Wheat is the most successful lifeform on the planet.

We should have gotten a second season at least.

Fox Media was run by sadists

I’m going to take a bold position and say they were all good consoles. It was a beautiful time for video games.

Animated webps have been a thing this whole time.

Reading this in Sam Reich’s voice.

Even if it wasn’t, you could just convert it to .jpg if you felt strongly about it. Not as though there’s a compatibility issue.

The complaint people are having is with resizing/manipulation after download. They want these enormous uncompressed files floating around on every website, in the off chance they plan to download it and manipulate it. 99.9% of the web needs to be full of megabyte sized image files for the 0.1% y’all want to play with.

The funny thing to me is that it’s still basically machine learning, the same tech that we’ve had since the mid 2000s, it’s just we have fancier hardware now.

So much of the modern Microsoft/ChatGPT project is effectively brute-forcing intelligence from accumulated raw data. That’s why they need phenomenal amounts of electricity, processing power, and physical space to make the project work.

There are other - arguably better, but definitely more sophisticated - approaches to developing genetic algorithms and machine learning techniques. If any of them prove out, they have the potential to render a great deal of Microsoft’s original investment worthless by doing what Microsoft is doing far faster and more efficiently than the Sam Altman “Give me all the electricity and money to hit the AI problem with a very big hammer” solution.

Should note that a lot of the Microsoft Recall project revolves around capturing human interactions on the computer in real time continuously, with the hope of training a GPT-5 model that can do basic office tasks automagically.

Will it work? To some degree, maybe. It’ll definitely spit out some convincing looking gibberish.

But the promise is to increasingly automate away office and professional labor.

Hell without Hitler doesn’t really sound so bad

You’re saying that god is so oblivious (even though he’s supposed to be omniscient) that he’ll be fooled by you claiming to believe just because you’re hedging your bets?

More that repetition reinforces an idea. By commiting to the bit and accepting a God at face value, you reduce your psychological defenses when the priest or prophet comes around with the next ask.

So you admit you believe in God? Then you won’t mind putting a few coins in the collection plate to prove it.

Oh, you’ve already donated? Surely you’d be comfortable making a confession.

My son, you’ve got so many sins! Surely you’d like to join our prayer group to get yourself right with the God we all agree exists.

Can’t have prayer without works! Time to do some penance.

More like a Chain Letter.

There was a trend when I was a little kid of people sending you mail that said something to the effect of “You have been cursed by reading this letter. If you don’t mail a copy to ten other people, you will die in thirty days.”

Roko’s Basilisk is a modern manifestation of human paranoia and superstition. It exists to exploit and extort the gullible.

Libraries provide a host of public services beyond “warehouse for books”. A big part of our digital archives come from library digitization programs. And knowing how to sort, store, and distribute this information is a vital piece of library science.

Losing libraries means losing the tools we use to organize information on a national scale.

I remember when /r/HailCorporate was a trending sub and then it just sort of got strangled to death.

Also remember the periodic waves of “Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!” and “I love Mayor Pete” and “KHive ftw!” and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.

Nevermind the absolutely sycophantic corporate ghoul AMAs. Bill Gates, Ann Coulter, and Don Lemon all leap to mind. Just the absolute worst moderation imaginable for these guys. Then there was the Elon Musk AMA. Jesus fucking Christ.

Tigers eat meat. Its part of nature.

But people don’t like being eaten. So they complain about tigers and try to get rid of them.

What is natural?

There are certain ecological balances that develop over time, as species fill individual niches and create symbiotic bonds. The capacity for the given biome to support life is predicated on a certain cyclical exchange. And when that cycle is broken, you typically see a die-off caused by the imbalances.

This notion that nature isn’t cruel and unforgiving is just a fairytale.

The question isn’t of cruelty but sustainability. The mouse eats the corn. The snake eats the mouse. The bird eats the snake. The parasite eats the bird. The corn eats the corpses.

But if you go through with a weed wacker and kill all the snakes, you get population spikes on one end of the food chain and collapses on others, in a way that ultimately reduces the amount of life the area can support.

We saw this across the American Great Plains with the extermination of buffaloes and passenger pigeons. What was once lush and bountiful became barren and inhospitable, as industrial scale destruction of natural resources rendered territory uninhabitable. Reckless industrial development produces waste faster than the natural ecological conditions can process it. And this same development siphons off the natural bounty faster than it can be replaced.

Our food production needs to do better and be better but it will only do so because of us, not because we “listen to nature”

If we do not understand why certain natural cycles exist or how certain minerals and molecules are naturally derived and regenerated or what energy sources are available and at what rates, we risk exhausting the existing biological landscape and destroying the capacity for a particular piece of territory to sustain new life in future generations.

This is as simple as looking at the Great Lakes or the Ogallala Aquifer or the Mississippi River and asking “Is there going to be enough water in these places in another 100 years to maintain our productive rate of agricultural development?” And at the current rate we’re exhausting these resources, the answer is no.

If we hadn’t brought in so many thirsty commercial scale animal and plant species or attempted to generate such large surpluses that we could export them overseas at enormous profits or raised the temperature of the Earth such that we evaporated off too much surface water, we would not be in this situation.

trying to sound enlightened

You don’t need to be a guru to look at the Earth and look at Mars, then say to yourself “Maybe we keep the Earth-style ecology going a little longer”.

Eating meat is very much a part of nature

Trying to explain this to the guy getting chewed on by a tiger, but he’s too busy screaming and thrashing and bleeding everywhere.

Fortunately, there’s enormous swaths of the planet that are totally inhospitable to human life.

Unfortunately, we’ve managed to deposit all sorts of toxic waste from the depths of the ocean to the hottest corners of the desert to the peaks of mountains.

Americans with Cryptids:

It’s part of the meme, tho.

Fair enough. Still incredibly cheap.

I did a quick search and the library service in England costs 840 million per year for an entire country.

Or roughly $12/resident/year. Admittedly, England has also been cutting deeply into their social services budgets, with library spending falling by over a quarter over the last decade. The UK has lost over a fifth of its public libraries during this time and continues to cut deeper and deeper into these budgets. So its per-capita cheap, but also a popular target for enormous budget cuts.

Compare that to the city’s police budgets and you’ll find a yawning gap that’s only growing larger with time.