bungeonsBaggins

You seem legitimately offended that this guy has preferences and opinions

No, I am not offended that anyone has preferences or opinions. What I am responding to is this language:

Neither a Vision Pro owner nor much of a hog cranker

native applications designed to aid manipulating oneself

dead-eyed men and women rutting on camera

...which is intended to indicate disdain towards people who produce or consume pornographic material. I think that this person is going out of their way to be an unkind contrarian regarding porn, and in my opinion that deserves a little light ridicule!

What a boner of a comment. We get it, George, you don't watch pornography. Well done on managing your personal brand I guess?

FYI there's nothing inherently wrong about porn or sex work! It's great! A lot of people like it, you should try it sometime!

I think this is a pro-Amazon piece disguised as an anti-Amazon piece. Like, the author comes across as so inept and unlikable, and Amazon so reasonable, that I strongly suspect that this is an Amazon-sponsored piece? If that makes sense?

Is that a concept that exists, where you write a shitty criticism of something in order to make people go "That actually sounds pretty good" and it ends up working as an endorsement or advertisement? Sort of an on-purpose Streisand effect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

I don't mean to blow your mind, but humans are a part of nature. One advantage we have over other species is that we can spot patterns and work collectively to fix undesirable situations or circumstances. And if our fix causes further problems, we can fix those too!

We're flawed creatures so it's not ideal, but it sure beats being at the mercy of the forces nature uses to correct things on its own, like diseases and famine.

So you think that if you wanted to start a business to compete with Apple in any of the spaces talked about in this lawsuit (hardware, web browsing, messaging etc) your greatest challenge to competing in that market would be regulation? Not Apple?

On the other side we see politicians - bureaucrats that never built anything in their lives. Parasites living off our work. Greedier and greedier every year they forcefully confiscate more and more of our sweat and blood while "giving" us crappier and crappier services in exchange.

Slow down there, John Galt.

How is discouraging monopolistic practices going to line the pockets of these parasitic bureaucrats? If Apple has enough control of the marketplace that nobody can meaningfully compete with them, do you think that's better or worse for "us"?

Buybacks are a favorite boogeyman, but they are just tax efficient dividends.

"Tax-efficient" is weasel language. If the money was spent as dividends it would be taxed and then would benefit someone besides the executive suite and investors. If they were unwilling to pay that tax, then the money would need to be reinvested in the company in the form of higher salaries or R&D. So yes, if buybacks were illegal the money WOULD go to one of these things.

For context, it looks like this user has deleted a comment where they claim they "have a screenshot" of this, but they "don't want to share it" because they "don't want it to make international news". For some reason the other people in this thread expressing skepticism are being downvoted, but I'll add my voice to the chorus: I do not believe this story to be true.

Considering that several people have tried and failed to reproduce this, and there's a warning at the top of the shared conversations about the creator's Custom Instructions, and that as others have pointed out this is pretty obvious and would destroy a lot of goodwill for ChatGPT, I think it's overwhelmingly likely that the author put in some custom instructions to try and elicit this behavior from ChatGPT in order to drum up controversy for clicks.

I don't know anything else about this author - do they have a history of similar behavior?

I don't want to feel like a fool for sticking with and supporting this woman from 40-70, when she was giving it up easily at 18-30

jesus

Yes, this is such a fool's errand. When GPT-4 was first released I started using it as a creative writing aid, and had a wonderful couple of months with it. Yesterday I finally cancelled my paid subscription because it's AWFUL now. I wasn't even asking it for anything particularly spicy, but whatever controls they've put in place have made it so that it can only churn out safe, uninteresting pap. It cannot seem to generate anything that would even be in a PG-13 movie, nor can it recognize or engage in humor anymore (it was never good at the latter, but whatever glimmers were there are totally gone now).

OpenAI has taken the most exciting technology I've seen in the last 20 years and turned it into an interactive Encyclopedia Britannica that lies. What a fucking waste.

4chan isn't a village, though, not in the way the author describes. Important characteristics of a "village" as defined in this piece are that you can develop systems of trust through reputation (by interacting with the same people over time) which leads to incentivizing pro-social behavior (there are consequences for acting like a jerk).

The author is specifically talking about places where you go to interact with people who share your interests and _aren't_ jerks.

