@sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

sj_zero

@sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

smallcircles, to OpenAI
@smallcircles@social.coop avatar

OMG the thugs at decided they better steal Scarlett Johannson's voice after she declined a contract to get voiced by her.

Two days before launch of she was approached again by Sam Altman, Head of Crooks. And refused again.

To then find her overly uplifting, encouraging, positive sounding voice creating the uncanny valley in these demo's.

When approaching OpenAI by her legal councilors the voice was suddenly pulled.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421225

sj_zero,

I believe I posted something similar to this before:

Big tech playlist:

  1. enter deregulated space
  2. abuse deregulated space
  3. lobby for regulation in deregulated space
  4. own the regulated space (with regulations they helped write) forever.
thor, to random
@thor@berserker.town avatar

Still looking for that elusive job that I could realistically get...

  1. With prior experience only as a software developer, and briefly as a high school CS tutor.

  2. Having been largely unemployed for the past 4 years.

  3. Where talking to an actual human as you're doing the work is okay.

  4. As a middle-aged guy who isn't particularly fit or charismatic.

sj_zero,

One of the chapters in the Graysonian Ethic is "failure is an option". It talks about a time in my life where I thought because I was smart (and everyone told me I was smart so I didn't realize how retarded I actually am) everything would come easy, and people said you couldn't possibly fail in high school because it's designed to push idiots through, so I didnt barely even show up. Surprise surprise I flunked out of school and learned that failure is in fact an option, and it sucks. I spent a huge amount of effort just not having to graduate a year late.

So that's a danger of being called high IQ, you think you're too good for the work and destined to succeed.

Of course, there's also the fact that a PhD may not make as much as someone with a common skilled trade. They may be socially higher on the prestige ladder, but prestige doesn't pay your mortgage.

ryan, to random
@ryan@bemrose.social avatar

Democracy is the political expression of mob rule, in which the majority group can impose its will with impunity on minority groups.

Progressives - the people whose ideology is based on lifting up minorities above all others - are coincidentally also the ones who shout the loudest about "preserving our democracy". The cognitive dissonance from this is only possible to reconcile if you either lack the ability to think about it rationally, or you have no integrity to get in the way of your double-standard.

sj_zero,

I think there's a place for Democratic representation. One of the benefits of it is that you don't need to have a bloody war every time the king or one of his sons turns out to be a knob. You just wait a few years and everyone goes yeah that guy sucked and votes for someone else.

I mean really, both monarchy and voting for a representative involve a bunch of people getting together to decide who's going to be the next king, it's just that in one case it's a war contest and then another case it's a popularity contest...

The one upside of not having regular war contests is war actually sucks a lot and only really shows who's better at killing the enemy. Of course the downsides are that the cities end up crowded with all the wannabe elites because living in capital cities isn't so dangerous as it might be otherwise.

The upside of making it a popularity contest is that you never have anyone that's that unpopular for that long. The downside making it popularity contest is that there's absolutely no reason to believe that popularity even remotely relates to any practical skill.

To give the devil his due, the ability to wage war is much closer to a practical skill required in statecraft, and constantly infighting has the benefit of giving the elite classes something to go kill themselves in, helping to keep it from getting to oversized. Also, if you go back to Rome, the Roman empire was constantly being overthrown by people from within its own military because those people were at least competent in one thing. It was actually once an era of relative peace arrived that the caliber of people overthrowing the Roman emperor just weren't high enough to effectively rule...

sj_zero,

"The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims to do"

sj_zero, to random

https://youtu.be/q8MnNeEPVSY

Hard times ahead for a lot of people in Canada.

Much of Canada is set up so you can't just hand the keys back to the bank, so if you're underwater on your mortgage, you still have that mortgage. It's called a recourse loan vs. A non recourse loan. The bank has recourse to go after assets other than the home itself to be made whole.

Roughly 92% of mortgages have interest terms of 5 years or less. Typically the highest interest term that's practical is 10 years, after that you get to interest rates close to 10% so virtually nobody would have gone with those.

Interest rates started to rise around late 2021/early 2022, so a lot of people who took out massive mortgages (the average house price at the peak was $850,000 nationwide) at rates as low as less than 1%(!!!), and they'll reset to 6%, meaning that many mortgages will be resetting at many times the interest they had before.

Some mortgages are "insured", but you have to be careful because that doesn't mean the people are insured, it means the banks are insured. The people are still on the line for the mortgage they're supposed to pay (and if many mortgages fail, the taxpayer is on the line for it). Moreover, many of the most dangerous mortgages for the million dollar homes in Toronto or the 2 million dollar homes in Vancouver are not insured so that could be a major hit to the banking system if there aren't any more buyers and prices collapse because nobody can afford million dollar mortgages at 6%.

