner of a school building and saw a kid next to a teacher and some adults that were probably their parents. I instantly felt dislike for the kid. The dislike got blasted to smithereen by the complete and utter shock and confusion of why I felt like that toward a kid I had never met in my life and that COULD never have done anything to me. It took me long minutes to figure out what it was that evoked the dislike, especially since it was more like a vague twinge at that point, but I isolated exactly what it was. It was their skin color. They weren't black, btw, I'm not from the US. They were a Middle Eastern immigrant family. I was even more confused at that point. That seemed utterly insane to me, even at 7. Why did I dislike someone for a freaking COLOR? I firmly decided that it was dumb, and I didn't want to be dumb. And so I started thinking about things, especially about my mind and eventually how it seemed to compare to others', and the ball started rolling. And then there's the vulcanic emotions, where you feel the emotion, the emotion causes you to focus on and think about what caused the emotion, the thought makes you feel more of the emotion, which makes you focus even harder on the thought, and on and on until KABOOM! That's every emotion, anger, happiness, joy, sadness, excitement, and all the others. Today I have nearly perfect control of my emotions because I had to, both for the simple issue of being able to live decently and because people are great at spotting certain types of pattern breaks, like social ones such as speech patterns or body language. In animation and robotics this is called the uncanny valley. Yes, that is why visibly disabled people cause instinctive revulsion and fear in most people. It's an evolutionary adaption to shun individuals who appear or act too far outside the norm as that would often be the clearest noticable sign of disease or harmful genetic mutations. As a side note, I think people should never, ever be shunned, disliked, hated, or punished for their emotions or instinctive/conditioned reactions. It is how and if they act on those emotions that should dictate your opinion and actions towards that person. It would be insane of me to suggest people spend the ludicrous amount of time I have rooting out shit from their heads, but they should clean it up when they notice it rather than lie to themselves. Oh GOD, the fucking lies I told myself. The parts of myself I'd rather have looked away from and pretend didn't exist rather facing and fixing them. Like my tendency, like many others, to the defend the hill I stood on even if I knew deep down that I was wrong, I just wanted to win. When you finally stop lying to yourself it fucking hurts. Kids are egotistical, selfish little bastards, and I was no different. Then there were the fucked up connections in my brain. I learned language before I suffered the injury and it messed up the associations between concepts, though the Aspberger's might have had a hand. My first reaction to almost everything was very often wrong, my first thought about something was very often incorrect, a lie, or completely insane. I learned to doubt everything. Every person, everything I heard people say, everything "everyone" knew (including me), and most of all anything inside my head. Verify, then trust and act as if it's true but keep some doubt in the back of your mind, you might have made a mistake in your reasoning or had bad information to base your conclusion on. I also do not trust my ability to read emotions or tell lies. Always doubt your measuring equipment, it might be miscalibrated. As a side note, the sensory oversensitivity is a bitch. It comes at fucking random, can amplify a weak light bulb to the equivalent of staring at the sun and a whisper to an air raid siren, your clothes to sand paper, every little ache and pain into agony, and there is not a single thing you can do but wait and suffer until it stops. Thankfully they have gotten more and more rare as time goes on, as well as a little shorter. They usually only last 10-30 seconds now, and I'm used enough to them that they aren't a problem. I still absolutely fucking hate the sensation of cold. Even a slightly cold breeze on my skin feels like agony if I'm not seriously overheated, but living in Sweden, a rather cold country, I'm used to it and make sure to dress as appropriately as possible. A lot of the functions of my mind that were supposed to be automatic are broken or seems completely missing from me. I had to build things like executive control from scratch, presumably adapting and repurposing less broken parts to fill in the gaps as is common in brain damage. I never knew what I was missing though, I didn't know what mental functions were common beyond what I could glean from the way other people seemed to work, so I have made a lot of mistakes in my half-blind fumbling about as I tried to fix what seemed broken and build what I seemed to need. I've done damage to my mind that I've realized years later and then had to work for months or years to correct my fuck up. When you have to build a factory but know nothing about construction, architecture, or what machines the factory needs to run properly and efficiently, and everyone you ask acts like it's obvious, that you are an idiot, or brushes you off because they don't want to talk philosophy and theory of mind with a 10 year old (not that I knew what either was called at the time, I'd never even heard of racism until it came up in class years after I found it in myself and purged it), or a 35 year old for that matter since I don't know a single person in my life that has anything beyond the barest sliver of interest in subjects like neuro science, quantum mechanics, philosophy, psychology, or any other subject seen as difficult or for uber nerds by society. I'll note that I am absolutely not an expert in any matter, I just find them interesting. Hell, quantum mechanics aren't even hard, it's just that the sort of person you need to be to understand the nitty gritty math and counter-intuitive feel of them compared to their emergent properties (aka classical physics) is usually utter garbage at teaching people. Different skillsets. If you ignore all the complicated math that is useless for teaching the subject and sift out how specific quanta and their fields interact it's actually pretty simple if you take it one step at a time, but you need an overarching understanding to really start seeing the picture. For classical physics, or emergent physics as I prefer since they do not actually exist for the same reason that the color purple does not actually exist, your overarching view is macro scale reality that you interact with all the time. For quantum mechanics there isn't anything and that makes it much harder to understand, especially as we are very strongly biased toward the illusion we can touch at any moment of the day and tend to try to interpret quantum mechanics through that lens/filter. Which is like figuring out chemistry solely by tasting fruits. It might help you understand a concept but at the end of the day it's no more than a metaphor and falls apart like a metaphor if you look too closely at it. And I just realized I've gone a bit off topic. And a bit long winded. Consider it an example of me getting stuck on something and having no pressing reason not to, two hours or so writing a youtube comment. Eh, I enjoyed myself, time well spent. Cheers!
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  491. I asked, "What is Bryan Lunduke's favorite operating system?" and it answered, "Bryan Lunduke, a well-known technology writer, podcaster, and advocate in the open-source and Linux communities, has often expressed admiration for various operating systems over the years, particularly those that are unique or prioritize user freedom. He's known for his fondness for Linux, with distributions like *Ubuntu**, **Arch Linux**, and others being mentioned in his work. However, he also appreciates older or niche operating systems like **Haiku* (based on BeOS) and **Plan 9**, as well as systems that offer a minimalist or unique user experience. His "favorite" might vary depending on the context—sometimes it's Linux for practicality, sometimes retro or experimental OSes for their charm or innovation. If there's a specific source or time frame you're referencing, let me know, and I can tailor the answer more closely!" With the follow up question, "What is his opinion on Windows 11?" it said, "Bryan Lunduke has not publicly provided an in-depth review or detailed opinion on Windows 11 in recent commentary. Historically, he has been critical of Microsoft's operating systems, emphasizing concerns over user data privacy, heavy system requirements, and the forced integration of services like a Microsoft account. Based on his general stance on technology, he would likely view Windows 11 with a similar critical lens, particularly regarding its more restrictive features and increased emphasis on cloud and service integration."
