I don’t have any solutions i’m sorry.

Aparently half the voting populace is hell bent on their own destruction.

Haah. Never thought about it but this is very true.

That’s what I thought.

The core tenets of far right in the UK and Germany just wouldn’t seem that relevant to a wealthy person. It’s not like he’s going to interact with migrants in any way.

What is it about the right that benefits him though? Small government and reduced regulation?

I genuinely would like to know…

Does he actually believe in these ideologies, or do they just happen to align with his interests presently?

I suspect it’s the latter.

Even pizza shops with their own drivers. I’d usually prefer to go get it myself so it’s as fresh as possible.

Even in places with good infrastructure and generally non-murderous drivers it still gets very sketchy.

The majority of drivers just havent ridden a bike since they were 3, and just don’t understand that you’re part of the traffic, as though you can magically just slip around between all the cars.

Obviously there are exceptions but the vast majority of moderators are fief lords stroking their own self worth.

It’s not really surprising when you think about the time they contribute, and the very few potential motivators. I think most people would enjoy moderating a community they’re passionate about but most people lack the motivation required to do it consistently.

all the power is already in the hands of the users.

but the users are being manipulated. The vast majority will never look at the mod log and never realise that the comments they’re seeing have been editorialised.

Woah, I think you just said the quiet part out loud.

Can I add fashion to this?

100% willing to admit I’m the weird one here, or maybe I’m just old enough now, but holy cow some trends are just daft and make people look like absolute idiots.

I live in a regional / remote area where fashion tends to take several years to arrive… presently all the studly men are wearing their socks pulled up? It’s just silly.

… and don’t get me started on sunglasses and frames. IDK how to describe the current trend… it’s like a huge single piece of plastic instead of 2 discrete lenses.

I think there’s a number of different aspects to this that could put it in context.

Yes there are a few obscenely wealthy people, like a dozen in the world, for whom it’s just a game and pretty meaningless. For the remaining merely wealthy people:

Your means increase as you move through life and your responsibilities, commitments, and tastes also increase. I might earn 6 times what I did when I was 20, but now I’m supporting a family et cetera. This same dynamic effects wealthy people in a similar but different way. People tend to live beyond their means. Someone making several million a year might end up with a few holiday homes, a mistress or something, a bunch of truly expensive hobbies (like… a horse stud farm or something). They might realise they’re “wealthy” but unless they earn a bunch more money they won’t be able to race their horse in qatar or whatever thing they desperately need to do to validate themselves.

Another aspect I’ve heard of, is that wealthy people are often anxious of losing everything. If you have a business that earns millions, it’s sensible to worry that the market might change and suddenly it’s worthless. This is the reality for the majority of businesses that are not publicly traded. As in, great grandpa formed a company that made squillions of dollars selling woollen socks during the first and second world war, but by the 80s it was really just ticking over paying wages and by the 90s it was insolvent. It’s natural to want to consolidate your position by buying some other company that makes hats or whatever.

The vast majority of people only accumulate enough wealth for their own lives. Once you’ve reached that point where you really couldn’t reasonably spend the wealth you’ve accumulated, then you’ve probably already switched over to accumulating wealth for your progeny. Lasting generational wealth is more or less impossible unless you own a country or something because your progeny increases exponentially, and their lavish tastes increase, and their ability to make sensible financial choices decreases.

Finally, you don’t end up with more money than you could ever spend by being satisfied with however much money.

just to take some piece of land

That’s not really what wars are about though. It’s usually some internal power struggle.

There’s actually a lot of people for whom this type of thinking is ingrained.

I live a somewhat isolated region in Australia and the sea food here is plentiful. We also rigidly apply very strict laws about the type, size, and number of fish you can kill.

I’ve seen first hand the impact over-fishing can have, with some areas now completely devoid of varieties which were prevalent a few decades ago.

It just doesn’t compute to people who are not from this area. They see the laws as a draconian revenue raising measure. There’s no concept that just a few people can decimate a population.

Yeah this is me.

I was reading these comments feeling as though I must be very odd until I got to yours.

Debian comes with firefox ESR which I think is a good choice because it “just works”, but it’s also no one’s “preferred” browser. I tend to use both LibreWolf and ungoogled-chromium all day every day.

I do use the terminal every day. Years ago I used oh-my-zsh for a while but I think eventually I just kind of didn’t bother to install it.

For file manager and video player et cetera, I’ve always found the defaults to be good choices.

Yeah, still not convinced.

I work in a field which is not dissimilar. Teaching customers to email you their requirements so your LLM can have a go at filling out the form just seems ludicrous to me.

Additionally, the models you’re using require stupid amounts of power to produce so that you can run them on low power machines.

Anyhow, neither of us is going to change our minds without actual data which neither of us have. Who knows, a decade from now I might be forwarding client emails to an LLM so it can fill out a form for me, at which time I’ll know I was wrong.

If I’m brutally honest, I don’t find these use cases very compelling.

Separate fields for addresses could be easily solved without an LLM. The only reason there isn’t already a common solution is that it just isn’t that much of a problem.

Data ingestion from email will never be as efficient and accurate as simply having a customer fill out a form directly.

These things might make someone mildly more efficient at their job, but given the resources required for LLMs is it really worth it?

I suspect that this is “grumpy old man” type thinking, but my concern is the loss of fundamental skills.

As an example, like many other people I’ve spent the last few decades developing written communication skills, emailing clients regarding complex topics. Communication requires not only an understanding of the subject, but an understanding of the recipient’s circumstances, and the likelihood of the thoughts and actions that may arise as a result.

Over the last year or so I’ve noticed my assistants using LLMs to draft emails with deleterious results. This use in many cases reduces my thinking feeling experienced and trained assistant to an automaton regurgitating words from publicly available references. The usual response to this concern is that my assistants are using the tool incorrectly, which is certainly the case, but my argument is that the use of the tool precludes the expenditure of the requisite time and effort to really learn.

Perhaps this is a kind of circular argument, like why do kids need to learn handwriting when nothing needs to be handwritten.

It does seem as though we’re on a trajectory towards stupider professional services though, where my bot emails your bot who replies and after n iterations maybe they’ve figured it out.

I think there’s specific industrial problems for which AI is indeed transformative.

Just one example that I’m aware of is the AI-accelerated nazca lines survey that revealed many more geoglyphs that we were not previously aware of.

However, this type of use case just isn’t relevant to most people who’s reliance on LLMs is “write an email to a client saying xyz” or “summarise this email that someone sent to me”.

In Australia there’s a phrase “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.

We have a two party system, one more progressive and one more conservative.

My parents are retired. They’re not wealthy and are living a meager existence on a government pension. They will always vote conservative, despite their best bet at better public services and social security on offer from the progressive party.

The reason is, they feel like they ought to be wealthy or at least they want to act like they’re wealthy. They feel as though they are more closely aligned with the views of wealthy people than they are with the views of poor people. They feel as though they belong to a class of wealthy people, it’s just that through a cruel twist of fate they don’t have any money.

There’s also the moral / ethical perspective that is ultimately meaningless but resonates with a lot of voters. For example, banning naughty books from schools. Obviously kids will access much naughtier content in other ways, but “protecting the kids from gays” is very communicable to low information voters.

It seems bizarre to me that the prevailing assumption is that Musk’s interests align with those of the working class.

As in, why TF would anyone who is not a billionaire want a billionaire to restructure government?