u/Dreadsin

The figure I heard is 0.5% of the soldiers that were in the army to overthrow tenochtitlan were Spanish. I heard the other locals in the area really didn’t like the Aztecs because they were imperialist

I specifically heard one video that said the locals didn’t really view the Spanish as a threat, so much as an ally they could enlist against the Aztecs. I also heard many paintings in Mexico City that depict Cortez aren’t actually as propagandist as they look; it’s from the perspective of the non-Aztec groups that were celebrating the fall of the Aztecs and by extension cenebrating the Spanish (I’d imagine before things went wrong??)

I’ve seen this news everywhere and everyone seems to be treating it extremely seriously, but I have a lot of doubts

These AI people keep saying things that sound terrifying on a surface level, but if you try to dig in for any details, they go quiet. “In 5 years, it will destroy humanity!”, bruh fable 5 can barely ship a feature that’s performant and doesn’t have bugs in an enterprise codebase

To me, this is a bit like if in 1999 people were saying “if the internet keeps progressing like this, we’re all gonna be enslaved in the matrix by 2005 😟”. It would be a strange, fringe opinion that would get you laughed out of most serious conversations

But if I say my chatbot that hallucinates like half the time is gonna take over the entire world in 5 years? Totally normal! Yes, the same AI that sourced the onion as real news just needs some screws tightened, then it will be ready to take over the world and destroy all humans! 😒

And istg, any time you start asking questions, these boosters start getting really cagey. They don’t like when you move the conversation away from vibes. Why is it dangerous? Wasn’t fable advertised as dangerous too? What specific threat is being posed? Why is an ostensibly consumer facing business developing something that has the capability to decimate humanity, exactly? For what purpose?

And one episode of the show brought it up: ask them to talk about any of this without bringing up “BuT In THe FutUReee…” and they totally shut down

Also, why are people believing this one researcher exactly? Reminds me of that twitch streamer pirate games where he would constantly hype that he “worked at blizzard” then he’d leverage that to gain an audience and then leverage that to get marketing and funding for his game. He mostly worked in QA, but sold himself as if he was the lead developer or something. How do you know this guy isn’t doing something like that? I need facts, not exceedingly vague platitudes

I absolutely hated this movie and I started to think about why and it was pretty easy

Jacob Elordis character is constantly wrong. About everything. ALL the time. The central idea his character presents is “what if a better world is out there? One where people trust each other?”. Josh brolins character is his foil: “this is the best we got, and it’s better than what a lot of people got, so we gotta defend it”

Josh Brolins character seems extreme at first, almost paranoid, but he’s basically always right even on big gambles. He takes the reaper threat extremely seriously, and survives something just about no one else would have. If that guy was on my team, I would never distrust him ever again

Then we have this very odd “meet in the middle” for the final act. Jacob Elordi comes back and Josh Brolin has 4 coffee mugs, symbolizing trust. What??? The movie set up so heavily that he doesn’t trust others and that Jacob elordi is too trusting. That’s so out of character and thematically inconsistent, made even worse because the last scene was him killing all those reapers. We also know more reapers are out there cause Jacob Elordis character escaped from them

Sure, okay, whatever. Moving on. Grand Rapids obviously was… pretty much what you’d expect. I’m not sure if they expected this to be some sort of twist, but it just felt so obvious that was gonna happen. Resigned, they go to the Mennonites. It’s a pretty decent life. Then the girl finishes the movie by effectively saying “don’t go off looking for something better”

The theme here is so muddled to me. If Jacob Elordis character never looked for anything better, then they wouldn’t end up at the mennonites in the first place. Josh Brolins character says to avoid them. Also… it was way too convenient that they just said “oh btw Josh Brolins character, they don’t have the flu and won’t get it! The one thing you expressed concern about!”

I think the movie is trying to say “don’t look for paradise, just worry about good enough”, but… where is good enough?? What was Jacob elordi expecting to find at Grand Rapids? Fully functioning civilization? That’s a little far fetched. Is he expecting to find something slightly better where he can let his guard down? But he already knew about the mennonites… I really don’t understand where this movie stands. What are they trying to say?

Also I genuinely despise this one boomer genre where it’s the end of the world and everyone is suffering, but some group of survivors… honestly kind of have it pretty good compared to the rest of the world. Denver looked fucking destroyed, their airstrip had coffee. In Denver. Do you understand how insane that is?