The Fed is not a single guy. Do you think it's a single guy? Are you just parroting something you heard somewhere else without understanding it?

I've read some of CS Lewis' writings on religion. I'm an atheist married to a person of faith, so I'm interested in what the people I love find so compelling about their faith.

He's a very charismatic writer, but sneaky in his arguments. For example, my rebuttal to the above would be: "Humans are evolved from apes who are social animals. No matter what we achieve materially, we will always crave social recognition, status, and love from other humans. And because other humans are imperfect, we can never get to a state where we are perfectly loved, content, and free from the fear that these things will be taken away."

He has a similar argument in "Mere Christianity", where (I paraphrase and over-simplify) he says that whatever goodness there is in humans proves there must be a God, because otherwise why would people ever want to do anything "good" rather than just what immediately benefits them? But I feel like that has a similar response to the above - we know that evolution exists, we know we evolved from apes, and we've watched apes exhibit the same social behaviors that we do. There are many times when it makes sense to act pro-socially (to do "good" things as CS Lewis would describe them) in order to get a greater benefit (from your community) than you would by acting purely selfishly.

This doesn't make humans bad, or make it any less "good" to do good things! I don't understand the idea that these behaviors are any less good or meaningful because we do them for natural reasons rather than supernatural ones.

In my experience of layoffs, it's more akin to just digging up a tenth of the garden at random because you don't know what a weed looks like.

It was very reasonable to imagine that if the API ever stopped being free, that the logical next step would be "paid access" rather than "no access". And that if Twitter was going away, we'd have some warning in advance (as we do now - building a business that relies on Twitter is a much dumber move today than it would have been a year ago, obviously).

I think the businesses expecting Twitter to remain relatively stable for the next several years were the reasonable ones here, yes.

It sounds like you haven't really watched the show. Which is fine, but your criticisms assume too much and miss the mark.

For example, this:

And then they try to paint Don as this cool customer who is the pinnacle of suave, when in reality his character is just a straight up goober. He's weird as hell, and comes off dumb as a box of rocks.

...is, probably, the main major theme that the show explores in some way in almost every episode. Ditto your feminism complaint. The show explores "feminism" from a bunch of different angles and none of them are as dumb as your dismissive caricature here.

It's fine not to like something, but you don't have to go out of your way to criticize something you don't seem to have actually engaged with. You can just say "Wasn't for me!" and move on. Or not say anything at all!

He's also been exposed as having sent sexually explicit DMs to minors, which started to come to light after the lawsuit was filed. It was probably that, more than/in addition to the lawsuit, that led to Adult Swim dropping him.

I looked into it because I had the same initial reaction you did. It's pretty terrible stuff, dude's got some issues

Your statement upthread, which I replied to:

Most poor people are children under 18. I guess technically, you can work at 16, so some of them probably dropped out and work full-time, but it's definitely not the norm.

Most poor "adults" - are people >65 who aren't working full-time either.

The first bullet point in your quoted source:

Of the 40.6 million Americans living in poverty in 2016, 56.1 percent were working-age adults, 18 to 64. Important shares of those living in poverty are children and adults aged 65 and older (32.6 percent and 11.2 percent respectively, in 2016).

I don't know why you included all these other bullets in your response. Are you just hoping that by adding extraneous information, that it would make it seem like your original statement was correct? Or that you were saying something different from what you actually said?

Hi! I worked for a nonprofit poverty advocacy center in Chicago. This is totally wrong, but it's stated so confidently. Why do you say this? What's the source you got this opinion from? Do you even know?

This is an opportunity for you to learn more about yourself and grow! For some reason it helps your ego/reinforces your worldview to believe (and repeat!) that "most poor people are children under 18 or seniors" which is easily disprovable. So you should think about why you want to believe that, and what about your worldview would need to change if you accepted that that's not true (because it absolutely isn't!).

How does this work in practice, though? I don't know how this would be possible at all. I have loaned money to family members in the past, and been paid back when they were back on their feet. But if a friend or family member borrowed money and never paid it back, even after they were over their financial difficulties, and never mentioned it or made any effort to repay the loan, it would certainly affect my opinion of them; at the very least, I'd expect them to offer some explanation as to why they weren't able or willing to pay me back as we agreed.

So do you actually mean this, or are you just signaling how kind you are?

This is so true to my own experience that it made me tear up a little.