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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • You know what absolutely did not convince Trump to keep supporting Ukraine? This stupid ass fucking tweet.

    You literally don’t know that. Lots of people have accused Mark Rutte of pandering to Trump, but from all reporting it’s worked because Trump is actually that vane. Reminding him that one of his closest supporters vehemently supported Ukraine has a chance of moving the needle.

    Also, guess what. Carney doesn’t need Lindsey Graham’s vote or Donald Trump’s vote to keep his position. He needs our votes, so maybe praising someone who wanted the USA to invade Canada is actually really stupid politics.

    Lmfao “why isn’t carney pandering to us, we’re the reactionarily outraged!”

    I think you’re confusing him for PP, Carney is the one who behaves like an adult.





  • They can do pre-fabricated architecture, but they haven’t cracked it.

    Current prefabricated construction (especially in the context of homes / housing) is still limited in terms of customization and/or requires a huge amount of manual architecture / engineering work, and the consumer facing customization software is still pretty garbage.

    People still often use contractors because they want the level of customization they bring, even when off the shelf options are available.

    Don’t get me wrong I have massive faith in prefab construction in terms of infrastructure projects like bridges and elevated guideways etc where you have a design team doing them all up front and sending them off to be made at a factory and assembled on site, but I haven’t seen anything in terms of home construction that seems revolutionary from prefab yet.


  • It really feels like the wrong technology for the job.

    What 3D printing is great at is having one machine, that can produce a billion different parts.

    i.e. with my one printer, I can print hooks, or replacement parts that no longer exist or custom organizer that fit exactly my stuff and situation.

    It’s fantastic for printing a massive variety of low volume parts / one offs.

    It’s not great at printing those things cheaply, or in modular parts (it can be done but it’s often not because it’s a lot of extra effort for one offs). Which in housing, people want cheap (because it’s the most expensive thing they’ll buy), and they want it to be adaptable and changeable.

    If anything I suspect an actual housing revolution could come from pre-fab housing, made of a highly customizable and modular component system, and slick design software, but no one has cracked all the pieces required to implement that yet.


  • If you are suggesting that LLMs are sentient, then this isn’t a “mild disagreement”, it’s the San Andreas fault.

    “If you are suggesting X is black then we’re mortal enemies”

    Theres more nuance then black and white, don’t be so internet brained.

    There are so many technological leaps that have to happen before AGI can become real that I am certain that neither of us will see that day.

    Name them if you’re so confident.

    We’re already operating models with simulated neurons on the order of magnitude as brains. Unless you plan on dying this decade or the next, there’s a reasonably likely chance we’ll live to see AGI.

    No one has claimed this is sentient, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not interesting, nor does it mean that it’s not interesting that a structure that seems to function similarly to one in our brain emerged.simply from the way they trained it.









  • Cory Doctor’s recent book on Centaurs and Reverse Centaurs is worth reading.

    The core idea of that is that centaurs are a human top and machine / alien body, they’re effectively augmented humans with all this technology to help them excel.

    Reverse Centaurs are human bodies and machine / alien tops, where the humans are just checking the work of systems and are subservient to them. He points out that that’s one of the fundamental differences between Amazon and the Postal Service is that in the case of Amazon drivers, they basically function as a reverse Centaurs where they are just an appendage of the delivery car, tracked and managed by that car, to do the tasks the car can’t do on its own.