I doubt they’re the ones that see anything wrong with this.

While true, a lot of older people in the UK get really, really racist when it comes to their bloodline. Some people view themselves as more British than others because of their lineage towards the Saxons, as opposed to people that have been here for 100+ years that may have originated from elsewhere. Many don’t consider anyone to be British if they emigrated from somewhere like Jamaica, India, or Ireland because, in their view, only the pure Anglo Saxons are the original Brits, even if 5-6 generations of their family grew up here, embedded themselves into society

I do agree that Americans are really weird when it comes to their ancestry, especially considering they come from a country that is very anti-immigration. IMO if you want to claim that you are 50% British or whatever, you shouldn’t be blocking British people from moving to your country (and vice versa).

It’s not a great look…but let’s be frank. Biden was pushed out of a race he wanted, during a presidency that wasn’t all that bad considering what came before. The Dems that wanted him out are now all either infighting, or saying everything is fine and they’ll definitely win in four years. Biden’s in the last weeks of his job, and when he’s lost so much already he probably just wants to ensure his family are safe.

After decades of public service, and being committed to handing power over to someone that’s demonized what’s left of his family, I’m all for Biden using his last week or two to protect his family and enjoy retirement.

Group Sounds - Temporarily In Love

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1I1NQuMP-8w

It’s…an experience.

It’s all well and good to blame the generation that can’t afford shit to use payday loan companies to buy shit…but when these companies align with the likes of Dominos Pizza to allow you to buy a pizza and pay off in several weekly installments, maybe it’s time to blame prices for being ridiculously high?

Are…are you serious? You can buy boner pills in gas stations in America?

No wonder you fuckers voted for Trump.

Saying he can’t be bought when he had to explain a metric fuck-ton of gifts he received from donors, from Arsenal season tickets to an insane amount on glasses, and multiple tickets to Taylor Swift, indicates a man that can very easily be bought.

In theory, a Sir that is known for being a chief prosecutor should be the hardest person to buy…but that’s the joy of politics I guess.

IMO Kier is a bit of a bellend, but a vast improvement on the shower of cunts in the Tory party. What I would love to see him implement is a true UK constitution to ensure that any wrongdoing in office results in criminal proceedings. Those in politics should be held to the highest standard, and if you’re caught taking bribes, selling access to friends, or abusing lower workers while in office you should be banned from holding office AND see jail time.

Preface: I work in AI, and on LLM’s and compositional models.

None, frankly. Where AI will be helpful to the general public is in providing tooling to make annoying tasks (somewhat) easier. They’ll be an assisting technology, rather than one that can replace people. Sadly, many CEO’s, including the one where I work, either outright lie or are misled into believing that AI is solving many real-world problems, when in reality there is very little or zero tangible involvement.

There are two areas where (I think) AI will actually be really useful:

• Healthcare, particularly in diagnostics. There is some cool research here, and while I am far removed from this, I’ve worked with some interns that moved on to do really cool stuff in this space. The benefit is that hallucinations can actually fill in gaps, or potentially push towards checking other symptoms in a conversational way.

• Assisting those with additional needs. IMO, this is where LLM’s could be really useful. They can summarize huge sums of text into braille/speech, they can provide social cues for someone that struggles to focus/interact, and one surprising area where they’ve been considered to be great (in a sad but also happy way) is in making people that rely on voice assistants feel less lonely.

In both of these areas you could argue that a LLM might replace a role, although maybe not a job. Sadly, the other side to this is in the American executive mindset of “increasing productivity”. AI isn’t a push towards removing jobs entirely, but squeezing more productivity out of workers to enable the reduction of labor. It’s why many technological advancements are both praised and feared, because we’ve long reached a point where productivity is as high as it has ever been, but with jobs getting harder, pay becoming worse and worse, and execs becoming more and more powerful.

For now, I work in AI.

IMO, using AI to remove jobs is the business equivalent of the Darwin Award. No sane executive will look at AI and see job replacement. A dumb executive will look at AI and see more productivity gains. A smart executive will see AI as a way to improve tooling for workers that explicitly want to use AI.

Sadly, as with most tech improvements, we’ll see lots of companies run by stupid people try to do stupid things with it. The best we can hope for is that there are opportunities for people to bail and find better job opportunities when their employer says “let’s fire HR and replace with GPT”, only to get absolutely brutalized by legal fees when their AI HR decides to fire someone for a protected reason, or refuses to fire a thief because they have a disability, or something that requires human intervention that doesn’t exist, or one of the hundreds of ways that it could go hilariously wrong.

