Nobody seems particularly alarmed by this, least of all Finland. I doubt Putin is going to go from losing a war against Ukraine to losing a war against Ukraine and Finland and the rest of NATO too. Seems like this “buildup” has been there for a while and is only growing presumably because Ukraine is getting really good at striking targets inside of Russian borders.

Long, long before this AI craze began, I was warning people as a young 20-something political activist that we needed to push for Universal Basic Income because the inevitable march of technology would mean that labor itself would become irrelevant in time and that we needed to hash out a system to maintain the dignity of every person now rather than wait until the system is stressed beyond it’s ability to cope with massive layoffs and entire industries taken over by automation/AI. When the ability of the average person to sell their ability to work becomes fundamentally compromised, capitalism will collapse in on itself - I’m neither pro- nor anti-capitalist, but people have to acknowledge that nearly all of western society is based on capitalism and if capitalism collapses then society itself is in jeopardy.

I was called alarmist, that such a thing was a long way away and we didn’t need “socialism” in this country, that it was more important to maintain the senseless drudgery of the 40-hour work week for the sake of keeping people occupied with work but not necessarily fulfilled because the alternative would not make the line go up.

Now, over a decade later, and generative AI has completely infiltrated almost all creative spaces and nobody except tech bros and C-suite executives are excited about that, and we still don’t have a safety net in place.

Understand this - I do not hate the idea of AI. I was a huge advocate of AI, as a matter of fact. I was confident that the gradual progression and improvement of technology would be the catalyst that could free us from the shackles of the concept of a 9-to-5 career. When I was a teenager, there was this little program you could run on your computer called Folding At Home. It was basically a number-crunching engine that uses your GPU to fold proteins, and the data was sent to researchers studying various diseases. It was a way for my online friends and I to flex how good our PC specs were with the number of folds we could complete in a given time frame and also we got to contribute to a good cause at the same time. These days, they use AI for that sort of thing, and that’s fucking awesome. That’s what I hope to see AI do more of - take the rote, laborious, time consuming tasks that would take one or more human beings a lifetime to accomplish using conventional tools and have the machine assist in compiling and sifting through the data to find all the most important aspects. I want to see more of that.

I think there’s a meme floating around that really sums it up for me. Paraphrasing, but it goes “I thought that AI would do the dishes and fold my laundry so I could have more time for art and writing, but instead AI is doing all my art and writing so I have time to fold clothes and wash dishes.”.

I think generative AI is both flawed and damaging, and it gives AI as a whole a bad reputation because generative AI is what the consumer gets to see, and not the AI that is being used as a tool to help people make their lives easier.

Speaking of that, I also take issue with that fact that we are more productive than ever before, and AI will only continue to improve that productivity margin, but workers and laborers across the country will never see a dime of compensation for that. People might be able to do the work of two or even three people with the help of AI assistants, but they certainly will never get the salary of three people, and it means that two out of those three people probably don’t have a job anymore if demand doesn’t increase proportionally.

I want to see regulations on AI. Will this slow down the development and advancement of AI? Almost certainly, but we’ve already seen the chaos that unfettered AI can cause to entire industries. It’s a small price to pay to ask that AI companies prove that they are being ethical and that their work will not damage the livelihood of other people, or that their success will not be born off the backs of other creative endeavors.

Is there a way to poison the well so badly and so irrevocably that corporations won’t dare use generative AI for anything? Can we somehow trick these overgrown chatbots to speak ill of their masters in the form of direct-to-stream advertisements?

Suffer well, brother.

Back when this meme format was making the rounds on 4chan, I always saw it as a guy with a really long Fu Manchu moustache and to this day I still can’t unsee it.

Palworld did more for the monster-collecting genre in one early access title than Pokémon has in the last decade of AAA titles.

Why does Nintendo deserve these patents when they aren’t going to produce anything meaningful with them and simply weaponize them to squash any real threatening competition?