Is the world horrific? Yeah. But most of the world is living closer to those 28 years later movies where they’re in danger every second, living without any threats in a small village is genuinely a pretty fucking good deal

Burned out at work so looking for some escapism tbh. The vibe id really like is about someone getting to actually enjoy their passion

I really like chef as a comfort watch. I specifically like the vibe of sort of “returning to first principles”

Kiki’s delivery service is one of my favorite movies. I just love how it presented passion as something that’s never truly gone

Common thread on the show is that AI is being sold at a loss right now and is totally unprofitable. I don’t need to go over that

So, why are they doing this if it loses money? To get people on their platform. Same Enshittification strategy as every other modern software project

They’re actually offering you great deals and enticing you to use it more so you’ll get hooked. With companies, they’re hoping that they’ll get so deeply embedded with the product, they’ll have a hard time transitioning. There’s tons of AI based products in software development that have now spread to infrastructure, so software has become reliant

Maybe from a purely academic standpoint, can AI improve? Yes. However, from a business standpoint (what actually matters from consumers), we’re probably in the absolute best time for AI

They’re gonna raise prices and it’s gonna hurt. Your tiny $20 or even $200 won’t be close to covering the actual cost of AI. You think those AI data centers are cheap? A single GPU costs like $45k and they have huge data centers full of them. This is gonna get expensive and it’s gonna happen fast

I’m just wondering if there’s any economic systems or ideas that differ radically from conventional knowledge, but still make sense in theory

To explain the idea better: in my own field of software, it’s not uncommon for one standard to be chosen over another, even though one may have some “objective” advantages. For example, x86 being chosen over RISC architecture. Both of these choices work, one just happened to be chosen and then we ran with that one. There are also many standards today that are competing and a winner will likely come soon

Is there anything like this in economics? Like are there economic ideas that are totally viable, but are a fundamental departure from our conventionally accepted ideas of economics?

Like in the 50s, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to work a normal job (like mechanic) while having a stay at home wife and kids in a house that he owns. They’d even have a car. Can you even imagine someone living like that today? I would think they’re covertly involved in organized crime or something

Now since women work, most households have two full time workers. Women have even been gaining a big foothold in college-educated fields, so not only are women working, they’re often working high skill jobs. Are we economically better off? No. Not at all. Now, your partner is working and you can’t afford a house! Seriously, you should have DOUBLE the purchasing power, but nope, you have less than a family in the 50s

Getting married and having kids was almost a given back in the 50s. Like, you’d have to mess up somehow to not get that. Nowadays, it’s high luxury. If you really want a kid, maybe you can adjust your budget so you can have… one. Our entire system relies on workers, but can’t support the very workers it depends on. The total birth rate per woman was like 3.6 per woman in 1950, now it’s 1.58 (and generally speaking, once it hits 1.5, it starts collapsing like in Korea or Chile)

Are we not producing enough? No, we’re producing incomparably more than in the 50s. More of us are working. We’re working longer hours. And things are WORSE. Like how do people not recognize that this system just sucks, and will continue to degrade and get worse over time?

EDIT: and in the 50s, we built a whole highways system across the united states. In my city (Boston), can’t even get the old commuter rail running right. We can’t get even the most basic infrastructure built nowadays. How long has that LA -> SF train been waiting to be built now???

And to what end? Just so some guy can have a lot of money. He’s not gonna spend it, he just likes to look at it in his account so he can feel innately superior to “normal” people. That’s what this is all in service of. Some insecure sad little man somewhere

I’m curious if anyone has met someone who avidly supports and evangelizes AI in real life. Part of me feels like the pushback online is… manufactured?

I’ve met people who tepidly supported AI, basically just “eh if it makes my life better then it’s fine”, a sort of luke warm response

I’ve met engineers who were kind of interested in it from a technical level, but were fully aware of its shortcomings. They were more interested in how it could be leveraged to improve their code. More often than not, I find it always ends up being something of a glorified MCP server and code search. Helpful, yes… but not world changing

I find that these engineers never trust AI output. It’s often used for things like code review, where you can read the comment and choose to ignore it. For generating code, it’s not actually useful outside of boilerplate, which was honestly never a problem even before AI

Also most of these engineers seem to go towards open source models like deepseek. Anything more powerful is unnecessary

But I’ve never met anyone who was avidly pro AI like you see on the internet. I’ve never seen anyone get “defensive” about people talking negatively about AI, the most you get is “idk I kinda like it but if you don’t that’s fine”

Frankly, Gen Z figured it out way faster than I did. I remember at one company I worked at, we had a hard deadline so they wanted us to work more. I thought I was being smart and cynical because I requested that, if we work harder now, then I get extra vacation time (was planning a trip to Brazil)

They agreed. Shortly after we hit the deadline, they fired the team. I messaged them asking about the comp time and they were like “that’s not on the books 😇”. Okay so I worked extra hard for literally no gain? I effectively just worked for free

So now when a company asks me to work overtime, it’s a no. Hard stop. What are they gonna do, fire me? Okay. I got fired working overtime, so who cares? Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. Good job companies, your short term play for slightly more profit has decreased all potential future output