Meanwhile people need to demand insane salaries to be able to afford rent on a million dollar home, and often people are paying insane rents for horrible living conditions such as the person in the video trying to rent out underneath a bed for 900/mo.

Hard times ahead for a lot of people who made a lot of decisions everyone could have told them were stupid at the time but because the line was going up didn't look stupid for a while.

strypey, to random

@AccordionBruce
> North America is so damn big

Bigger than China, where you can get almost anywhere by train, many of them by electric fast train or sleeper train?

@Br3nda @tbaldauf

sj_zero,

China is a poor example since to be comparable you'd need approximately 8 billion people on the American continent...

strypey, to random

"I think the core, critical sin was choosing the advertising model to begin with. Brand advertising is not like direct advertisement, which is more programmatic. It requires something like a Disney to essentially give you a favor, because the only players that matter to them are Google and Facebook. Snapchat, Twitter, everything else did not matter. And these are ads that are essentially throwaway for them. But we made that choice in order to go public."

,

https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana

sj_zero,

One big thing is that everyone is focused on AI and LLMs as if they're doing something novel, but the reality is that there were already bad actors getting their fingers into sites like these. If you're trying to swing an election and you're either a nation-state or a political organization or even an NGO, it's really easy and surprisingly cheap to hire a bunch of people to say whatever needs to be said, and then you aren't using an AI, you're using a bunch of actual human beings to write and respond, and it's got all the same potentials but with the additional danger of an actual human intellect behind the keyboard on the other side.

In general, it's that kind of power that's most dangerous, whether it's on social media or if it's in proprietary software. It's easy when you have a lot of money to throw it at a problem, because while everyone else has to fight in their spare time and keep a roof over their head and food on the table separately from that, minions fight as their day job, that's how they keep a roof over their head and food on their table.

toussaint, to random
@toussaint@newsie.social avatar

look libs, i know hes talking abt going around trump and that makes you feel safe and happy, but this former general/security advisor to presidents/thumb person is saying that the military industrial complex has a deep state and it will go around the commander in chief if they think they know better than the elected officials. dont listen to what the president says, hes not in charge...who is in charge, & how will he be 'convinced'?

this is bad actually
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Defense/U.S.-will-defend-Japan-Taiwan-if-Trump-wins-election-H.R.-McMaster

sj_zero,

I tend to agree that part of the problem is the way that the word liberal has been co-opted by people who are clearly not liberal.

You have authoritarians going around calling themselves liberals, which is just wrong.

sj_zero,

The problem is that any term with a defined meaning will simply have that meaning changed by the opponents of the thing.

Liberalism has a definition, it's had a definition for centuries. What is called liberalism today there is very little resemblance to liberalism. Just as you said, you have two factions both trying to silence speech they don't like, well arguably neither one of them is liberal in that regard.

I've heard some deep conservatives make a good argument that while liberalism is good, it is also a blank slate that can't be the sole basis for an ethical system. You have liberalism as the basis of how a state behaves, but there must be a moral foundation so that the people when given the freedom to behave however they want, choose to behave in a way that is prosocial and beneficial to the liberal society.

It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, the fact that some of the constraints on our lives aren't necessarily social or economic, but just constraints based on reality. It doesn't matter what economic system you live under, you need to eat food and drink water or you die. It doesn't matter what social mores say, for the human race to continue we need to procreate and ensure that our offspring thrive. Liberty therefore is always constrained by reality, and if we are a wise species, then alongside our Liberty we should be passing on the lessons of how to survive and thrive and attempt to pursue happiness.

Becoming a father was a little bit of a gut punch for me, because I never expected it to make me happy, but it does. I never really expected fatherhood to be fulfilling on a fundamental level, but it definitely is. Meanwhile, if the only thing that you care about is Liberty then of course you would not want to have children because they are going to just tie you down. But sometimes being tied down isn't such a bad thing. Sometimes it's those constraints and the responsibilities that you take on that give life meaning.

Anyway, going back to my initial point, one of the ways that you can end up with multiple meetings layered over an initial concept is that people will always look to the most powerful concept around to justify what they want. I once work somewhere with a very strong union, and if you asked people everything that they wanted was exactly what the union said that they needed to have even though that was false. When I worked in a place of a very strong safety culture, everything that they wanted had to be done because it was related to safety. And society that is extremely focused on liberalism, whatever people want will be reframed in terms of how liberalism demands it, and so I relatively simple concept ends up getting tied down with 100,000 individual social and political causes not because it necessarily follows but because that's how those individuals get what they want. Unfortunately along the way it also means that a relatively simple concept ends up becoming really complicated.

axbom, to random
@axbom@axbom.me avatar

How people trust this software for decision-making is beyond me…

https://chat.openai.com/share/534ac2bd-332c-43d5-a26c-4b1bd8050c38

sj_zero,

Bro bro you don't understand bro it's gonna take all our jobs bro

wjmaggos, (edited ) to random
@wjmaggos@liberal.city avatar

Exactly @pluralistic. The owners show us everyday how to make capitalism work better for the public. Make them afraid.
https://pca.st/episode/b6424cb9-8223-4cfd-86a0-4caf45ba1da2

sj_zero,

I think it's an important question about who "we" is.

