• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The difference is that a cars only purpose isn’t to kill or maim. There are very obvious positives to having widespread access to cars. I can point you countries where there is not widespread access to guns that do not have these problems. Can you point to any that have guns as accessible in the US that don’t?

    Because I know your next argument will be about knives or cars again, let me address both of those: A knife is not nearly as deadly as a gun. You can at least run from a knife, its much more personal so less people are willing to use it, and you at least have a chance of fending off the attacker. Against a gun, your only hope is that they miss. And regarding cars, you’re right, they can be used as a weapon! Do you know what solves this issue while also still allowing people to commute? Public transport! Im glad we agree cars are an issue, and that public transport is needed.

    Since you clearly don’t think everyone having grenades is ridiculous, how about rockets? Missiles? Should any citizen be able to obtain those too? Mustard gas? Nuclear weapons? How far are you willing to let that go before its obvious the cons outweigh the pros?


  • My assumption would be that he hoped he could at least become a martyr for the Russian people. It is one thing to be accused of crimes, and flee your country forever, it leaves space for Russians to think “well if he is an innocent man, why is he on the run? If he wishes to represent this country, how can he if he flees it?”. Maybe he hoped that by coming back and facing the ridiculous charges, it could at least give him some credibility with the citizens who would maybe see the absurdity of it all, and maybe spark some kind of political unrest. It obviously didn’t work, but in the face of the hopeless political situation in Russia, can you blame him for trying?


  • Nah, it doesn’t. If I advocate for the right for everyone to carry grenades on them, and then I get put in a position where someone actually has one and I get scared shitless and run away, thats funny, regardless of whether or not I carry a grenade myself. Its funny because we all can obviously see that the right to carry fucking grenades is ridiculous, and by advocating for it I kinda got whats coming to me.

    In fact, the more I think about it, if you advocate for guns, why not also grenades? If you are citing the “well armed militia” part of the second amendment, well, you’re not going to ever be able to fight a tyrannical government with bullets alone will you? And if you’re worried about the self defense part, a grenade would let you take care of a shooter thats behind cover without putting yourself in the line of fire!

    And if you think you shouldn’t be able to have a device that could kill a crowd of people in seconds, because thats obviously stupid and dangerous, I beg you to take another look at your stance on guns.


  • Because him not carrying at the time demonstrates why guns could never truly be a solution to these shootings. It can happen anytime, anywhere, and you can’t be prepared at every moment. You can’t live your life never letting your guard down.

    Not to mention, if anyone should be carrying and take action in these situations, it should be the ones advocating against gun control. Missouri has some of the loosest gun control in the country. If the main argument against is the right to defend yourself, and when the time comes this guy is either not prepared or not willing to defend the people he is meant to serve, how can we expect others to?

    Are we really to say “everyone should be carrying so they can defend themselves in these situations”, when the Missouri governor himself isn’t?

    And when you advocate against gun control, that is the statement you’re making. That the issue of these shootings is simply solved by a good guy having a gun. If you’re saying “gun control isn’t alright because i deserve the right to defend myself”, you’re implying that everyone else has the same right, and their only chance to save themselves is to also exercise that right.

    But can we expect women and children to do this? And I’m sure there are plenty of people of color who would not be super hyped to have a weapon on them during a police interaction. If the Missouri governor, one of the loudest voices against gun control can’t be expected to exercise this right, how can we expect everyone else?



  • So your solution to the issue of mass shootings is that everyone should carry a gun on them at all times, and everyone should be ready to kill if necessary? And you don’t see the issue with that?

    I’m not saying you specifically should not carry or be ready to defend yourself, and I would be a fool to pretend that you shouldn’t be willing and able to defend yourself, especially with how things are now. But do you really want to live in a world where every citizen has to be ready and willing to kill his fellow man at the drop of a hat when things go to shit? Do you want your kids, grandkids, etc. to live in a world like that?

    The point isn’t that you shouldn’t be able to defend yourself. The point is that the fact that you need to is fucked up, and we shouldn’t accept it as the status quo.



  • Yeah man I know a lot of guys who drop money on shit like this. None of them are “whales”, but i know they’ve dropped hundreds if not thousands on this mtx bs. None of them own homes (which is kinda normal as we are in our 20’s), but only a few of them are even living on their own at all. Something is clearly going on psychologically there, if someone is willing to forego their own needs for cosmetics (that they will later replace with new cosmetics they bought!!)




  • Everyone with a dissenting viewpoint from your own is not some secret right-wing troll smuggling in the “wrong” viewpoints. You are not helping anyone with this mindset.