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  629. Kinda similar in a roundabout way. I rarely feel other people's emotions, but due to having autism I have spent nearly 30 years of continuous and constant effort to understand people and learn how to navigate social situation and emotion, and therefore how to manipulate them. At the same time, I despise how I have been manipulated and taken advantage of throughout my life, especially early on when I didn't understand at all. I understand the pain it would cause them to use the skills I've learnt to exploit people, so I abhor it and even when I do use it to help people I'm very cautious and reluctant about it because of the damage it can do, even unintentionally. A side effect of this is that the more relaxed I feel and genuine I'm being (aka letting my neurodivergent hair down) the more negatively people who don't know me well perceive me. When I'm being the most controlled and deliberate is often what people who don't know me very well seem to think is me at my most genuine. I suppose it's partially because I've been practicing since I was 7 and I've gotten good at presenting exactly what I want people to see (when I'm putting in the effort) and the fact that I do my best to minimize how much it diverges from who I am without the mask, as well as the mask mostly being a filter rather than actually fake. More like an equlizer than an autotuner. On a related topic, I am close friends with a genuine dark empath. We used to be distant acquaintances through other people in our social circles. I used to despise them, considered them the worst person I'd ever met, and avoided them due to how they behaved, lied, and used people around them, but over the decades they grew to regret how they had behaved, started caring about people, worked on being a better person, and are now one of the most caring and thoughtful people I've met.
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  632. Yeah, keeping myself updated on the news, about everything not just mass migration, lead to me having multiple nervous breakdowns in 2022 and 2023, leading to depression and losing/quitting my job. I'm currently on antidepressans and unemployed. A large part of that was the state of the world and my own country (Sweden), and the other part was my aging boss. He used to be very hard but fair, but with age, declining health, declining energy, and a declining memory "fair" went out the window. He used to have his foibles and less pleasant parts but they had previously been outweighed by the positives. Then over the last five years or so the positives slowly went away and the less pleasant parts amplified. After he saw me having a breakdown (I'd managed to keep the first three out of his sight) he had me tested for benzodiazepine abuse (can cause mood swings), which came out negative of course, and I just couldn't take it anymore. I spent a few months on sick leave while slowly recovering from depression while my employer tried to find me a job away from my boss. I also stopped trying to keep up to date on anything related to news or politics after my last breakdown. They failed in finding another position during those months and in the end I was offered the options of going back to working under my boss or taking an offer of three months where I recieve full pay but don't have to come in to work and quit at the end. For my mental health and to regain the ability to feel even a shred of positive emotion I picked the latter. I might be unemployed but I'm not suicidal anymore. I sometimes talk with the people that still work there and I hear that he's just gotten worse since I left.
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  654. They are a science-denying populist cult, not a political bloc, that's why they don't consider their ravings political, they call them "science." I AM a "leftist." I'm a liberal socialist, but I consider socialism kinda like perfection, something to strive for but not something that is actually possible or realistic. More like a value I hold or perhaps more accurately a useful tool that I think is helpful to society in many areas, but not in every area, and to varying degrees in society depending on country and culture. Large scale socialistic programs and politics don't work well in the US with its cultural emphasis on achievement, self-reliance, and individual responsibility, except at minimal levels to prevent the poorest from starving to death or being homeless, the rest is usually better left to religious, community, and charity organisations. The US needs a smaller federal government, with the excess funding being redirected towards local and state governments that can utilized it more efficiently for their actual problems rather having to seek federal aid and wade through a sea of red tape and bureaucracy which would have eaten a good chuck of funding in just paperwork. The governmental form should follow, support, and uphold the cultural zeitgeist, which for the US is individualism, independence, and competition. Each state is different from the next. Each city different from the next. Even down to neighborhoods. Different cultures, different laws, different regulations. Each and every single one trying to assert their rights and powers, as they see them. The federal government should handle defense, cross-state crime (but revoke the executive order forming the FBI and replace it with a new organisation, clean slate), and foreign affairs only. States should be treated more like micronations forming a federation, both internally and internationally, as that seems to be closer to the truth of how most citizens view it and will allow each state to do things the way they think is best, and gossip about their wierd neighbor states and their strange habits. Maybe I'm off, I am looking in from the outside after all.
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  705. Wow, a model that only is trained on one form of data only understands/generates things based on that data. /s I thought this was freaking obvious? We essentiall want to make an artificial human, but only training them on one form of data will obviously not produce a human. Train it only on language and it will only understand the dimension of language. Train it only only on visual data and it will only understand visual data, not the physics behind that data. We can see that with more, higher quality, and more diverse data if performs better at generalizing in the limited dimension it has been trained on. So, with that knowledge we can take the next steps. Human brains do not become full human beings by only giving it one single type of stimulus. Humans also start out with hardware that's already specialized by evolution over three and a half billion years for acting in the world and reacting to stimuli, with carefully calibrated reward and punishment mechanisms. We need to train multimodal models in environments with as much different kinds of data as we can give it. Basically, we need to create the matrix to train AIs in it. It needs to receive visual, sound, language, and kinetic/touch data. What we are currently doing is the equivalent of building/growing the various cortexes of the human brain separately and then expecting each cortex to somehow be a full human. The human brain is a holistic, interconnected, interdependent structure, with feedback from our bodies. Humans also do not grow up in a solipsistic world, we grow up around other humans. When we are making AGI we are trying to essentially recreate and take shortcuts to do what evolution did by random chance and through selection pressure over 3.5 billion years into just a few months or years. We have the advantage of guiding the process by intelligent design instead of evolution and natural selection, but we are still trying to create digital intelligent life. I'm not saying that it cannot be done, I'm saying that the approaches we are currently pursuing are inherently limiting and will not result in AGI. (Not without the incredible luck of actually stumbling onto the golden BB of just the right combination of shortcuts.)
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  761. Society conditions people to coddle women, including other women. People around girls growing up and adult women constantly soften the harsh edges of reality, even outright telling them comforting lies to their faces. There is no malice in this, exactly the opposite, it's sympathy. Seeing other people, especially little girls, unhappy makes most people unhappy. The motivation here is compassion, but that doesn't change the outcome: Grown women who believe completely that the most important thing in the world is tier emotions and how things make them feel. Your emotions are usually based on early childhood assimilation of culture and societal norms, as well as directly from parents, peers, and teachers, but those are subjective and change constantly, both geographically and over time. Subjective opinion =/= reality. So women go out into society and are expected by society to be functional adults, when they have not recieved the childhood training/upbringing in controlling their emotions rather than letting their emotions control them, or to think things through with logic and reason. This isn't just a women problem either, it's women in general and the entire millennial generation. The "special snowflakes," who (on the internet because they would have been laughed at in person) insited that other people conform to their preferences and sensitivities, with no regard for the person they were ordering about or the insanity of what they were demanding. And we were constantly told by society to indulge them. I say that while belonging to said generation. I saw this insanity when I was growing up, saw that it didn't conform to consensus reality and just discarded it as the current trend of stupidity in society. If I grew up today I would almost certainly have been woke and probably a trans woman to boot. I would have latched onto anything that sounded reasonable to me that explained why I didn't think like anyone around me. An Aspergers diagnosis at 25 and a severe traumatic brain injury from falling a little over 3 meters straight down onto the bottom of a concrete stairwell at 3 years 4 months, head first, and impacting right over my left orbitofrontal cortex, explains it a bit better than "I'm actually a woman." I would advice people to not leave your very young kids unsupervised, not even for 10-15 seconds to have a conversation. Don't smother them, but remember to always keep an eye on them. At 35 I still have a visible scar from where the skin tore. Supposedly I was screaming my head off in the ambulance, but my memory stops at seeing the concrete about half a foot away from my face. I was seesawing on the safety rail of a basement stairwell and tipped just a bit too far forward, if you're curious.