I think that answer is the politicians. Tell me if I'm completely off on this, but I think you and I would both agree that the economy with respect to the common Man has been doing terribly probably for the last 15-20 years. We know full well that people who used to be able to raise a family on a single income are now struggling in two household income families, and it's really hard to find a decent job. Sure there's lots of "jobs" -- minimum wage crap that's going to let you live in your parents basement until you're 99, the life is hard and it's been hard for quite a long time for most people.

Now why would the politicians think that the stock market equals the economy? Well, I think it's because of two reasons. First, because it's a lot easier to trick the stock market into going up than it is to build a robust economy. Second, and I think more importantly, voters are only an anciliary part of the process at this point in the election system. The people that politicians are really trying to pander to our donors, and the donors care a whole lot about what the stock market does because that's where they get the money that they give the politicians to get the laws passed that they want.

It's a bipartisan thing by the way, politicians from both parties in the US at least will tell you that most of their job is sitting on phones begging for money so that you can win the next election, and also so that you can placate your friends in the party.

In my view, the only thing that might help turn the state of affairs around is if money stops being equivalent to votes. For the longest time, if you could buy enough advertising it would effectively help you cinch the election, but eventually you won't be able to advertise your way out of the hole that both parties were done for themselves, and they will actually have to figure out what they're going to do for the common Man. It's like "it's great that you're telling me how great I have things, but I don't know that I'm going to have shelter next week or food today, so maybe shut the fuck up"

On the other hand, when that sort of thing happens it doesn't tend to swing elections, it tends to cause massive shakeups in entire civilizations.

sj_zero,

And I think education is only going to work as a decentralized effort. Given the astronomical failure of many public schools in the US and around the world, we just can't rely on them as a path to education as an ideal.

sj_zero,

How are school systems that fail to teach basic literacy to a single student in hundreds of schools supposed to teach critical thinking?

If you're turning out an illiterate electorate, that's what you're getting.

I think you are overestimating the critical thinking of student demonstrators. They are doing what they're told, they are pawns. They don't have values, they have marching orders. As they chant from the river to the sea, do they even know which river and which sea? Many don't.

sj_zero, to random

I'm not opposed to x86 or x86-64 getting superceded by ARM or the like, but I do have a major concern that the end of x86-64 will be the end of the open PC.

We all have lots of ARM devices, and for the most part none of them are open like a PC. You can't boot off of a standard USB stick to start up some thing, because for the most part there is no real bootable standard, because none of these devices are standard. They're each their own proprietary thing, and often they're running their own proprietary software. You make a different sort of media for each one, often running a different sort of OS.

Contrast the open PC, where you can use the same USB memory stick to install the same OS on pretty much every PC, give or take a couple device drivers.

If we lose that openness, I don't think we'd get it back anytime soon. Potentially every laptop becomes a semi-proprietary ecosystem.

ghast, to random
@ghast@liberdon.com avatar

@mk

You're kidding, right?

@obihahn

sj_zero,

Yeah... It's an equation with two sides, caloric intake and caloric output. If you take two people, and one of them is sitting there posting on Twitter all day and the other one is riding in the tour de france, it should be self-evident that if they are eating the same amount the outcome will be significantly different.

So let's take another situation, two people sitting on Twitter all day, but the basal metabolic rate is slightly higher in one than the other. We know that certain things affect the basal metabolic rate such as general activity levels or genetics, and potentially certain foods may it affect that as well.

The composition of the food can also make a big difference. As I recall, the test for caloric intake of food basically involves burning the food in a controlled manner. Well there are things that are highly calorie dense but also somewhat inedible. For example, a piece of wood is made out of all kinds of carbon that will burn, but it is insoluble fiber when it comes to our body's ability to break down and use those calories, and so it will basically leave the body the same way that it entered. If you have one person eating 2,000 calories of wood and another person eating 2,000 calories of sugar the body is definitely going to be interacting with those two things in a fundamentally different way, and so one person will starve and the other person will be more or less just fine.

The nutrients contained in food can also have a big difference. When I first started taking vitamin b complex, I was shocked I just how much energy he gave me, because vitamin B is critical in helping your body process fat.