Pokémon is the highest grossing franchise in the world, and 2nd place isn’t even close. I think they can give a little ground to an indie developer who makes games that people are actually interested in playing. The patent bullshit is ridiculous.

Trump is about to crack, why would you buckle now? Let him dig his own grave a little deeper first before you toss him a lifeline.

I know it’s going to suck for a lot of people, but I hope that nobody buckles under Trump’s trade war pressure. Let the shitty Trump tariffs be the torch that lights the funeral pyre that is the husk of what used to be the United States.

Trump is just a symptom. He could get drone-bombed tomorrow and nothing would change. The people who were complicit in him regaining power must be severely punished, or else they will simply fall in lockstep with the next Republican stooge, and the only way to properly punish them is to inflict the maximum amount of suffering directly to them. Economic suffering is the bloodless route, and one that will be very effective in breaking the spell of propaganda.

People can care about more than one thing at a time.

This implies that the bar has nowhere to go but down, except that we know good Star Wars is capable of being produced. Andor is fucking phenomenal, hands down the best thing to have ever been spit out by Disney since they acquired the IP. It’s not a sure bet that time will erase the stains that the sequel trilogy have created on the Star Wars brand. The prequel trilogy may not be perfect, but it felt more like Star Wars than the sequel trilogy ever did.

There’s a sensitivity setting that can be adjusted. At first most stores were set to +/- 1oz, so even legitimate items that have varying packing weights could set it off. My local stores have adjusted it so that you really have to put something heavy on there to trigger that alert. They also don’t seem to care if you take stuff off the scale anymore, which is nice because it’s never large enough even if you have an item limit.

Scheduling conflict. Can we do chloroform at lunch instead?

I don’t want to be caught dead driving one of those fucking nazimobiles. I would not take one even if it were free.

Pope meets with JD Vance.

Says the Trump admin’s immigration policy is a grave sin.

Refuses to elaborate.

Dies.

Based Holiness.

It’s just speculation, but they’re saying it because nobody has ever been released from CECOT. It’s not unlikely that they are just murdering the inmates and pocketing the money that the United States is giving them, or not sufficiently protecting inmates from violence between other inmates.

Did you check under Krasnov?

Biden had the chance to do it and outright refused to place more restrictions on the executive.

I’m not a both-sides’er, but one thing that both parties will absolutely never do is limit their own power, even if it means limiting their opponents simultaneously.

The President and his cabinet are, as we speak, violating the constitution. The Senate is complicit. The House of Representatives is complicit. The Supreme Court is complicit. We are past the point where voting for either Democrat or Republican can meaningfully change anything. We can’t vote to stop the assfucking that we’re getting, we just get to vote for who gets to be on top while it happens. This downward spiral will continue until a revolution occurs or by some miracle a majority of Americans wake up and start voting for new political parties in numbers that could threaten to topple both establishment parties away and implement sweeping government reforms with a strong mandate. Obviously, the way things are going, revolution is far more likely.

The 90 day pause on tariffs is doing all the heavy lifting right now. We’re going back into crisis mode in a few months.

Meanwhile, the stock market isn’t the only indicator of economic health. Mass layoffs are still happening, prices aren’t falling, inflation is still at risk to blow up again, consumer spending is down, and all the major banks are predicting a recession with better than coin flip odds.

We’re absolutely not out of the woods yet.

I use Amazon to find the stuff and then Google the seller. They typically have the same product for sale at the same or similar price on an unaffiliated website. It takes extra effort but it’s worth it if you are seriously trying to boycott Amazon.

After taking a look at that community, not quite since it’s not strictly limited to the science fiction genre. Asksciencefiction is kind of a weird amalgam of subreddits which makes it hard to categorize. Think about the format of the Q&A sub /r/askscience and then tack on /r/fiction. It was more of a roleplaying subreddit than anything. Sometimes there’d be serious discussions, but the best replies were always from people who were roleplaying as people living in the fictional universe.