THE ART OF THE DEAL

Askhistorians and other academic subreddits, along with specific fan communities. Lemmy is just too small to support a good community for a smaller video game, for example. That’s pretty much it though I was surprised at how little I missed reddit after switching

Bear in mind this is almost entirely caused by the stupidity of the American consumer. You can also lease cars like you’re describing, and you can also buy a used Honda Civic for under $20k that will last you forever and you can get loans on more reasonable terms. People just don’t do those because they see they can get a really nice car for an “affordable” monthly price and get stars in their eyes.

A lot of “local” news stations do this because they’re almost all owned by two companies- Sinclair and Nexstar. If you add “-Sinclair -Nexstar” to your search it may filter the duplicates out.

Nah it’s got all the classic AI tells. Look at Hank’s right hand with a weird psuedo-finger sticking out between his index finger and thumb, and Dale’s hands- one has 4 fingers and the other isn’t attached to an arm.

Reminder that basically impossible ≠ impossible. The Beirut explosion was a big bunch of ANFO going off.

Mining engineers calculate how the walls and paths need to be sloped, shored up, and shaped to prevent collapse. This channel on YouTube has a lot of good content about stuff like this, but this video is about hole collapses and how they’re prevented. Reminds me of the old engineering adage- “anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to just barely build a bridge.” Same goes for anything we do. You can do a lot by over-building and just accepting inefficiencies, but in a case like this you want to excavate as much of the ground as possible so you want the slopes to be as steep as possible. Anyone can dig a stable hole that’s like a pyramid where the slopes are very shallow, but engineers find exactly how steep you can safely get away with.

Nah this is how people I went to high school with write. For some people, writing is apparently kept in an entirely different part of their brain from normal speech and they can’t just write the way they talk, it’s just pure stream of consciousness.

At least in the US people routinely get predatory loans for cars with super long terms to make the monthly payment lower. A base model cybertruck is “only” like $70k so at 7.3% APR and a 7 year loan you can get that down to $900 a month, which is still a lot of money but some people make bad financial decisions of this level all the time, and I would imagine the people who would buy a cubertruck are more likely to be in this group than not.

We as a society completely ignored teen boys and especially what they were looking at online for over a decade and then we locked them all inside for a couple years during their most formative years while only giving them access to the Internet.

You forgot that he is also one of the most loyal to Trump. In this admin, loyalty is above all else. It doesn’t matter how incompetent you are as long as you’re loyal.

Except those people didn’t experience “sa” they experienced sexual assault and you’re not doing them any favors or showing them respect by hiding their traumatic experience around a stupid little acronym.

This is lemmy you don’t have to do dumb bullshit like say “sa” you can say “sexual assault” or “rape” and it won’t get censored. Actually saying what he did is important because the more layers of abstraction it’s hidden behind the less weight the accusations have. It’s like how saying that someone unalived someone else is not the same in terms of weight as saying someone murdered someone.

Yeah but who decides what sensitive content is? Is this going to make the entire platform look like shitty tik tok videos where everyone says “f*ck” and “unalive” like some insane dystopian world

Just another viewpoint on this- millions of dollars in electrical bills is also carbon in the air for every kWh wasted. Perhaps this should be a condemnation of LLMs and their insane power usage but if we’re stuck with that at least for now there’s no reason to pump more carbon in the air out of spite.

Pontius Pilates sounds like a much more fun guy who teaches a class at the YMCA

If you think Christianity is unique in this regard look towards Buddhism, specifically the Vajrayana branches (often associated with Tibet) and you’ll see even more gruesome imagery than any Christian symbolism. Buddhas drinking blood out of the skulls of their enemies, stomping on corpses, and having sex all at the same time, and even more shocking things. These"fearsome" or “wrathful” manifestation of Buddhist deities that display raw power and the trappings of demons to destroy said demons are relatively common. Religion is weird and powerful symbolism is often shocking.

I don’t know if anyone has pointed this out (I’m sure they have) but fundamentally I think it’s related to the cultural impact of the Garden of Eden story. God creates Man in His own image, and Man comes up short and disobeys God. Man creates Robot in his own image, and Robot surpasses man and disobeys him, completing the cultural cycle. Both stories are about human nature being flawed, with robot stories being about how the flawed human nature leads us to want to “become God” by creating life on our own, becoming our own Demiurge, creating a shadow of a shadow of the “Divine Image” which represents goodness and morality.

The QAA podcast recently had an episode on AI generated images and right wing movements and they said something that really stuck with me- AI “art” is so popular among right wingers and barely literate tech bros because it is truly art the way they see all art, images with only surface level literal meaning and no subtext, context, or anything actually thought provoking. The dumbest thing about this is that there are several Black Mirror episodes that are ultimately hopeful or value-neutral about the effects of technology on the future- San Bernardino and Striking Vipers come to mind. Then again, both of those are about how sexuality intersects with transhumanism, which right wingers generally see as bad things so maybe they see those as dystopian episodes as well.

Yeah I think people on Lemmy are delusional about how much people are willing to stick with Trump. Opinion polls are staying pretty high, close to 50% even after the tariff nonsense and Venezuelan concentration camps. Trump’s approval rating cannot go below 30% because roughly a third of the population are completely incapable of finding any fault in their God Trump. The fact that so many people who aren’t in this camp are still sticking by him is a sign of how corrupt and vile the American people are more than anything. It’s hard to continue to love my fellow Americans when they keep being so stupid.