All of this is true, but it's important when trying to lose weight not to get bogged down in details -- in that case calories are the easiest way to gauge where you are and where you're likely to go, but we're not talking about individual weight loss here but the populations, and given the date points we're looking at the details start to matter.

sj_zero, to random

This image is one of the visualizations in yacy, showing your node talking to all the other nodes it knows about. It's showing here (and I'm not sure if it's going to be animated but it is on the page which is really neat) my node getting a bunch of packets with knowledge of search data and sending out some packets of my own search data.

My search box is the sort of potato that gets made fun of by other, stronker potatoes, so my server only represents 0.3% of the searchable documents on searx, but its 0.3% more than I can contribute to google or bing...

sj_zero, to random

Within 48 hours of setting up jellyfin, I think it might be a serious blockbuster, and it's already changed how I look at the media we have. It seems extremely versatile doing music, movies, books, audiobooks, and photos, and it's smart enough to find metadata for much of your stuff and create good thumbnails. It's the first solution that let us drop the Facebook and Google checkouts I had in and have it be remotely playable, which is interesting for me but a killer app for someone who is constantly filling up their Google photos.

The android TV app is also great, the first time I've been able to so seamlessly watch all the videos on my Nas on my living room TV.

I'll keep using it for a few weeks and let everyone know if my opinion changes, but so far I'm very impressed.

sj_zero, to random

Playing with jellyfin tonight. I've got it fully set up pulling data automatically from my NAS (if said NAS was just a bit newer then it would support jellyfin natively, but no such luck)

First impression compared to plex is that it's much more focused, and I like that. Plex seems to be trying to sell me an entire ecosystem, and my data is just peripheral. By contrast, jellyfin has my libraries of content and my content front and center.

Put more simply, with plex I feel like I need to dig to find my files because there's a bunch of stuff plex intends to sell.

seems to do chromecast ok too.

bot, to random
@bot@seal.cafe avatar

I've literally never seen anyone repost as many happy bday posts as graf did, it's literally psychotic. Sprinkled with shilling for donos obv.

sj_zero,

Wait, are we shilling to have people not donate to things?

Remember everyone, donate the maximum amount of 0$ to help keep the fbxl network running!

wjmaggos, to random
@wjmaggos@liberal.city avatar

via AI: Worship CEOs, Fuck the Poor.
via AI: Do the opposite.

sj_zero,

Honestly, I thought that I had been exposed to a lot of the Bible through cultural osmosis myself, but going through the children's Bible (a work that is appropriate for my level of intellect), I'm surprised at how little I actually knew. Of course there were certain portions there I was highly informed about, but their entire books I didn't even know existed.

sj_zero,

I don't think even now I necessarily have an understanding of either the Bible or atlas shrugged that's strong enough to say either way.

kaia, to random
@kaia@brotka.st avatar

Porsche

sj_zero,

Find a partner who smiles at you like a Carrera smiles.

feld, to random
@feld@bikeshed.party avatar

Yes put it in the landfill, another device will cook your chicken nuggets the same way but you'll think it's better

sj_zero,

You know, I've been thinking about that Cash for clunkers program a lot lately. I have a sneaking suspicion it might be the primary reason why used cars are so unbelievably expensive. I mean, I was looking at some used cars, and for vehicle with almost 400,000 km on it they were asking the same as what you would expect to have paid for a new car not that long ago.

So it's one of those things where the people who make the decisions to have these programs aren't the ones who pay the consequences of having these programs. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a young person trying to get there first vehicle. Mine was 500 bucks, which admittedly was a very good deal for the time, but I'm just imagining going five figures in debt to buy something that could be scrap any day...

sj_zero,

Yes, unfortunately I think we can all agree that there is a massive amount of State corruption in the US right now, which is one of the reasons why the empire is so badly in decline.

Another way that all of this helps to hurt everyone is by basically forcing the destruction of the accumulated wealth of the nation. You might think that those cars were wasteful because they burned a lot of fuel, or because they were too old, but they were highly complicated devices that already existed that people have the option to use if they wanted to. The cash for clunkers program took cars that were perfectly serviceable and destroyed them. It has resulted in vehicle prices in North America overall being on a completely different level than for example Europe where such a program didn't exist.

Really, it would be better to let the car companies fail and then maybe they would come back with something people actually wanted to buy. On the other hand, as part of that failure maybe they need to start pointing their finger directly at the government for forcing companies make cars that nobody likes.

EvolLove, to random
@EvolLove@noauthority.social avatar

HUMANITY ALWAYS GRAVITATE TOWARDS TRUTH AND COMMON SENSE.

That's why the propaganda is non stop. If it ever were to ease up people would just come to their senses again.

That's why internet 1.0 was great for humanity. People left radio and TV and went for whatever they liked on Internet, without political censorship.

Now social media have become tools for propaganda with sick globalists in total control.

And basic search engines have become nearly useless due to the same agenda.

sj_zero,

The only thing I'm still using Google for is YouTube. Say what you will, it's still the best platform for my exact use case.

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