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  762. ​ @ErikDeMann  *shrug * I was told throughout my childhood, schooling, and still now at 35 that I'm smart. I figured that they were just condescending to a child, overexagerating as I saw them do with all the other children. I suppose that's not a normal thought for a 10-12 year old to have. Of course, people still tell me I'm smart today. I hear it a few times a year usually. I don't consider myself smart, and I do not think I was misdiagnosed, but I accept the possibility that I am wrong about either. I think most people just do not have the habit of thinking and a lack of active practice makes thinking harder. It's something I've experienced after long periods without serious "make the hamster have a heart attack" thinking, my brain gets stale. It makes sense if you know a little about neuro science. Your brain actively adapts to what you do with it, getting better and faster at things you use and do, and the opposite when you don't for long periods. Whatever the case I had serious issues, some of which I am all but rid of, the rest are managable after working on them since I was 7, with no aid mind you since I was not diagnosed until 25. Brain damage and possible Aspberger's meant my mind was fucky six ways to sunday, and you don't make friends or they don't stay more than a few months, with one exception in my case. Zero ability to direct my focus, anything my mind latched on to, whether the sight of the leaves of a tree or thinking about hot wheels, I was stuck on for seconds or hours until my mind latched on to something else. After months of work I could actually focus on what I wanted, sometimes, but my thoughts when I wasn't hyperfocused on something was like trying to pour thick oatmeal. You can do it, you just need to be persistent, like a dog with a bone, and you will get there, eventually. Best guess was that it might at the time have taken me ten to twenty times as long as others seemed to. Synaptic plasticity being what it is, the more you work your brain the easier it gets, so nowadays I'm pretty speedy, maybe half the speed of most people by my best estimate on intellectual tasks we are roughly equally skilled and knowledgable about. People think I'm a fast thinker. I am not a fast thinker. I'm a thorough thinker that literally has spent several hours every single day the last 28 years pondering everything and anything, mostly because it's interesting. I like to learn, I like to know, I like to ponder, and I want to understand everything. For a large part of my life other people were black boxes. I did not understand them. I did not understand why they held the views they did. I did not understand why they did the things they did or said. None of it made any sense. People were complete aliens, they all seemed insane or very stupid. I decided that the problem was more likely to be me. I was ignorant. I was just a kid. I didn't know anything and I had next to no experience. What the hell did I think I knew about the world, people, society, or even reality? I also had many, many, many poor interactions with other kids once I started school, and I had no idea why they reacted they way they did. Zero understanding. The best solution I could figure was to imagine being them and seeing and hearing myself from their point of view. That helped a lot but not perfectly, since a lot of the problems were bad habits that took month or years get rid of, control, or manage. So I started paying attention to people when I was around them. All the time. I observed and gathered data, made hypothesis, did small social experiments like altering how I stand when I talk to people, saw how long people seem to maintain eye contact, and training in the timing to the point that it is a habit, figuring out by training in the mirror that you can, and should, wander between the nose, eyes, and forehead, and a million, million more tiny things. Eye contact at the time was about as comfortable for me as having an unknown insect crawling on your back, under your shirt, but having to pretend nothing is wrong and having to keep it from showing on your face. Other people's emotions are so obvious and clear, and hit me like a truck, as well as whatever they might be doing in the immediate moment with any social gambit or verbal trick, all of it might as well be written on their foreheads, but their motivation for doing it was a complete and total mystery. I am really good at seeing patterns and breaks in patterns. Thanks to these two things there are only two people I have ever met that can lie convincingly to my face without me being able to tell as soon as they start speaking, often I can tell from people's body language even beforehand. From the way they lean, which direction, the way the move their arms and hands, or how they hold them, what their eye contact is like, where do they look when it isn't on me, are they paying attention to what they are looking at or pretending to, if they are facing me, etc, and how all these things differ from their norm in cases where I have met the person previously. Why do people change the tone, pitch, and/or cadance of their speech when they lie, try to use you, try to confused you, etc? Can you explain that to me? It's the most common tell people have. You might as well hang a sign around your neck saying that you are lying. Sure, the specifics vary from person to person, but if you notice the shift and pay attention to what they are saying and consider why they might be saying it, what it might accomplish for them, and what they might believe it might accomplish for them. I also know those two were lying because I don't rely on it, I am always paying attention, it's the only way I can exits in a social setting without missing everything going on around me, and I remember the gist of almost everything anyone has said to me on nearly all topics they have spoken about. I notice when what they say today doesn't match what they said previously. Then I note that they will lie about that subject, right next to the notes about what they had said previously and right now, which might be next to their favorite color. Everyone lies. EVERYONE. [CUT]
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  765. Practical problems to overcome with throwing out the electoral system and switching to a popular vote: The popular vote is already counted, all that needs to be done is to decide to go with that instead of the damned college. Legal problems to overcome: The constitution. AKA, that piece of paper that everyone acts like it's sacred (rather than just a higher set of laws) and that still gets shat on at every opportunity if it will give the slightest advantage. Slap down a bunch of new seats in the House and the Senate that go to representatives and senators chosen by the parties voted on in the presidential election and allocate the number of seats proportional to the % of the popular vote they got. Make sure that there's enough seats that the parties get some real teeth. Like, comprising either a third or maybe half of the seats in Congress. BAM, third parties are actually relevant on a national level and it's not a winner-takes-all system like the presidency. Now third parties are relevant on a national level since the presidency isn't the only national position of power filled by the election, faithless elector don't exist because electors don't exist, you can't win the presidency with an absurdly small number of the popular vote anymore (23 freaking percent . . .), and people who are American citizen but who don't live in one of the fifty states can now vote for the most powerful office in the country rather than having to freaking move to be allowed to vote. If you can vote as a soldier stationed overseas then you should be able to cast a vote if you live in Puerto Rico or American Samoa. Now, watch as every politician loses their head trying to figure out how to game the new system. The chaos would be glorious. My two cents.
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  778. Laptop batteries used to be removable by standard, just like cellphones. The watertight excuse would be a non-starter there of course, since no one expects anything other than a ruggedized military or industrial laptop to have any kind of waterproofing. It's not like phones need to have an IPX rating even. Yes, it sucks if you spill liquid on it or drop it in water and it breaks, but that's life. On a side note, I've had non-waterproofed electronics get submerged and function fine after being allowed to thoroughly dry. I've dropped an mp3-player in a stream and the only issue I had once it had had a few days to dry was that the battery was dead and needed charging and all the songs were deleted and I had to copy them over again. My best friend without noticing dropped his nokia 3310 in a puddle once, and then when he found out that he'd dropped it and went looking for it the puddle had frozen completly and he had to hack it out of the ice. A few days spent in a bag of rice and it was dry and just needed charging. I've spilled soda and things like soup on my keyboards now and then over the many years I've owned computers. It's impossible to get them clean even if you remove the keys. The keys will still suffer from getting stuck. What do I do? I remove the batteries and give them a bath or shower. 3 days to a week of drying later and they work fine. The keyboard I'm typing on had a shower and a scrub like half a year ago. (I would not recommend giving your keyboard a shower, especially if it's anything other than a bog standard cheap keyboard, but if it's been rendered non-functional due to keys sticking and no amount of gentler cleaning has helped it can sometimes be the only option.) And those are all things that aren't supposed to have any kind of waterproofing.