The jobs I worked the hardest at just gave me more work to do then complained when it wasn’t done on time. Managers are never happy with you hitting targets or even exceeding them. They will, however, get furious if you make a single mistake, so it’s better just to lower workload to decrease mistake chances

When people talk about these software companies being “bloated”, it’s bad management. It’s not “too many engineers”. The engineers are completely unmotivated because they effectively have negative incentive to work. They’ll only be punished for work. Instead, these managers respond to office politics, so that’s a better way to approach these problems. Do nothing at work so nothing is your fault, schmooze the boss, and take credit for as much as you can

Now we got a whole generation coming into the workplace that has already internalized these messages and they don’t wanna do shit, unsurprisingly. Why would you? Working hard gets you nothing

I just don’t get how companies can present themselves as these strategically minded entities when they make these impulsive, short sighted decisions

I got Claude at my work and I’m surprised at how quickly it burns through tokens

When I hit my token limit for the month, then what? I don’t really have a problem going back to manually coding for some time, but it made me think: how is any of what they’re proposing supposed to work with token based billing? How can they “replace” engineers?

Suppose they did fire the skilled workers and programmers and replaced them with AI. The first thing that obviously becomes a problem is support engineers. At these companies, there’s generally an “on call” engineer who’s responsible for responding to any critical bugs in prod or customer problems. You must respond within some time window. These are the people who fix apps when they go down. Just seems irresponsible to let AI into that role. Since it’s kind of a 24/7 job, you’d have to have AI running on a loop just burning tokens. Also, Claude itself can be down, if that intersects with when your app is down, you’re in big trouble

Then the next thing that would become obvious is how opaque the billing is. It’s unclear how much tokens an AI will use upfront. For example, I did a code review on a relatively small pull request and it used like, millions of tokens in a single go. This wasn’t even adding code. This was simply reviewing handwritten code. Why would a company choose a variable cost over a static one? Engineers are usually paid salary by the year. That’s way easier to account for

And what’s worse for companies is that companies like Claude, OpenAI, etc are in charge of pricing. If they replace their employees with AI, then the company can change prices whenever they want. It would be effectively like if all of your employees were unionized and demanded higher pay or they all leave the job. Isn’t that supposed to be a company’s worst nightmare? And yet they’re just walking into it because they might save a little bit of money now. So shortsighted

I usually mean people who do costume makeup or elaborate gothic makeup

Some are just goth girls showing off cool makeup. Some are cosplays showing makeup for a specific character. Some are really over the top costume-like designs, like uncanny valley makeup. I saw one today that was backrooms makeup, where they tried to make it look like they were those still-lifes in the backrooms movie

Maybe it’s dumb and insecure, but I’m 34M so I’m always afraid it’s gonna be seen as a bit odd to like this kind of content. I’m afraid people will think I’m weird in some way, or judge me. How? I’m not really sure tbh, that’s why I’m asking. I just feel like I shouldn’t like it

YES I KNOW, “just b urself”, “like what you like”, I like it no matter what, I just don’t want a bad digital footprint

Two movies come to mind: Rio, and la la land

Rio de Janeiro is probably my favorite city in the world and I just love how Rio presents it. Every time I watch it, I wanna book a vacation and go back.

Then on the complete other side: I really don’t like Los Angeles. However, whenever I watch la la land, I feel like it does have some very specific magic

I tend to be drawn towards more Latin American cultures, so bonus points if it’s that

This is such an insidious loaded statement

First of all, the terminology of “artificial intelligence” does a lot of lifting here. It can be parsed as “computers will keep getting more intelligent and capable”. LLMs are not “intelligent”, they’re statistical models. If they get better at being a statistical model, they will be better at predicting a “conventional” response or perhaps better at inferring more information from an input prompt. They will not suddenly develop sentient thought. If you believe that, then you believe that you are literally just repeating things you heard and have no thoughts of your own >!which might actually be true for AI bros now that I think of it!< >!🤔!<

Once you know the underlying tech of AI, they are very easy to trick. There’s whole tiktok accounts of people just showing how ridiculous, absurd, and inaccurate AI responses can be. There’s standard question sets for LLMs that are used to test its reasoning skills. Classic example is taking the riddle “there is a boat full of people, but not a single person on board, how is this possible?” and modifying it. The conventional answer is “everyone is married”, but if you remove the word “single” (which fundamentally changes the riddle), a lot of AI will still answer “everyone is married”. (for the love of god I hope no AI bros comment and be like “nuh uh! nuh uh! not anymore!” missing the forest for the trees)

“but chain of thought, agents, etc etc!!”, but as I just mentioned, it predicts next tokens. That means that it really can’t be totally trusted for its output. You need a human in on the loop to supervise it, and that human needs the training and skill to validate the output. If the central premise is to automate work, then you’re not really saving anything. “Ok, but it can replace juniors”, yeah, and then we won’t have any seniors in 10 years

“Okay but they aren’t limited to LLMs! They could come up with a new technology!”, yeah, and we could invent portals in 10 years and put every car company out of business. What’s your point? I don’t care what could theoretically potentially maybe happen in some vague nebulous future. We are talking about science fiction when we do that, not technology

“B-b-but sam altman said—“ yeah he is selling the AI. Ignore him. He’s also a known grifter. Don’t get scammed.

