Oooooooh that makes sense! Thanks for explaining. Yeah I wish we had legislation around it here, it’s stupid that I have to play games to get lower prices on things.

Wait what??

The consumer is barred from swapping providers annually to get better rates? Or are they barred from lying about fake quotes to get a better rate from their current provider?

Edit: By chance did you mean “price walking”? I did some searching online and I couldn’t find anything about the UK forbidding consumers from changing insurance companies to seek lower prices by searching for “policy walking” but I did find something about insurers slowly increasing prices on customers (thus creating the need for the behavior I suggested) called “price walking”, though I didn’t see anything about it’s legality. Admittedly, I’m just skimming while working.

Every year, call your insurance/internet/phone/TV etc. provider and tell them one of their competitors gave you a lower quote and you want them to match it or come close.

They will often give you a better rate just for asking. It’s easier if you do have an actual quote to compare it against but you don’t need one. Everything is made up. Just ask to pay less and threaten to stop paying them and they’ll often just give it to you.

Even if they refuse, just say, “Okay. I need some time to think about whether or not I want to continue our relationship or switch.” Hang up and do nothing.

It’s good to keep in mind that the cost of space exploration vastly pales in comparison to most social programs which also vastly pale in comparison to the military budget.

We should absolutely focus on helping people on Earth, but we don’t need to cut space exploration to do that, just war.

The car from the 70’s survives accidents better because more of it is rigid, but this makes it more dangerous as more of the force of the accident is transferred to the driver.

Modern crumple zones are placed intentionally so that while the car will crumple, the driver will not.

Can one give consent in a situation when they’ve mentally decompensated to a point where they are a risk to themselves or those around them and need intervention?

There’s a $12 bottle of Monastrell that my roommate and I adore. It’s rich and complex with wonderful plum and fruit notes, it’s not too expensive, it’s vegan, and it always seems to be flying off the shelves.

Whenever I see it, I try to buy a case of it and we save the bottles, never opening more than one a night, debating if we should open another cheap red or “one of the good ones”.

It’s not much, but it is a luxury I love to enjoy and share with friends.

Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird’s song “The Butcher’s Sher” is a fairly quick summary of (including some quotations from) Capital with the bonus of a lil klezmer, but in general I think there’s value in just reading the text.

Whoever correctly observes that I am the sole member of the human species that can correctly prepare this damned beast into something decadent and delicious gets their first choice of cuts after my wonderful partner gets a leggie (it’s his favorite).

I’m even so generous and benevolent that I’ll save you the keystrokes of asking how such a feat is possibly accomplished.

Homemade yolk-only herbed mayonnaise under the skin, spatchcocked and roasted high (like 425°-450°) on a raised rack until the thickest part of the thigh reads 150°, tenting the skin with foil if it looks like it’s browning too much. It’ll come to 165° as it rests, don’t you worry.

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Good luck, buddy. You’re gonna need it.

I have to use week numbers for scheduling things at work and they are very useful once you get your head around them, but it’s also useful to have larger monthly descriptors too.

I’m big into adding 10,000 years to the date to better show how long human civilization has existed and I would appreciate some standardization in month length. 12 months is useful for dividing the year up in many neat ways, but I’m not married to it. In any case, we gotta make Sept mean 7 again and so forth, or just change them to like Month-1, Month-2, Month-3, etc., sorta like how Mandarin handles it.

I’ve watched people get stupider in the past few years using LLMs to replace thinking for themselves, so, yeah I guess so.

You can say it’s just a problem with capitalism, and, yes, capitalism is a problem, but AI is the current tool de jure that capitalists are using to crush workers, so, yes, I oppose it.

It’s pointless to argue about how it could be used in a post capitalist world, we don’t live in that world, we live in a world where LLMs are actively being used to harm the working class. This applies to a myriad of things, of course.

You want to use and develop AI tools for use in a post-capitalist world? Alright, let’s get to the post capitalist part first. Until then, I’ll oppose tools used to harm the underprivileged.

I think it’s genuinely too early to say definitively one way or another, but anecdotally, the people I see educated with LLMs are a lot less capable than people who aren’t.

Only time will tell how badly we’ve allowed ourselves to get fucked over to benefit a few ultra rich companies.

That’s the thing.

Your specific opinions on how LLMs should be used or not use don’t affect how they are being used.

A system is what it does, plain and simple, and LLMs look like they’re doing serious damage to our societies to really just benefit the wealthy.

Here’s another fun piece you can read.

The incoming AI apocalypse isn’t about Skynet drones or malicious AGI, it’s about creating generations of vastly less educated and cognitively deficient lower classes and restricting traditional education to the wealthier echelons of society, gatekeeping the poor out by cost alone, undoing decades of socialist efforts to bring education to the masses.

Here ya go.

I’ll give you a quick summary. It turns out spending time thinking improves your ability to think and vice versa. When you rely on LLMs to do your thinking for you, you become less skilled at thinking.

It’s important to remember that it doesn’t really matter how you, personally, use their product or think it should be used, it matters how it is used by large swaths of society. Don’t get fooled into promoting some billionaire’s tool to shift wealth further upward and further denigrate the working class in your quest to get out of spending 15 minutes searching for the right D&D character picture.

In my experience, people who use LLMs as educational tools… don’t actually learn very well. They think they are, but they don’t retain the knowledge nor do they seem able to infer from or apply the knowledge very well. There are even some early studies that are showing that using LLMs decreases cognitive ability, and considering how many kids and young people are using it to get their way though school and even higher education… I think we’re using AI to raise a generation of stunted minds. That’s going to be a bigger issue as time goes on and with the state of the world and who owns the LLMs… it looks like a grim, sad future thanks to this tech.

I think it’s more cultural as it’s not uniform globally. I don’t care much for dessert as a concept, but I love a piece of cold fruit, like an orange, strawberry or melon after dinner. I find it helps reset the mouth after a flavorful meal. And I’ll usually have a cup of tea with it.

Desserts seem to pair better with coffee or tea, and having those after a meal is a fairly common ritual. I wonder if we have dessert after dinner because we often have coffee or tea?