25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2024

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    1. Went to Canada. No earthly idea why. Drove through London on our way to the Niagara Falls, then looped back around, saw hydroplane races in Syracuse, and stayed in the weirdest motel ever somewhere in Penn or Ohio because it was really cheap. This was the most WTF vacation I’ve ever been on. No idea what my parents had in mind. I literally only remember being on the car.
    2. Went to Thailand for about ten days. Stopped in Laos for an afternoon and got a t-shirt and snake whisky. Almost set foot in Cambodia, but the border was closed so we got our passports stamped and that was all. Saw a bunch of monks on cell phone’s and smoking cigarettes. Saw so many freaking temples. Went to the bridge on the river Kwai. Ate some good food. Saw the red light district. Thought it would be sexy, but it was just depressing. Loved the people and the experience and want to go back some day. Also saw Tokyo through airport window.
    3. Went to Mexico to get drunk and eat good food for a week at a resort. Got drunk and ate well for a week. Went to a xenote and swam.
    4. Went to the Bahamas to get drunk on boat for a week. Twice. Got drunk for a week both times. Also snorkeled at some point and visited pigs on an island.
    5. Headed to the Dominican Republic to get drunk in Punta Cana for a week in about ten days. Might do a topless cruise depending on how my wife feels. Jury is still out, but I have a feeling I’ll successfully get drunk for about a week.


  • MagicShel@lemmy.ziptoCasual Conversation @lemm.eeStory
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    19 hours ago

    As an adult, I find people appreciate me more when I speak less. If I don’t say much, speak slowly, and only open my mouth when the conversation will be improved by it, I tend to be well liked.

    The more someone really gets to know me, the less they tend to like me. I think. My wife tells me people like me a lot, but I don’t really see any evidence of that. I think I’m just easy to tolerate.

    As to the subject of cringe memories, I have a whole litany I run through every time my brain tries telling me I’m a shit person. No real advice there other than the worst cringe memories were formative for me, making sure I never felt that humiliation again.







  • I respect your ethical take. But my respect doesn’t put food on your table. Do what you have to do to sleep at night, and maybe that’s an ethical decision or maybe it’s just knowing you sleep better with a roof over your head.

    If you consider yourself a highly ethical person, I wouldn’t be in sales of I were you. It’s hard to find really successful salesmen without a lot of gray area in their ethics.

    But at the end is the day, you probably can’t know that your boss won’t find a way to deliver. Anyway good luck. Sounds like a difficult position to be in.





  • This, above any other reason, is why I’m most troubled with AI CSAM. I don’t care what anyone gets off to if no one is harmed, but the fact that real CSAM could be created and be indistinguishable from AI created, is a real harm.

    And I instinctively ask, who would bother producing it for real when AI is cheap and harmless? But people produce it for reasons other than money and there are places in this world where a child’s life is probably less valuable than the electricity used to create images.

    I fundamentally think AI should be completely uncensored. Because I think censorship limits and harms uses for it that might otherwise be good. I think if 12 year old me could’ve had an AI show me where the clitoris is on a girl or what the fuck a hymen looks like, or answer questions about my own body, I think I would’ve had a lot less confusion and uncertainty in my burgeoning sexuality. Maybe I’d have had less curiosity about what my classmates looked like under their clothes, leading to questionable decisions on my part.

    I can find a million arguments why AI shouldn’t be censored. Like, do you know ChatGPT can be convinced to describe vaginal and oral sex in a romantic fiction is fine, but if it’s anal sex, it has a much higher refusal rate? Is that subtle anti-gay encoding in the training data? It also struggles with polyamory when it’s two men and a woman but less when it’s two women and a man. What’s the long-term impact when these biases are built into everyday tools? These are concerns I consider all the time.

    But at the end of the day, the idea that there are children out there being abused and consumed and no one will even look for them because “it’s probably just AI” isn’t something I can bear no matter how firm my convictions are about uncensored AI. It’s something I struggle to reconcile.


  • They learn far more by watching than by listening. If you want to have great kids, be a great person. That was where I failed them.

    Beyond that, responsibility and intellectual curiosity and independent thought. I mostly nailed that last one… those little assholes never listen to me even when I have receipts—it has to be receipts they give a damn about. I couldn’t be more proud, but they are difficult.






  • I don’t know that I’d agree it’s unnatural. My observation, from far too many years on the internet, is that fighting passionately over minor differences is quite natural. But it’s all very impersonal here, and if someone seems to be really intense about an issue, or if I feel myself getting that way, it’s time to take a break from that conversation. Maybe block them if it seem consistent because sometimes you just can’t have a healthy conversation with a person and what’s the point of engaging with them, then?

    I’m really suspicious of anyone who doesn’t hold a single opinion that differs with the zeitgeist. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me all the time, and I don’t agree with anyone on issue B just because we happen to align on issue A. And don’t even get me started on morons I agree with, but who make terrible arguments I’m going to be expected to hold with and defend by association.

    Then I step away from the computer and go deal with the nuances of life where nothing is so clear cut as the hypotheticals we engage with online.