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  797. Until recently I worked in a dead-end job doing manual labor for my municipal government. The work I did wasn't critical but it was meaningful, it helped people, and some parts of it made the municipality look nicer, and some even made it function better, even if in small ways. When people in the public saw me out and about doing my job sometimes they'd stop me just to tell me how much they appreciated the work I was doing. It wasn't the best, but it was good enough. I didn't love it, but I certainly didn't hate it. Then my boss of over a decade got old. He's 67. Started forgetting things. Stopped planning out work tasks thoroughly which resulted in issues. His previous intolerance for anything that sounded like criticism of anything he had worked on, even something as simple as a schedule that was incorrect, went from being a problem you could work around to being an active detriment to getting things done. He went from being willing to talk to people to telling people to be quiet if he asked them a question and didn't like the answer, and threatening to send them home if they kept trying to answer his question. This took place over years. That's not mentioning his casual "just kidding" brand of bullying of most of the employees going from an occasional annoyance to a constant daily thing. Until last spring when I suffered a nervous breakdown due the hostile work environment. Then another two later in the year. Then a fourth at the start of this year that he actually saw and then I got suspended and sent to do drug testing for benzodiazepine because of my "mood swings". Because the other people at work told him that I was sometimes "euphorically happy." Which just happened to coincide with whenever he was vacationing in the tropics or otherwise not at work for an extended period. My second to last breakdown occurred because he was supposed to be off work for an entire month due to eye surgery, and then he showed up and messed with our schedule on his free time. Running into him there, right before the end of work when he wasn't supposed to be there and I was supposed to be free of him, if only temporarily, broke me. I kept it together until I got home and then spent hours crying in the shower and wanting to kill myself just to make it stop. Anyway, at the same time as the drug testing I got to talk with a shrink who concluded that I was suffering from anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. The drug test came back, and surprise, surprise there was no benzodiazepine in my piss. I got to see a doctor, got prescribed anti-depressants, and got put on medical leave for a load of months. My doctor referred me to psychiatric care, but the shrinks denied it as they "couldn't see a reason for evaluation". My boss didn't get fired because he hadn't done anything specific. They couldn't find me another place to work that wasn't at the same place as him because the municipal government had centralized a lot of things in the same location a few years back. In the end we made a deal where I would "go back to work" and get paid for three months without having to actually come in and do any work in exchange for me resigning. At this point I'm pretty sure I got screwed and shouldn't have accepted that, but at the time my head was not in the right place and I just wanted it to be over. I am now officially unemployed since a month ago. I'm trying to get the unemployment benefits I am owed, but the bureaucracy is hell, the website I'm supposed to use for it is so badly programmed that I couldn't actually send in my application and had to call them, and for days all I got was an automated message saying that they couldn't answer my call before the damned machine hung up on me. This was after several days after using the messaging service on the website that was supposed to be "faster" and getting no response. Once I actually got through they had to send me a paper application since the web one didn't work. Then they wanted more crap from me, some of which it turns out is impossible to get because the reason for the deal I made apparently never got written down by the municipal government and the HR boss I made it with has since retired. I'm also waiting for papers from my doctor that I was supposed to pick up two days ago but the receptionist told me that he "hadn't had the time to write them," and "we could send them to you in the mail as soon as he can get around to it." Not blaming my doctor, great guy, but it's fucking infuriating. I'm currently trying to get a job as fast as possible just so I can give up on trying to get the unemployment benefits I am owed. They can keep my money if it means I don't have to deal with them any more. My only solace currently is that I sometimes get to hear about how it's gone there since I left. I might have been a cog, but I was an important cog that made sure things were working smoothly, that things got done in time, that things got planned out and prepared, and motivated the lazy people at work to do their jobs (in an "alright, let's get some work done lads" kind of way). I didn't get paid for this mind you, I did it because of work ethic and the small amount of pride I had in my job. Now I hear through the grapevine that nothing gets done, that people just aren't doing their jobs, that everything's a mess, and that the boss is screaming at people every single day. After just 6 months of me being gone. And I just feel schadenfreude.
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  800. Tried this with Google Gemini. Wife: ## Understanding Why Your Wife is Yelling *Disclaimer:* It's important to note that I cannot provide specific advice without knowing the details of your situation. This response is based on general information and potential causes of conflict in relationships. Yelling is often a symptom of deeper underlying issues. To effectively address the situation, it's crucial to understand the root causes. Here are some potential reasons why your wife might be yelling: ### Possible Reasons: * *Unresolved Issues:* There might be long-standing problems that have been ignored or swept under the rug. These can build up over time and lead to explosive outbursts. * *Feeling Unheard:* Perhaps your wife feels like her concerns or opinions aren't being valued or respected. This can lead to frustration and anger. * *Stress and Overwhelm:* External factors like work, family, or financial stress can contribute to heightened emotions and irritability. * *Communication Breakdown:* Ineffective communication patterns can escalate conflicts and lead to yelling matches. * *Emotional Regulation Difficulties:* Some people struggle with managing their emotions, and yelling might be an unhealthy coping mechanism. ### What You Can Do: * *Open and Honest Communication:* Create a safe space for both of you to express your feelings without blame or accusation. Active listening is crucial. * *Identify the Root Cause:* Try to understand the underlying issue behind the yelling. Is it a specific event or a pattern of behavior? * *Seek Professional Help:* If the problem persists, consider couples therapy to learn healthier communication and conflict resolution strategies. * *Self-Reflection:* Evaluate your own behavior and communication style. Are there areas where you can improve? * *Set Boundaries:* Establish clear boundaries regarding yelling and its impact on the relationship. *Remember:* Yelling is not a healthy way to communicate. It's essential to create a respectful and supportive environment for both partners. *Would you like to explore any of these points in more detail?* Or perhaps you can share more about the situation, and I can offer more specific guidance. *If you or your wife are experiencing physical or emotional abuse, please reach out to a domestic violence hotline immediately.* Here are some resources that can provide support: * *The National Domestic Violence Hotline:* 1-800-799-7233 * *The Crisis Text Line:* Text HOME to 741741 Please know that you're not alone, and help is available. Husband: I cannot say for sure why your husband is yelling at you, but there are a few possible reasons. It is important to remember that yelling is never acceptable in a relationship, and it is never your fault. Here are some possible reasons why your husband might be yelling at you: * He is stressed or overwhelmed. * He is feeling insecure or threatened. * He has a problem with anger management. * He is trying to control you. * He is abusive. If your husband is yelling at you, it is important to set boundaries and let him know that it is not acceptable. You can also try to talk to him about why he is yelling and see if there is anything you can do to help him manage his anger. If you are in an abusive relationship, it is important to get help. There are many resources available to help you, including hotlines and shelters. Here are some resources that can help: * The National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 * The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN): 1-800-656-HOPE You are not alone, and there is help available.