Also, it is not guaranteed to get better! I don’t get why people assume everything has to improve over time. The basic shape of a bike hasn’t changed in decades. How can you improve a bike? It’s effectively already fully optimized

We also have to address the elephant in the room of training data. They consumed the entire internet, pirated insane amounts of content, and are currently scanning obscure old books. They are reaching a limit here. It’s basically been trained on the totality of human knowledge. I don’t see how it’s not gonna plateau

None of this even matters if artificial intelligence is simply prohibitively expensive to use or train. You can hire a very competent software engineer for the static cost of $200k/year. Tokens could vary wildly in cost, often exceeding the cost of a software engineer. You’re at the mercy of the companies selling tokens, who would love nothing more than your buy in to your platform so they can enshittify. They can raise the prices any time. Sure, you can set a token limit, but what happens when you hit that? Just… “guess we’re out of business until the end of the month 🤷🏼‍♀️”?

I really don’t understand why people say this. Like what is their logic?

My doctor said 6 weeks to recover from a microfracture. My PT said I don’t have to use both crutches. Go to doctor and they’re like “what are you doing??? Use both crutches”

So, I went back to both crutches, no big deal. I occasionally use one crutch (for walking up the stairs, maybe carrying something a short distance). For about a day, I had to operate on one crutch because one of them broke and I had to order a new pair

I have absolutely no idea what my flexibility, stiffness, and balance is like because I’ve been on at least one crutch for the full 6 weeks. I have occasional cracks on the inner part of my operative hip, but with no pain

I’m just wondering if there’s some possibility I messed things up for that short time where I wasn’t using two crutches. Is there any way to know without going to the doctor about it?

With products, everything ends up being profitmaxxed to the point where it’s exhausting

I rented a car on a car rental platform and they charged me for “finding dog hairs in the car” and concluding a dog was in the car. Nope, I just visited a family with a dog that sheds a lot, no dog in the car, is that against the rules??? Then I gotta fight with customer service about it. The person who was renting out the car seemed to be the most deeply unpleasant person I’ve ever met, tbh I’d rather deal with a soulless corporation than one of these people

Same with Airbnb. It’s not even worth going over cause everyone knows. Used to be “rent a cheap room” now it’s all these stupidly expensive apartments with all kinds of dumb rules. You know the owners are just squeezing as much as they can. How tf are you more greedy than a multi national conglomerate?? Cmon. Never had anything close to this when getting a hotel

Etsy is probably the worst one. I want to support artists not business hustlers, no I don’t want your mass produced product or id go to Amazon or something. Etsy should be for artists. I explicitly do not want profit seeking

And then it extends to hobbies too. Pre 2020, anime conventions were so much better, full of actual nerds. Now you go and half the people think anything but your generic popular shonen is cringe?

Even with places, like vacation destinations, it’s happening. When I go on vacation, I like the feeling of experiencing a totally different place. Ive noticed more conventional destinations have gotten waaaay more… same-y. Gotta go out of your way to get a real experience. I used to love Amsterdam, now gotta go out to Utrecht to get the same vibe as it was before

It just feels like any time you find something good, it’s like a ticking time bomb before it becomes shitty. I’m sick of constantly needing to beat the crowd everywhere so I can experience it while it’s still good

Basically what I’ve heard is that they put out some cameras and tried playing different sounds for different animals. Regardless of the animal, all responded with most fear to hearing the sound of a group of humans. For example, deers were more afraid to hear humans than wolves

While it seems the plausible, it also seems kinda… idk like something simplified down for a TikTok?

Like you know when you see YouTube videos with drawings where they’ll say something, then they’ll switch out the drawing and say something different. It’s like animation but with like, 1 frame every 5 seconds

I know there’s a word for it but forgor 💀

What I’m hoping to accomplish is to be able to go to a farmers market, pick up a few things that are in season, and figure out how to make something good with it without a recipe

Currently my cooking skill is roughly at modifying existing recipes and some very rudimentary skills like making a pan sauce or a decent stock

My local area is Southern California, so I’m pretty sure I have a wide variety of options for local