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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • I’m not from the U.S., but why would people from the military get a discount? If you do that as a store, why not doctors and nurses too? Why stop there and why not include firefighters, government workers or teachers?

    And who compensates you as a business owner for these giveaways? If your store happens to be close to an army base, do you just accept the disadvantage of giving away part of your profit?

    It sounds pretty stupid. People should get paid enough to pay full price for their stuff. Especially by the government. Especially in a country that allocates an enormous part of their GDP to their military.


  • It takes people’s collective work and then requires those same people to pay to use it. It allows already mega wealthy companies to get even richer by selling people’s own creativity back to them.

    I also see a lot of privacy issues - the fact that let loose on a specific data set (like Facebook) it then knows anything about anyone. Even if I don’t use Facebook myself because I hate it - if someone would congratulate my spouse with the 10th birthday of our son Chris, A.I. now knows I have a son, born on this day in 2015, his name is Chris. That fact isn’t stored in a database where it’s easily erased. It’s part of a probability vector in an artificial brain, where it can’t be removed even if I request the source data to be deleted. This is actually what worries me more, for all the good AI can do, there is a lot more evil. If the Nazis would have this in 1940, there would be no resistance movement. It would be trivial to see who would be part of it and who would be their families and friends.


  • This. And all that “convenience” makes the world uglier and less human. Where we used to take a taxi on holiday and have a chat with the driver about his life and his family, and get a few tips on where to eat where the locals eat, we can now get robotaxied somewhere without any human interaction at all. And we get doctored made up images of destinations that don’t exist, by people that look like manga versions of themselves. We truly live in the cheapest version of the world nowadays.




  • One example he gives is Facebook - it allows you to keep track of events you might like to go to, which seems convenient, but then it will show you hundreds of other events you might want to go to, much more than a single person can visit.

    Another example is food delivery - in the US there was even one company advertising with the fact that when you order food, you can do so without having to interact with anyone. While that might be convenient, a lot of neighborhoods lose cohesion, because people stop meeting each other at the local takeout or have a small interaction with the people behind the counter there. The gist of it is, that it’s okay for some things to be a little less convenient, because there is always a cost involved.

    What he promotes is to accept that you can’t get everything done. You have limited time, and sometimes you’ll have to accept that the laundry might pile up while you are working on your book/application/… whatever.

    It also puts in perspective what you are actually working for - he quotes the parable of the businessman and the Greek fisherman to illustrate.











  • Before people started measuring time, a day was a day. People worked when they felt like it and stopped before it got dark.

    When we started quantifying time, it didn’t take long before time suddenly became a commodity. All of a sudden bosses would pay by the “hour”, and no longer by what they got in return.

    Then, they started regarding the hours that they paid for as “theirs”, demanding workers to keep breaks short or peeing in bottles.

    /Rant