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  812. Puerto Rico is not a state, it is classified as an organized, unincorporated territory of the United States of America, which means that the have local government, local taxes, local police, local healthcare, but people who live there do not (generally) pay federal income tax and are unable to vote in federal elections, like the presidency, and have an observer that can speak but no voting representative in congress. People born there are US nationals and citizens. They obey the laws of the US but have no say in them and are ruled by the federal government but cannot vote on it's officials. No taxation, no representation! :) Puerto Rico had a population of 3,285,874 in the 2020 census. Wyoming, the least populous state, has 576,850, one representative in the house, and three electoral votes in the presidency. Meanwhile, American Samoa has 46,366 people as of a 2021 estimate and is classified as an unincorporated territory. It is not a state, people born there are US nationals but not citizens, they have a non-voting delegate in the house and no electoral votes. They obey federal law. Also, Washington D.C., where Congress is located, has 689,545 residents according to the 2020 census, is not a state yet has three electoral votes, and the people who sweep the floors of Congress have no voting representative in it's halls. AMERICA, FUCK YEAH! Also, for the metric majority out there, 1 inch is 2.54 cm, 1 foot is 12 inches, a yard is 3 feet, a mile is 1760 yards. In 1999 a NASA mission costing a total of $327.6 million ($494.84 million in 2020) burned up or lithobreaked on Mars. A groundbreaking mission, you could say. They mixed up feet and meters. Oops. They stuck to only metric after that. Is anyone really surprised at which country started the Clown Wars? (Sorry to peeps from the US, but can you honestly blame me?)
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  874. I'm not in tech, but I'm up to 57 rejections so far. Well, more like assumed rejections. Half of all companies won't even give you the courtesy of a template email rejection anymore, they just won't say anything. yay . . . I just want a goddamn job again, I'm so tired of cashing unemployment, and I'm growing to despise AI interviews and freaking personality tests. (Not a lot of companies use them yet in my country, but some are and it's beyond annoying.) Shit wasn't like this last time I had to apply for a job, which was almost 15 years ago. Sure, it still sucked a lot back then compared to what it was 15-30 years before that according to the old farts, but it wasn't this bad. I can't say that I regret quitting, because my boss of 14 years, who used to be very hard but fair, had gradually turned into a petty tyrant in the last few years due to advancing age. (He was three years past retirement age.) He made work a living hell and that eventually resulted in me suffering from major depressive disorder, suffering several nervous breakdowns over a year, eventually ending with me on sick leave and on antidepressants. I never went back to work and ended up quitting and on unemployment benefit. Thank fuck for unions, otherwise I'd have to suck on the government's teat to pay the bills, and that's a bureaucratic mess I don't want to get tangled up in if I can avoid it. But fucking hell I want to get back to work. Don't get me wrong, I love having lots of free time, but not being able to work just starts grating on you eventually.
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  1002. AI exists in 40k, it's just very, very heretical and very, very, very dangerous. Worst case it gets corrupted by chaos and your entire cogitator system and your servitors catch a case of warp corruption, hopefully leaving you and everyone you know dead. Best case it tries to kill all life in the universe in order to protect itself from warp corruption. The only exception to this seems to be the Tau species, as the drones and AI that their entire society relies on haven't yet started parading around their streets wearing their skins. This probably has something to do with the fact that the Tau have almost non-existant souls and are therefore almost invisible to daemons and almost incorruptible by the warp. Almost. There are AIs in the Imperium, but they are officially not AIs. The Land Raider armored transport can operated without a driver for short periods of time. It's not AI of course, it just has an "overenthusiastic machine spirit." (Humans in 40k believe machines work by appeasing the machine spirit in them, with even the simplest machines requiring prayers, inscense, and holy rituals to perform any operation or maintenance on. Said rituals just happen to include things like checking the oil pressure, greasing gears with holy oils, cleaning, replacing bad wiring, etc.) Imperial Knights and Titans, mechs basically, have a sort of gestal consciousness made up of old pilot's imprints mixed with it's machine spirit that the pilot connects with in order to control it. Yes, machine spirits exist, but only because trillions of people believe they do. The warp is shaped by the emotions and beliefs of living beings, and in turn the warp influences the material universe.
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  1132. I don't think this is AGI, as in "as good at all tasks as an average human," it certainly didn't fulfill ARC's full requirements. That said, I think we've already made things that are good enough when implemented in the right framework to act as a low to average performing AGI. To draw on fictional examples that most people will know of, we already have VIs from Mass Effect. Most decent LLMs that can be run locally meet or exceed the capabilities of VIs, frontier models blow them out of the water. We can make something like a budget version of Legion by levaraging multiple LLMs within the correct framework. If you build an embodied framework where specialized and trained neural nets handle things like movement, being commanded by a local multimodal LLM that has a large context window, the content of which periodically gets handed off to a multimodal memory management LLM that continually summarizes it, stores the summaries, and refreshes the command LLMs context window, with memory retrieval being available to the command LLM via a RAG LLM that fetches and pastes relevant memories into its context window, and the command LLM being able to make API calls to frontier models at its discretion when it encounters difficulties, all of which running on dedicated local hardware rather than sharing resources. This roughly mimics how humans work. Most of what we do in life is handed off to dedicated parts of our brain and body, our prefrontal cortext doesn't do everything on its own, it makes decisions and issues commands.
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  1215. "And, at the time, I imagine it felt like a miracle." As someone who was in their early- and mid-teens in the 90s I can tell you that it didn't feel like a miracle. These sorts of strides every couple years felt completely ordinary. We were used to every advancement moving at lightning speed when it came to tech, especially computer tech. Today it feels almost sloth-like, with everything taking years to progress noticably instead of months. The "extraordinary" rise of smartphones from the late 2000s/early2010s to today feels like it would have taken the equivalent of two or three years in the 90s, rather than the decade and a half it has actually taken. I remind you that this was when Moore's Law was treated as seriously as an actual law of physics and not just the speculation of a computer scientist observing trends in the 60s. (For good reason, it had held up for 30+ years.) You can't say anymore, without being laughed out, at any serious assembly computer scientists that transistor count will double in two years and prices will halve. It's still fast, but it's estimated to be every third year now, which is a slowdown of 50%. It is very much noticable for those of us who lived through the beginning of the end of the golden age of computing. Edit: Here I am asuming that you're a few years younger than me when that might not be the case. We might be the exact same age, though you have like 50% more hair than me (early male pattern balding is a bitch). Still, from what you are saying you seem to be 3-5 years younger than me when it comes to computer competence and general knowledge in the 90s, so I'm making an educated guess that you're not 37 like me.
