Most notably Kim Kardashian, Kanye Wests’ ex wife

This is a non-trivial problem. The best thing for the environment is for all of us to stop buying so much shit we don’t need, but that would require a dramatic shift in how society works and the cultural values of pretty much everyone. Cookies coming in metal tins again would be way worse for the environment than plastic, but you also have to remember that when cookies came in metal tins, they were luxury items people would buy for holidays and special occasions. The only way to meaningfully improve things for the environment in terms of packaging is for all of us to buy less pre-packaged food in general.

Expanding access to goods is both good and bad, and plastic containers are a big part of that process. I think it’s completely unrealistic to replace all single-use plastics with non-plastic alternatives, and I think that efforts to do so have largely backfired in unexpected ways. This problem is best solved by reducing the amount of useless shit we buy but in the meantime I think biodegradable polymers are a good bridge technology. We actually already know about a lot of biodegradable polymers because the earliest polymers were based on biopolymers such as cellulose, resin, and rubber, and these have remained commercially important enough to maintain a high degree of knowledge of their chemistries.

Another problem, of course, is that most people don’t actually want truly biodegradable polymers. You don’t want a ketchup bottle that starts breaking down while you’re still using it or impacts the taste of the ketchup, but you also don’t want to buy it in a thick, non-squeezable glass bottle. So from an engineering perspective we have to devise plastics that are biodegradable, but only when we want them to be. There are a lot of advancements in this field, but it’s still not enough on its own to fix things. This issue also applies to paper, since almost all “paper” packaging products also include polymers as sealants to improve performance precisely because paper has all the same issues without it.

Everyone does that all the time though. I can’t remember the last time I bought something online that wasn’t supposedly either the last one in stock or one of like 5 left. It’s obviously bullshit and everyone is doing it.

Wikipedia articles are already quite simplified down overviews for most topics. I really don’t like the direction of the world where people are reading summaries of summaries and mistaking that for knowledge. The only time I have ever found AI summaries useful is for complex legal documents and low-importance articles where it is clear the author’s main goal was SEO rather than concise and clear information transfer.

AI is way older than the public release of ChatGPT. GPT-1, OpenAI’s first version of what would become ChatGPT, was released in 2018, for example, and OpenAI itself was founded in 2015, DeepMind was founded 2010, and IBM Watson competed on Jeopardy! in 2011. Furthermore, Alan Turing wrote about a lot of the ideas that are now being used in AI research in the 1940s, fuzzy logic and natural language processing were developed in the 1960s, and so on. This stuff didn’t come out of nowhere, you just didn’t know about it before ChatGPT.

Sounds like someone is still in high school lmao

Calculus. That is the first thing that comes to mind.

Idk. I’ve been reading about Bitcoin since the very beginning and while I don’t think it’s necessarily a “scam” the whole project was based on a flawed hyper-libertarian economic theory that inflationary currency is inherently evil and that the ideal currency has a fixed quantity, requires effort to produce, and becomes rarer over time. From that standpoint, I feel like Bitcoin has failed in its original mission. You simply cannot use it as a day to day currency and everyone is just using it to gamble essentially. I do agree that if crypto had been an outright scam from the beginning, Satoshi would have rugpulled already, though.

“Researchers” did a thing I did the first day I was actually able to ChatGPT and came to a conclusion that is in the disclaimers on the ChatGPT website. Can I get paid to do this kind of “research?” If you’ve even read a cursory article about how LLMs work you’d know that asking them what their reasoning is for anything doesn’t work because the answer would just always be an explanation of how LLMs work generally.

Kagi seems kind of expensive. $5 a month is pretty high compared to the costs of other subscriptions and that doesn’t even get you unlimited searches. I am definitely interested in this idea but I can’t see the value being there at the prices offered.

These have been a thing for a while but it wasn’t an LLM it was a video analyzer. I did exactly one interview like that 5 years ago and gave up halfway through the second video they wanted me to send in because the job sucked ass anyway in a shitty part of the country and I realized I was going to be miserable working there even if I got the job degrading myself like that. I ask terrified of getting laid off and having to enter the job market right now and deal with all these new ways companies are coming up with to degrade potential hires and waste their time

I don’t understand why some people are so obsessed with this and why they make comments like this. Like what’s the point? To be smug and act like you’re better because you know that it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid used in Jonestown? Do you think it’s actually a public service? Do you have some vested interest in Kool-Aid and feel the need to defend their good name? Let me let you in on a little secret- most people know it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid but was a competitor’s product. However, it doesn’t fucking matter because that’s not the saying. If you say “Oh Jim isn’t using toothpaste because he drank the flavor aid and thinks fluoride is government mind control” the person you’re talking to will just look at you weird. It’s like getting pissed off at someone saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” by saying “uhuh well actshually the birds have the same monetary value regardless of whether they are located in a bush or in someone’s hand I am very smart”

I’m waiting for the day we get the Black Mirror technology where the ad stops playing when you look away and doesn’t start again until you look back at it, forcing you to watch the entire ad all the way through

People in 2025 don’t really do ‘super advanced technology’. Like they’ve got super powerful handheld computers on them at all times and all of human knowledge accessible at all times and planes and shit, but they don’t treat it like high-tech stuff, they treat it like we treat carriages and books.

This was super common in the 1960s and 70s when hippies where the ones writing sci fi and the thought was that technological advancement would also come along with spiritual advancement to the point of supernatural powers. Star Wars, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many others freely blend the supernatural with the technological. Sure it’s not D&D magic with fireballs and shit but it’s still magic. Further, if you want to look at a modern IP with this vibe look at World of Warcraft, where there are aliens from space with spaceships and shit with one of the most stereotypical fantasy settings you can imagine.

I’m Western esotericism, names have power beyond simply being signifiers for the thing they represent- they embody some part of the thing they represent. The word “fire” contains some intrinsic “fire-ness” but not the whole picture. After all, everyone has different names for the same thing. It is thought that everything has a “true name” that perfectly encapsulates all things about it in their entirety, and this true name could be found by intense study, meditation, or etymology. The Bible pays a lot of attention to names in this way. Adam, the first man, names all the animals. Genesis pays a lot of attention to the names of places, and a lot of stories in Genesis are essentially folk etymologies of locations. God’s own name is of special importance, and its meaning was revealed to Moses by the Burning Bush. Even today Jews believe that even saying God’s name is powerful and dangerous and that only the High Priest would be allowed to say it once every year during Yom Kippur. Jewish folklore says that even this name is merely a part of God’s true name, and that Moses pronounced a longer more complete form of The Name to part the Red Sea, and some systems hold that there are even longer and even more complete forms that have been known to rabbis in the past.

Yes but you, like everyone I seem to talk to these days, is under the false impression that Trump isn’t a complete idiot who literally thinks tariffs are the solution to all problems. It’s more comforting to think there’s some massive conspiracy by Russia or that it’s a ploy to make money off the stock market, but I truly believe that Trump actually thinks tariffs will magically fix the economy and his reactions to the backlash are legitimate shock that so many people and the markets don’t agree. Yes Russia does stand to gain from this, but they don’t need to pull the strings when the guy in charge is innovating economic policy so stupid that a smart person would have trouble even imagining it.

Trump decisions make more sense when you realize he is actually stupid as fuck and there’s no hidden chess moves or anyone pulling the strings from the shadows. There is nobody at the wheel who is actually competent even if they’re evil. This is all just the whims of a complete moron who is probably also going a bit senile as well.