Do you have any proof you’re not a chatbot?

Our future AI overlord is currently a malfunctioning AutoGPT instance

Well, if you’d like to reduce your risk of losing data to a minimum, you should still test your backups anyways. Shit happens, even to the good people at Backblaze sometimes.

Or things like your offsite provider taking a shit and corrupting your backups without realizing, meaning when your local backup goes kaput your 2nd backup has already silently failed. That exact thing hitting one of their off-site providers was what convinced one of my clients to let me fix their backup procedures (or at least try)

It’s totally insane that employers expect me to believe you, poorly paid customer service worker, actually care about what I have going on and aren’t just going through the motions to pay your bills.

I respect the shit out of anyone who can put that show on. I certainly can’t do it.

To be fair, though, I only call customer service when I have a corner case that can’t be answered online and 9 times out of 10 I have to lovingly explain about four or five times what I’m even trying to ask because the customer service person is too busy groaning in their head because they assumed I asked something in the FAQ, cutting me off to answer questions I didn’t ask that don’t remotely help, etc etc.

Calling customer service is so weird. I have to pretend like I don’t know the customer service person hates me, and the customer service person has to pretend they’re my best friend. We all know it’s a sham, and really I don’t need them to care as long as they can hear me out and repeat corporate’s policy on whatever I asked, but it makes the people with money happy and they wouldn’t have it any other way, so we all keep pretending.

Quantum mechanics presents the most meaningful challenge to determinism because unlike chaos theory it asserts that reality really is indeterminate. Physicists have been wrestling with this problem since quantum mechanics was formulated. Even Einstein tried to prove quantum indeterminacy was false, but he shrank from the implications of his own solutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory

Spoiler: there’s no strong evidence for most hidden variable theories. There has been a revival of interest in some deterministic re-interpretations of quantum mechanics over the last few years (recommend Lee Smolin, he has a book and some talks on Youtube re this discussion), but right now, the prevailing theory is that reality really is just fundamentally indeterminate. Hey, I hate it, makes my skin crawl, but that’s most likely the way it is based on the science.

EDIT – I’m not a strong advocate for free will in the abstract, but I do think the basic worldview underpinning certain forms of hard determinism has been superseded by a non-deterministic view in physics.

EDIT – for greater precision/clarity

I have nothing to say except this is very cool and I’m keeping an eye on it! Thanks for sharing!

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Like any new format it’s going to take time for everybody’s software to support it, that’s all.

Oh, I know. But see how downplaying serious threats to civilization plays out. The IPCC 2007 report screwed the climate movement during likely its most critical period (earlier action is always better, but the late 2000’s-2010’s were sort of our last window for avoiding the really awful stuff, so in a way that was sort of the most important time to be ringing the alarm imho – at this point, we just get to respond to the out of control emergency that’s now starting to play out) because everybody could officially point to it and say “look? see? we’re fine! it’s fine! shut up!”

Climate denialism that merely comes from a CYA/institutional politics angle is still climate denialism.

There’s a speed standard in the USA and it mandates 25 down and 3 up? Could someone tell my ISP?

Thanks for clarifying, but I mean, that hardly seems any better. Why does it matter if the temps “only” got too hot for life in the river and they reduced output to avoid environmental damage? Do you mean to imply stripping that environmental regulation and letting them kill off life in the river with overheated wastewater would be an acceptable tradeoff if temperatures got too hot for too long?

Yeah, but since there are no moving parts and no emissions, you can site solar panels in places you could never site a nuclear power plant. You can even put them on farms, which is actually of interest to farmers now since climate change means many farms are dealing with excess heat stress and water retention issues in their soil. Revenue-generating shade devices that protect their yields are of interest to farmers. There are a million ways you can creatively use wind and solar technologies because they’re not just inherently extremely harmful and dangerous.

Cf. agrisolar.

Go ahead and put a nuclear power plant anywhere and continue to use that land for anything else. Or cover a city’s rooftops in nuclear reactors. Go right ahead, I’m sure nobody will have anything to say about that.

Your argument sounds great as long as we forget literally all of the specific characteristics of all of these technologies that differentiate them other than power output. Only thinking about power output is why we’re dealing with a 10-dimensional stack of environmental problems only the largest of which is climate change.

EDIT Made some tweaks after posting sorry if you were replying.

Current favored theory about his Twitter takeover is that he was just fucking around with the stock price, as he is wont to do (this is the guy that was forced to step down as the head of Tesla because he manipulated the stock price as a joke), and the Twitter board and SEC called his bluff. He’s been backed into a corner and is now trying to drag it to bankruptcy so he can get out of the mess he made.

There are US states where insurance companies are refusing to offer new home insurance plans and are dropping customers who have spent six figures and more making their homes more resilient to the new climate environment.

If you want to slightly recast that, there are now US states where it’s not economically viable to extend basic services that are generally considered necessary to live in an area.

Yeah, but the only way you could weaponize a solar panel is to drop it on someone. You can’t just misconfigure a solar array and render the entire area unlivable.

Like, what part about “if this power plant falls into the wrong hands it could be turned into a weapon of mass destruction” sounds even remotely acceptable as a trade-off when cheaper and vastly safer alternative techs are available?

I think we need to accept that we don’t have the technology to sustainably deliver as much energy as the capitalist economic system now demands and will demand in the future. We are, in fact, going to have to figure out an economic system that can meet our needs without ever-spiraling energy requirements.

I read the Fourth IPCC Assessment in 2007 and was like “wow, they have to know they’re being too conservative with their estimates”

Basically, if anyone had looked at the IPCC reports that had been produced even before 2010, it was obvious how much airbrushing and wishful thinking was going on to make it look like everything was fine. But instead of looking at the reports overall, people just wanted to read the comforting, obviously wrong even then conclusions at the very end.

If you really looked at the level of uncertainty involved in the projections, and thought about it honestly, anyone could have have realized long before 2010 that, at level best, world “leaders” were literally gambling with the future of this entire global civilization.

Yes, but in the US, everything has to be really shitty and backwards for no reason, so banks don’t have functional apps to quickly move money around. You can do ACH transfers, which work, but are only designed to clear within a couple days, not minutes.