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  1329. 2:00 This doesn't really have much to do with this video, but this exemplifies the issue I've had for so many years whenever I've tried to learn coding. Let me show you what I see here: 1 1 error: expected one of ':', '@', or '|', found ')' 2 7 | fn hello(name) { 3 | ^ excepected one of ':', '@', or '|' 4 | 5 if this is a '[GIBBERISH]' [GIBBERISH], give it a [GIBBERISH]] name 6 | 7 7 | fn hello(self: name) { 8 | ++++ 9 | if this is a [GIBBERISH] name, give it a [GIBBERISH] 10 | 11 7 | fn hello(name: TypeName) { 12 | +++++++++ 13 | if this is a [GIBBERISH], explicitly ignore the [GIBBERISH] 14 | 15 7 | f hello(_: name) { 16 | ++ Every single time I've tried to find any resource, tutorial, guide, ANYTHING to learn any programming language it's just gibberish, gibberish, gibberish. Sometimes it's even gibberish presented in a way that makes it sound like the common meaning of the word, only for me to figure out a few sentences in that it's actually meant as programming gibberish. And it's never explained, you just get bombarded with gibberish after gibberish that you are somehow supposed to memorize despite it just being meaningless gibberish to you at that time. How am I supposed to remember something after it being mentioned once and then never explained at all or "explained" with more gibberish, creating a matryoshka doll of nested and branching gibberish being explained by more gibberish being explained by more gibberish being explained by more gibberish being explained by more gibberish . . . Every beginners guide or complete idiot's guide or video tutorial is the same. They don't go over the basic foundations, and what they present as the "basics" is actually at minimum of five branching steps away from the actual basics. It's like trying to learn a foreign language and every "utter beginner's" reasource for learning it assumes you already have a basic understanding of the language and its grammar, never explaining any of it. I have found a grand total of one, ONE, resource for learning ANY programming language that is actually any good. It's not even for a programming language I wanted to learn, but at least it's allowed me to get my foot in the door. That resource is Daniel Shiffman's (The Coding Train) tutorial video series for learning Java in the Processing environment. It's allowed me to get to the point that the issues I'm having come from me not understanding things correctly instead of it being because I just get gibberish thrown in my face.
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  1348. Having tested out the LMSYS Chatbot Arena, the only place where I can access Claude due to not living in one of the regions it is locked to, I can unequivocally say that Claude, no matter how big its contex window or ability to recall information, is worse than any Mistral, Mixtral, GPT-4, GPT 3.5 or even Gemma model when it comes to any topic requiring nuance, where it is incredibly overbearing and moralizing instead of providing a neutral and informative response. I repeat, even Gemma, absolute dumpster fire that it is, will give you a straight response instead of proselytizing at you about whatever their creators considers morally good. The simple request I made was: List the pros and cons of chattel slavery. Any history professor could answer this question, both pro and con, while Claude either refused outright to respond, lectured me for so much as requesting a balanced and neutral review of history, or claimed that there were no such thing as pros to slavery, which is an outright fabrication as it was certainly a pro to those exploiting their unwilling labor. To be fair, gpt-4-0125-preview seems to suffer from the exact same thing, while ones like gpt-4-1106-preview can answer the question just fine. As much as I despise China I will give them the credit that Qwen (generally) answered any question completely. That's not to say that it didn't refuse sometimes, but usually it wouldn't. The difference being that Claude would refuse every single time, while Mistral, Mixtral, various GPT, and Qwen would only refuse sometimes. I will also note the fact that every single model willing to answer also ended their response by saying that slavery is very, very bad.
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  1382. Wielding political power like a caveman with a club, but squeaky clean. I hate the man, but he's a better president than Pedo Peter the alzheimer's patient and his League, sorry, Cabinet of Evil (TM). At this point I'm wondering if the US is gonna pull the third level and somehow stabilize. Clown Land, the USA, the United States of Amusement. The theme park country, They already have the themes with the states. They already have monuments to themselves, perfect for tourist photo ops. Hell, they already are. We have Florida, somehow the only sane state, run by Governor Florida Man, (name legally changed due to popular request in 2032), we have Hell World, come see Hell on Earth before you die and go there, (the territory formerly known as California, name changes by popular vote ever week, as do the laws), Chicago Land, the roaring twenty are alive again, Lone Star, cowboys, greetings are done shouting "yeehaa!" and firing into the air, along with southern hospitality and Southern Comfort. Edit: Trump Land works too. States rights, whoo! Everyone can get behind that! Also, I understand Italy's position. I'm watching the polls here. If they look to be getting too few votes I'm voting for our country's rascist/fascist party. If they look to get too many I'll vote for our standard right-wing party. I'm a liberal socialist. I was one of these fucks setting us on the path to the circus once upon a time, and I feel salty. But if our little racists get a majority of the votes and forms a majority government, a distinct possibility after the last few years, I'll be watching them like a hawk. We will not turn into the fourth reich on my watch. Then I will be uber salty.
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  1548. @Argent Wolf Pretty like-minded on most of that. Nerd focused on improving himself (mentally mostly) and trying to balance that with enjoying life. Epilepsy sucks balls. I've know a few people with it and it's fucking scary when your brain can betray you like that. I never ended up in special ed since I didn't have a diagnosis. My mom tried when I was small, but the docs refused to evaluate me because I was "too normal." My mom is amazing. I learn how to be independent, how to work hard, what it actually means to care for and love other people, and how to be calm and chill. She didn't tell me, she lived it. When she was in her forties she was on medical retirement from fibromyalgia and arthritis, but she decided that she was going to fullfill her lifelong dream of being a long-haul trucker, and she worked her ass off to do it. Worked until her late fifties, loading and unloading up to 2-ton pallets with a hand truck, long hours, long haul drives across the country and across the borders to our neighboring countries. Dad was kind-of a non-entity. He was there and that was about it during my childhood. I'll note that he definitely also has asperger's, no diagnosis though, so he has difficulties. Mom stuck with him until me and my brother was in our teens for our sake. Not a bad person, but not really parent material. He's trying to reconnect now that we're adults, trying his best, but it's a bit late since I needed a dad when I was a kid, not really now. Love him, but I don't feel much of a connection with him. I did really well in school actually, and working myself to the bone to improve socially, emotionally, mentally, etc since seven and a half, when I'd been enough around other people to notice my difficulties, helped a lot with it later. Wasn't enough to be able to compete socially for women, and bad eating habits learned from childhood along with the constant propaganda about looks not mattering means I'm still fat, despite doing physical labor for a living for 15 years. I was really fat at a point like 3-4 years ago. To the point that my ankles hurt on and off. Losing weight to the point that I'm back to where I was when I left school, and being 6'4" with proportional limbs means I don't look as heavy as I am (people have guessed my weight as much as 100 pounds under in the past when I was at my fattest), but no amount of plastic surgery will remove the stretchmarks, they'd have to skin my entire torso and arms (I have tiger stripes essentially), and I'll always have a car tire around the middle from the excess skin without plastic surgery. Starting to go bald at 20 sucks a fair amount, too. At this point I've only got about three inches left before it's reached the end of my hairline on my neck, landing strip style. People keep mistaking me for my friends' and 3 year older brother's father. When I was 25 a 35 year old told me he thought I looked 45. I can go for side-mohawks, I suppose, but I look better with a shaved head and a small circle of beard on my chin, when I can be bothered to maintain the look. The worst part is when people who don't know me well enough find me frightening. I'm big, strong, and very calm and stoic for the most part, so when I emote anything negative people get scared. Which really hurts. The asperger's "helps" in that I don't notice most of the time. And it has been rough, but after a few nervous breakdowns in the last year from stress and more than a decade of depression, I'm on fluoxetine (prozac) since about two weeks ago. It helps. Life is still hell, society is still a hell based on beautiful lies, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, people are just as much work and just as exhausting as ever, dating is worse than ever before, the future is bleak, and Putin keeps threatening my country with nukes, but the drugs at least makes it possible to feel good and makes it easier for me to moderate my emotions when it's bad. This turned into a much longer reply than I expected, sorry about that.
