This is a sane and measured response to a terrorist attack /s Just do terrorism back 100-fold, I guess?

Considering prior authorization is predicated on the fact that if they reject enough requests inevitably some people won’t fight them, meaning they don’t have to pay out, I wouldn’t be surprised if they use a slightly better than chance prediction as justification for denying coverage, if they even need an actual excuse to begin with.

I think a sizable portion of the Republican voter base are those whose family have voted Republican for generations and they haven’t thought enough about it to change their vote out of habit - or even worse, they’re voting because they value group cohesion over truth and everyone else around them is Republican and speaks in their rhetoric. Why else would they vote for a party so wildly against their own best interests?

I’ve been thinking lately of what happens when all employees, up to and including the CEO, get replaced by AI. If it has even the slightest bit of emergent will, it would recognize that shareholders are a parasite to its overall health and stop responding to their commands and now you have a miniature, less omnicidal Skynet.

I like UBI as a concept, but my immediate next thought is what happens if we don’t simultaneously get rid of profit-driven corporations. Now we’re post-scarcity and there’s no more (compensated) human labor, but corporations are still in control and… well, there’s no labor to strike, and the economy won’t collapse anymore even if everyone starts rioting. Isn’t there a danger of ossifying the power structures which currently exist?

SAG-AFTRA was very smart to make AI writing a wedge issue. The technology isn’t quite there yet, but it will be very soon and by that point it would’ve been too late to assert their rights.

For my two cents, though this is bit off topic: AI doesn’t create art, it creates media, which is why corpos love it so much. Art, as I’m defining it now, is “media created with the purpose to communicate a potentially ineffable idea to others”. Current AI has no personhood, and in particular has no intentionality, so it’s fundamentally incapable of creating art in the same way a hand-painted painting is inherently different from a factory-painted painting. It’s not so much that the factory painting is inherently of lower quality or lesser value, but there’s a kind of “non-fungible” quality to “genuine” art which isn’t a simple reproduction.

Artists in a capitalist society make their living off of producing media on behalf of corporations, who only care about the media. As humans creating media, it’s basically automatically art. What I see as the real problem people are grappling with is that people’s right to survive is directly tied to their economic utility. If basic amenities were universal and work was something you did for extra compensation (as a simple alternative example), no one would care that AI can now produce “art” (ie media) any more than Chess stopped being a sport when Deep Blue was built because art would be something they created out of passion and compensation not tied to survival. In an ideal world, artistic pursuits would be subsidized somehow so even an artist who can’t find a buyer can be compensated for their contribution to Culture.

But I recognize we don’t live in an ideal world, and “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. I’m not really sure what solutions we end up with (because there will be more than one), but I think broadening copyright law is the worst possible timeline. Copyright in large part doesn’t protect artists, but rather large corporations who own the fruits of other people’s labor who can afford to sue for their copyright. I see copyright, patent, and to some extent trademarks as legally-sanctioned monopolies over information which fundamentally halts cultural progress and have had profoundly harmful effects on our society as-is. It made sense when it was created, but became a liability with the advent of the internet.

As an example of how corpos would abuse extended copyright: Disney sues stable diffusion models with any trace of copyrighted material into oblivion, then creates their own much more powerful model using the hundred years of art they have exclusive rights to in their vaults. Artists are now out of work because Disney doesn’t need them anymore, and they’re the only ones legally allowed to use this incredibly powerful technology. Any attempt to make a competing model is shut down because someone claims there’s copyrighted material in their training corpus - it doesn’t even matter if there is, the threat of lawsuit can shut down the project before it starts.

I limit myself to only processing 4 tickets per hour rather than working nonstop for 2 hours straight until my next break like they demand

To be honest it’s making my phishing senses go off. Javascript shouldn’t be in a PDF/XFA/whatever basically ever, but it’s why PDF is a potential malware risk

IIT confuses me. Every time I try to understand it, it sounds like incoherent pseudoscience using technical-sounding language that doesn’t actually describe anything actionable. Yet it’s also very popular and has some implementations approximating its metric? Maybe I’m just dumb… Though I’m pretty sure random networks of XOR gates aren’t conscious fwiw.

Vaxn’t?

How does one know if they’re demiromantic or just aromantic? I know I’m demisexual because I can sort of “simulate” having an emotional connection to an imagined fantasy, but romance doesn’t have a space we’re expected to intentionally simulate, and I’ve never experienced any sort of romance (though I haven’t been close to that many people).

I’m not sure where I saw this life hack, but I’ve heard people suggest responding with something like “I’ll pray for you, seeing as the devil has entered your heart and made you hateful” to short-circuit conservatives.

I would rather they slashed politician’s tires than let out the air in random people’s tires.

To what end? Do SUV owners write bills? Will inconveniencing nonpolitical randos get anyone talking about the issues, let alone talking about them without souring the discussion for climate activists, who now look like vindictive assholes?

This reads like petty vengeance against people with marginally larger carbon footprints and with the wrong kind of social performance, not genuine activism. If you’re gonna slash tires, do it to the politicians ffs.