mountainriver

joined 1 year ago
[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

On an old tablet I used Opera because it had a nifty function where you could zoom in and it made the text larger and enforced line breaks so that the text still fit the shown space.

I know Opera is horrible in many respects, but I kept that tablet for reading in the evening. Being able to zoom in and still just scroll down was very useful when tired.

Anyone happen to know any similar add ons for Firefox?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 13 points 4 months ago

Ah, but checking the actual grade gives a correct answer. Who wouldn't want to change that for a statistically likely answer?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

Even if no one can use the wealth, wouldn't it be placed in some kind of trust in order to keep accruing wealth rather than be decimated by inflation?

And then, as the frozen rich wouldn't use any of their wealth, it would just keep accruing wealth. They would be perfect, frozen, capitalists. The control of that wealth would give power, and controllers of the trusts can gain even wealth and thus power more by coordinating. The power would only keep growing as more rich freeze themselves to keep up with and join the growing trust of trusts.

Living in a society where the frozen owners would own all the means of production, these frozen owners would naturally be hailed as sleeping kings in order to motivate me system. They may even be seen as something godlike.

Then one day, if one wakes up, it would cause immediate power struggles, as well as give a flash point for the discontent of the billions of impoverished serfs slaving away for the controllers. But the controllers would mobilise violence, and....

Oh, HG Wells already wrote this story. Typical!

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Gerard -> Assange -> creates Wikileaks -> Wikileaks receives and publishes hacked or leaked DNC emails -> DNC emails shows Clinton cheating Sanders in the primary -> depresses turnout among potential democratic voters in the general election -> Trump wins.

On can question each step on how influential it's for the next, but if one doesn't Trump was all his fault.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 11 points 4 months ago (19 children)

Shouldn't they be fans of The Culture? And didn't The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?

(It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 19 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Why is it art from artists who made their last work in 1912? Modern copyright lasts life plus X, where X has been increasing and is now mostly 70, though some stopped at 50. So why 1912? Did US copyright change that year?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I thought that was Hirvox point, that the NPC meme now goes hand in hand with Chan shittery because the NPC meme allows for an easy format to say that other people are not real people. With the added bonus of a built-in "just joking" defence.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 4 months ago (9 children)

I think the connection isn't with belief in the supernatural, but with the specific belief that there are things around us that look like people but aren't people. I can easily see how the latter at minimum makes one very susceptible for racism.

If people start believing that androids are a real thing (not the OS, human like robots), it's only a matter of time before people will be accused of being androids.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 18 points 4 months ago (2 children)

When time is precious, use AI for all your glue in pizza queries.

Of course, Google is also crapified, but at least there is still a search engine underneath.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 4 months ago

Oh yes, very much so.

The British Empire had its colonial administrators curriculum consisting of Latin and history and such. A rich 19th century heir that went into physics or mathematics were considered to be wasting the chance of a political career.

It made their colonial administrators write about their crimes in a nice prose, but it didn't stop the genocides. If anything it made them aware of what paper trails to burn after the fact, in order to obfuscate the crimes when future historians came looking.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 13 points 4 months ago (8 children)

Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.

Don't know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 12 points 4 months ago

I think it's a good one to hand people who just vaguely has picked up something about existential threat. Short, funny, and gets to the point of the existential threat stuff being a smoke screen for crapification and redirection from climate change.

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