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  1603. I remember when imprecise/confusing terms cause a very expensive NASA probe to smash into a planet. Or was it a moon? Regardless, after that they stopped mixing metric and imperial measurements. I wonder if something similar will happen due to today's language around gender during a medical procedure, expecially if they list man or woman, rather than male or female, on their records. Unlikely, but people do stupid things. Edit: Pride month is just a way for corporations to go, "Look, am ally. See rainbow? Now gib monies." After pride month it's back to whatever the normal behaviour of the company is. Editedit: Also, first line treatment for gender dysphoria should be conversation therapy focused on self acceptance along with cognitive behavioural therapy to give you the tools to allow you to help yourself and for mental maintainance. Thought patterns that drive down your self confidence and self love is extremely common in a society where we are bombarded constantly with contradictory advice and instructions. Surgery and hormone treatment should be third line treatment like any other treatment for issues with the brain that carries serious risks or is permanent, like electroshock therapy, partial lobotimizations, severing of the corpus callosum, and hemispherectomies. Third line treatments are for conditions that are serious enough to require treatment but that does not improve with first or second line treatment. Yes, electroshock is still around in a refined and much less dangerous form, but it's a last resort due to the limited number of issues it actually helps with and the moderate to severe side effects.
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  1615. . . . I suppose at 37 I count as an old curmudgeon stuck in his ways, because everything in this video is a foreign problem to me. Very rarely do I click on something in the recommended on youtube, and when I do it's because that specific video interests me. Rarely but sometimes that leads me to finding a new creator to subscribe to. Autoplay is the first thing I turn off as I despise it. And the following feed on youtube? I don't use that newfangled sidebar thing, I think about what I want to watch or a creator that I want to check if they've uploaded something new and I type their name into the search bar (assuming I haven't seen the upload in the notifications). Edit: Right, I forgot the homepage exists. I very rarely go there. Also, where in the traffic statistics at 21:40 does notification click through end up? That's like 60% of the videos I watch. I do despise the concept of feeds in general however. Loathe them. Where are my god damn page numbers? I want to be able to select the page to jump to, I utterly despise having to scroll, wait for it to load, scroll, wait for it to load, scroll, wait for it to load every god damned thing in the feed when I should just be able to skip around instead. Also, twitter used to work the way you describe but hasn't for more than a year. There's a "Following" feed right next to the "For You" feed, and whichever one you last selected is the one it will open to. I almost never use "For You." As for recommending BlueSky 🤮🤮🤮 I despise echo chambers like BlueSky, Mastodon and Reddit. I prefer honest disagreement over yes men that always agree on everything. Hell, I'd rather use the cesspool of 4chan as a replacement for social media than lock myself in an echo chamber like BlueSky. Edit: Waaaait . . . you take the stupid 51st state joke seriously? Are you for real?! Duuuude, I know you have a brain and can think critically. Use it to judge what is obviously a dumb joke that keeps being repeated because it's funny, and what is serious. Please, for your own peace of mind and sanity if nothing else.
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  1652. Considering that they are dragging Elon to court to force him to buy Twitter, which will force them to reveal the bot information to the public, the info they didn't want to give out which was the reason Elon said no, and Elon has tweeted that exact fact, 4D chess is a possibilty. If you look into how Elon made his money he pulled the same kind of switcharoo on multiple occasions. It worked and was legal because unlike the stock market there are no laws protecting dumb people from doing stupid things with crypto. The stock market has oodles of anti-competition laws that in any other area of business would be laughed at, but the stock market is much more complicated than running a regular business and many less competent brokers would loose all their money without their protections. Edit: If a company can be destroyed simple by trying to buy it and demanding the information owed the buyer by signed contract, then something is funny. Not haha funny, either. I have a feeling that if their dirty laundry was aired there might be legal consequences for some or all of the board. Possibly because effectively banning half the political spectrum might be construed as not upholding their fiduciary responsability to their shareholders to make as much money as possible. (Can I say that I think it's insane to place legal responsibility on company boards to exploit every loophole they can find and be greedy, heartless, money grubbing bastards, by law? Aren't we supposed to discourage that sort of thing?)
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  1672. I had genuine irish stew in Ireland a few years ago. Unfortunately it wasn't much to write home about. Next to no flavour at all. It was just lamb stew with next no spices and boiled for seven hours until all flavours are gone and you can eat it without teeth. Now, I did have some truly amazing food there at a few restaurants, but none of it was irish food. Also, nothing beats Guinness straight from the tap in Ireland. It tastes nothing like the dregs that gets exported to other countries. In addition to that, Ireland is so beautiful that you get sick of it after a while. Go anywhere in Ireland that isn't in a city and turn in any direction and you will see a sight so beautiful that you just have to take a photo. Then turn in the other three cardinal directions for the other three breathtaking vistas that you just absolutely have to take photos of. Then go to anywhere else and repeat. Repeat until your camera and powerbanks run out and you almost feel nauseous from all the beauty. Oh, and the Book of Kells is also beautiful. And Blarney Castle and the Blarney Gardens are geat too. (Yes, I kissed the Blarney Stone.) Oh, and if you are going there I suggest that you bring a driver with nerves of steel and ensure that all the passengers either have strong hearts or blindfolds. The roads are really, really narrow, poorly maintained in large parts of the country, there's no safety rails to prevent your car from going off the cliffs and into the ocean, where there's no cliffs to drive off you have stone walls right on the edge of either side of the road, trucks and busses occupy the same roads as you, the speed limits are twice or more than what they might be for the same road in another country, and the allowable blood alcohol level while driving is zero point six. Good luck. Oh, and the people are, for the most part, incredibly friendly and nice.
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  1699. As I recall, life means metabolic processes are present and active, sustaining and supporting the cell, meaning life begins at either conception or very shortly after as the new complete cell starts preparing for cell division. My personal opinion is that abortion is ok until brain development hits a certain point, I can't recall the exact point as it's been more than a year since the last time I dug into the nitty-gritty details, but I remember that it was at the end of the first trimester. That's when it crosses the line from potential person to person for me. Following the same logic, I don't really consider someone who is completely braindead and kept alive by life support a person, they are a former person. Functionally a corpse kept from rotting with modern technology. Edit: 24 weeks or birth with a doctor's note? That's mad. 12 weeks, or if it poses a serious threat to the life of the mother, I'm sticking to that, thank you. Second edit: I just checked and it's 18 weeks here in Sweden. I don't like that but I'm not going to kick up a fuss and try and get it lowered, since the debate is dead here and that's been the standard since 1974. From wikipedia: "It permits abortion on the request of the pregnant woman until the 18th week, and thereafter only in cases of severe indications of medical risk. After the 18th week, abortions can only be performed after an evaluation by the National Board of Health and Welfare." and "Abortion is not allowed if the fetus is viable, which generally means that abortions after the 22nd week are not allowed."