    I live in a pretty red area. I talk to a lot of people who have a lot of these right wing beliefs. Im not going to pretend these aren’t dogshit takes, they fucking suck. But like this guy is trying to tell you, these views and talking points are very prevalent. We can’t treat these people like right-wing sleeper cell trolls that just want to attack us, they are people who have been misled.

    I’ll give you an example. I was talking to someone who was a little upset we were sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. Is this a shit take? Yeah it is, but he didn’t have it because hes some russian fascist who wants to see putin recreate the USSR, he’s just living in the COL crisis like everyone else. When I pointed out it was a shit move to let ukraine burn and made him think about it, he changed his mind. Theres other shit we spend way more money on, like our military, and we should defend a country that is being annexed by another world power.

    He’s not a bad dude. He just hadn’t stopped to think about it. If i had just attacked him for it he would have just doubled down, because im being an asshole, and why would he adopt the assholes position? Thats how most people are. It sucks but it takes a lot of energy to really sift through all the bullshit, and surviving in todays world is stressful enough as it is for people. Its hard to look at the bigger picture when your smaller, immediate one is so turbulent.




  • Its a collectors game with nothing good to collect. This might seem like a silly take, and with 813 pokemon now in the game, it should be. But the way pokemon are laid out in this game is just horrendous.

    In the main series games, you LOOK for pokemon. You might just wander around the grass for a while and take what you get, but at some point, you have a shopping list. In order to find specific pokemon, you go to a specific location. You find the pokemon you are looking for, often with others similar in type.

    Well, in pokemon go, this isn’t the case at all. There are maybe 20-40 pokemon in the spawn pool at any given time. Go somewhere, ANYWHERE around you, and you are going to see more of the same. Once you have them, you wait for the next spawn rotation (sometimes thats 1 month, sometimes its 8) or events. The events are somewhere between 3 hours and 1 week long, and then you might actually have some cool shit, and the game is exciting for a bit. But after that, its back to the same old bullshit.

    Now the game is just about collecting shinies. This is really what niantic has tried to monetize. The (often only) way to get them is to either hatch eggs (buying incubators) or doing raids (buying raid passes). The other way to get them is by doing certain events where they hand them out like candy. I stopped a couple years ago when i had well over 300 shinies, because there just wasn’t a point anymore. The whole “cool collectible” factor came from them being rare, if everyone gets them in events, why is it special?




  • From the article, because it explained it much better than i was going to:

    The date, calculated by Global Footprint Network each year using National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts data, marks the point when humanity’s demand for biological resources exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate them within that year.

    So basically, lets say 1000 tons of coal is formed every year (this is not a real number, its a hilariously high overestimate), “Earth Overshoot Day” marks the day we actually use up that years resources. So if that day is Aug. 2nd, that means we already used the 1000 tons that would have formed that year, on that day.




  • Sure, AI is not doing anything creative, but neither is my pen, its the tool im using to be creative. Lets think about this more with some scenarios:

    Lets say software developer “A” comes along, and they’re pretty fucking smart. They sit down, read through all of Mark Twains novels, and over the course of the next 5 years, create a piece of software that generates works in Twain’s style. Its so good that people begin using it to write real books. It doesn’t copy anything specifically from Twain, it just mimics his writing style.

    We also have developer “B”. While Dev A is working on his project, Dev B is working on a very similar project, but with one difference: Dev B writes an LLM to read the books for him, and develop a writing style similar to Twain’s based off of that. The final product is more or less the same as Dev A’s product, but he saves himself the time of needing to read through every work on his own, he just reads a couple to get an idea of what the output might look like.

    Is the work from Dev A’s software legitimate? Why or why not?

    Is the work from Dev B’s software legitimate? Why or why not?

    Assume both of these developers own copies of the works they used as training data, what is honestly the difference here? This is what I am struggling with so much.


  • Sure, but what I’m asking is: what do you think is a reasonable rate?

    We are talking data sets that have millions of written works in them. If it costs hundreds or thousands per work, this venture almost doesn’t make sense anymore. If its $1 per work, or cents per work, then is it even worth it for each individual contributor to get $1 when it adds millions in operating costs?

    In my opinion, this needs to be handled a lot more carefully than what is being proposed. We are potentially going to make AI datasets wayyyy too expensive for anyone to use aside from the largest companies in the market, and even then this will cause huge delays to that progress.

    If AI is just blatantly copy and pasting what it read, then yes, I see that as a huge issue. But reading and learning from what it reads, no matter how rudimentary that “learning” may be, is much different than just copying works.