It happens all the time. I remember watching solid profitable tech companies pivoting to delivering large apps on the new iPhone app store because “it’s the future”, only to realise that spending two years to develop an office suite for the iPhone 4 was a fucking stupid idea in hindsight. I remember people firing web developers because WYSIWYG editors would mean that you could design and build a website in the same way you create a Word doc. Stupid execs will always do stupid shit, and the world will move on.

Maybe they want small government…so they can fight the government with their union?

It’s a bit like saying that you want to fight Mike Tyson, but only if you remove his arms and vision.

I work in big tech, and in the US there is a lot of money being thrown at knowledge workers. IMO it’s not a bad thing, but I do wish that other workers also got their fair share.

Regardless, the dirty secret of these companies is that a big part of your compensation is usually restricted stock units, and when you relocate through work to a different country you usually get to keep the same amount of stock. You’ll get a good base pay, but your stock once vested will usually put you leaps and bounds above the average pay.

So, work for one of these companies that pays stock, and move to the UK, France, Germany, somewhere with a MUCH cheaper cost of living and better social net. At a high enough level, you could arguably quit your job and prop up your future salary from interest.

It INFURIATES me how many companies will spend money on backups, but not ever test that their backups restore or allow for continued functionality afterwards.

At one company, I banged this drum for years, and one day we had a situation where someone “accidentally” deleted all the media from a client website. I had to dig through several backups and rebuild from beta, which annoyed me endlessly, but I dropped the “I fucking told you so” several times, and hinted that our “restore scripts weren’t working as intended” to the client. It took me a full day to do what should have taken maybe 1-2 hours at most…

The Lizzy Line is my line when I go to the office, so I hope they don’t fuck it up more than it can be. It’s usually reliable, but when it isn’t, fuck me it’s a nightmare…

I had discussed it with my wife. I didn’t want her to feel obligated to do so, and I know it would be awkward at her work to change her last name, but ultimately she wanted to - so I guess that’s one reason?

There is a degree of closeness from it that I think some people appreciate. If you all share a last name, perhaps you feel closer as a family? I’ve known some people that don’t share the same last name as their kids, or people that went double-barrelled, but didn’t with their kids, and some of them had either changed later, or regretted not having the “same” name.

You only need to look at the many BlueSky posts here to see that many people view BlueSky as an attack on federation. It’s only natural to see people on Mastodon shitting on BlueSky for taking what they see as their success away from them.

The McMahons are so weird.

It’s kinda funny how Vince funded two failed campaigns, and the second the two seem to be estranged Linda has found political power through Trump.

I have no idea if Vince and Linda are still together, since they’ve been mostly separated for years now, but I wonder if this will also open doors for Vince considering he was booted out of TKO/WWE for the recent abus allegations.

Even today, they just don’t give a fuck about rules.

In Southern France there are speed cameras being set up everywhere, and they’ll catch you for being even a few km’s over. The locals (mostly rural) have responded by either torching them, encasing them in hay bales, painting over them, or chopping them down. The police keep putting them up, alongside cameras to watch the cameras, and the locals keep destroying them overnight.

Because they want to read stuff that they both agree with, and want others to agree with also.

Up until quite late in my teens I often felt that I would make friends with people that had similar interests.

I started going to more rock and metal gigs, and bars that played the same music. I’d also talk to people that were into the same games as me, and engaged them in a friendly manner since, you know, we like the same stuff - we should be friends, right?

It was a shock to the ol’ belief system that someone that likes the same bands you like might also be a huge cunt, or that dude that likes the same anime as you is also really fucking racist. I found all that out in one night after talking to two dudes that had a Thrice shirt and one dude that mentioned he was a huge DBZ fan. I found myself growing closer to people that didn’t necessarily like the same stuff I did, and my closest friends like a varied range of music, sports, and shows. That realisation allowed me to stop changing myself for others, to stop gravitating towards people that simply like things I like, and to just be open and friendly to everyone.

For me it’d be Better Than That by Sub-Radio.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qPIrWtlpCSA

Those that have spent a few years on Reddit might remember them doing live shows back when they were less known. As a band, they’re basically just pure pop-punk joy, and I think people could use a little joy lately.