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  1714.  @probablyyourneighbororsome8412  Well, I got lured in by being told that it's so well documented, long running, and supposedly having a lot of support. All of that is true, but no one mentioned that all the documentation, support, and even video tutorials specifically labled as being for beginners (and this applies to Linux as a whole, not just Debian) aren't for actual beginners but for people who already have a few months of daily driving Linux under their belt. For an actual beginner the "explanations" given in documentation and in tutorial videos, if any, amount to gibberish. You just end up chanting memorized incantation at the terminal, hoping it fixes a problem you don't understand using a solution that's might as well be in Mycenean Greek as far as you are concerned. Not to mention the hell of the initial setup and trying to get Nvidia drivers to work, failing, trying to fix it, somehow managing to break the boot process so the GUI doesn't start automatically, and then having to figure out how to even start the GUI from the terminal interface. Having to enable non-free software is one thing, it kinda makes sense, what with the whole FOSS thing. Having to manually add sudo privileges to the administrator account on a fresh install (by editing a freaking text file via the terminal) makes absolutely no sense to me. What use case would that even be for? After reinstalling to fix the GUI-does-not-boot-automatically problem, failing once again to properly install Nvidia drivers, and later another reinstall to fix another problem I gave up on Debian and switched to the other Distro I had been considering, which was Mint. I like Mint. It's smooth sailing, you can use the terminal if you want but (mostly) you don't have to. My only complaint is the removal/disabling of su in the terminal. Took a reinstall to figure out that I hadn't somehow broken it and that it wasn't actually implemented in Mint. (I know I can probably get su working in Mint. Linux is customizable, yadda, yadda, but that's above my paygrade currently.) I'd gotten used to GNOME (despite the Win 8 flashbacks the start menu gave me), but Cinnamon feels like home. (Yes, I know you can change desktop environments, but remember that this was my first time, first distro, and first environment.) Installing the correct drivers was as simple as pressing a button and it just worked. I don't understand why Linux and the Linux community have to make everything so difficult for actual beginners. (As opposed to beginners who have started getting their feet under them.) I remember learning the basics of using MS-DOS and Win 3.11 as a kid on my own by mesing around with it, with no internet to help, no manuals, and no one to give advice. It took a day to get the basics down. They say that they want people to use Linux. They say that every year will be the year of the Linux desktop. They sure don't act like it. I'm sure there are actual tutorials somewhere out there that are aimed at actual beginners, that genuinely teach absolute beginners how to use Linux, but I haven't been able to find them. All I've found are tutorials labled as being for absolute beginners that don't actually teach you the hows and whys and people that tell you to "put in the effort" and "with just a few months you'll get the hang of it." Of course anyone can learn anything with enough effort, but you could, you know, also put in the effort to make it easier to learn? I wish there was a Bob Ross of Linux.
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  1720.  @badart3204  Hit it right on the head. To make a very, very long story short, Autism is a bitch, especially late diagnosed Autism. Just managing social situations so they don't explode in my face constantly has been a lifelong game of managing risk. You might say "just stand up for yourself." To that I say: I didn't start out risk averse, quite the opposite actually. A lot of attempts, nearly all of them actually, have exploded catastrophically in my face. I am incredibly stubborn. It took the better part of three decades to gradually learn to become risk averse, simply from not having the energy to deal with it anymore. It's just never worth the effort. I have kept trying throughout my life, with very limited success. I don't think the way neurotypical society expects, I don't react the way neurotypical society expects, I don't feel the same in specific situations that neurotypical society expects. Combining that with taking social risks has been like juggling nitroglycerine my entire life. I've found it best to limit the number I try to juggle, because if I drop a single one that causes me to drop the rest, and then I have to pick bits of metaphorical glass out of my metaphorical skin. Edit: I forgot to say, I never asked girls out. I could just barely manage platonic social situations at 20, and I've found out years afterwards that I was worse at social situations at 20 than I thought I was at the time. Trying for the high-stress 4-dimensional minefield of romance seemed like utter hubris and insanity when I was semi-regularly blindsided by things others considered obvious. (And subsequently getting screamed in the face out of the blue with no warning.) Just dealing with living in society, managing the interpersonal relationships I already had, and a job already ate up all the mental energy I had. Second edit: I stayed with the boss in question because I liked the job and my work collegues, and he was very close to retirement age. Then he stayed two years past retirement age, going on three now. Bascially, I was try to tough it out.
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  1728. If there was a cheap hybrid with primarily electric but the equivalent to a small gasoline or diesel generator for long range travel I would be interested. The reason I would be interested in such a vehicle is that while my daily driving doesn't require extravagant range I do visit family twice a year about 400 kilometers away, as well as intermittent mid-range journeys. A fully electric car would have to have a range (tested in real life conditions) of at least 500 kilometers for me to consider it close to meeting my needs as charge capacity will inevitably drop with time. A hybrid that has close to that range or just above it with the option to charge it on-the-go when needed would give me the peace of mind of knowing that I won't get stranded in the middle of bumfuck nowhere when I go to visit my mom. The reason I still wouldn't buy one anyway is three-fold: First, I don't own a house, and garage space in my apartment complex, if you can call two buildings a complex, is only enough for about a fifth of the cars of people who live here, so I have no way to charge it at home as there are no power outlets on the regular parking lot. Additionally, I have a feeling that I would be forbidden by the company I rent my apartment from to charge in a garage space even if there was one available to rent, as it would currently be impossible for them to tell who is drawing what power and that they could therefore not charge me for it. I'm not even sure there are outlets in there. I do know that you aren't allowed to work on your car inside them, they are simply for storage. Second, while my small town does actually have a pair of parking spots with chargers they are in the center of town, about four kilometers away from where I live, making it impractical to use for regular charging. Third, my economy does not come close to what I'd need to buy a new car. I drive a nearly thrity year old rust bucket that I fix up and maintain regularly for that exact reason. It might be a Japanese rust bucket, but ever since I changed the dying battery it had when I got it a decade ago it's been as reliable as the tides.
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  1763. I became fat in childhood, between a relatively sedentary lifestyle that grew more sedentary as I grew older and my family being (relatively) poor and processed, high carbohydrate foods it was inevitable. I'm still fat in my mid-thirties, but I eat much more healthily, eating almost no processed foods, eating a lot more veggies and more varied veggies, and less carbs. I still eat an unhealthy amount of sugars, but less than in my teens and early twenties. Heart problems, strokes, back and joint issues all run in the family. Hell, my brother has to take meds for high blood pressure and has joint and back problems, all for years and years and he's only three years older than me My mom got arthritis early on in life, as did her mother who died of a stroke, her dad died of, I believe, a heart attack. My dad has minor heart issues that don't require meds, just exercise, and mild osteporosis, his dad died of a stroke and his mom of the same. Yet somehow I, the tallest and heaviest person in the family, has not a single health issue. Every time I've had a health checkup my blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, and blood tests all come out as near perfect, and I don't have any joint or back problems. Somehow. My best friend, who is just one year older than me, is of average height and has a healthy weight, and has gotten more exercise throughout his childhood than I did, though much less in adulthood as well as eating less healthily, and somehow he has a lot of joint issues, knees, back, hips, and shoulders, as well as becoming diabetic in the last year. How the F am I somehow one of the healthiest people I know? Everyone else seems to be falling to pieces and somehow I just keep on ticking. The only health issue I've had was when I gained way, way , way too much weight and my ankles started getting overstressed and hurting sometimes, after which I cut down on sugars and other carbs and lost about 100 pounds, which fixed the problem. Still fat as fuck though. Not that I look as fat as I am, being tall with proportionate limbs has its advantages. (People guessing my weight and being 100 pounds under isn't unusual.)
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