Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars (probably of their parents saved money) to go to university and have a chatbot do the whole thing for you.

These kids are going to get spit out into a world where they will have no practical knowledge and no ability to critically think or adapt.

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?

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.

lmao I can’t believe that line is actually in the description :D

2020’s aren’t over yet pal, but I hope we both make it.

Also no kids for me. I got snipped precisely because it would be unconscionable and financially impossible for me to bring a child into the world as things are now.

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.

I tried to make /r/asksciencefiction around the time of the API exodus from reddit. It got a bunch of initial traffic and even got the attention of the mods of the actual subreddit but ultimately I guess they decided to stay on reddit rather than encourage people to go to Lemmy. Anyway, the traffic has slowed to basically nothing and I’ve kind of lost interest in moderating it, not that it really needs it anyway since the community is like 20 users per month.

[email protected]

Just subbed, I love a good cocktail. Second that it would be good to have a version of /r/normalnudes on Lemmy.

lmaoooo

You just tanked your credit score by a lot. There are two aspects about this that matter:

Each one of those approvals required the credit card companies to pull your credit score from the major credit reporting agencies, and a lot of credit inquiries very close together will cause your score to go down. This is not so bad, as those will only weigh on you temporarily.

The worse one, however, is account age. Opening so many lines of credit has lowered your average account age by a ton, as you now have many accounts on your credit history with 0 years, so you are going to see a big drop because a lot of what makes up for a good credit score is how long you’ve maintained good credit (which means using it and paying it off on time to prove you can actually handle being lent money) and how much credit diversity you have (mortgage, auto loan, credit cards, etc.) .

The good thing is that both of these blunders will go away with time. How long it will take to get you back up to 830, well, I can’t quite say.

Like, this isn’t as bad as a bankruptcy is for your credit score, don’t get me wrong, but you’re going to need to start reading the fine print on these very carefully moving forward, because you can’t afford to keep signing deals for credit cards and not knowing exactly what the terms are. If you didn’t know what the credit limit was up front, you probably weren’t paying attention to things like APR either and that makes a big difference. Why did you feel the need to get a new credit card anyway? It sounds like you had no issues building credit before.

“Evil attacks”, like we’re killing puppies, or something.

Leave the puppy killing to the expert, Kristi Noem.

If he were stupid he would not be the richest man in the world

No, stop.

You are conflating wealth with intelligence.

Do you know how easy it is to have money multiply itself in high enough quantities? It’s hard to overstate just how difficult it would be to have the wealth of Elon Musk and somehow not make money. You would have to make several multi-million dollar bad investments per day for decades, and even then, you’re still not likely to run out of cash any time soon. If Elon Musk did absolutely nothing for the rest of his life (and god, we could only hope) the interest and dividends his wealth passively generates for him would be enough for all of his children and grandchildren to live lavishly luxurious lives.

Elon is not a genius. He’s actually a complete fucking moron who got very, very lucky and has excellent timing. If it were not for the success of PayPal in the early dotcom days, we would never have heard from this guy again.

Friendly reminder that almost all news media outlets and social media platforms are owned by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals and they are in full control of the algorithm that feeds you content, so you’ll likely never see anything that is critical of them or advocates for them to have less power or influence than they do.

This is the 2025 version of “The revolution won’t be televised”.

If you’re rebadging your Tesla because you feel some second hand shame for owning one now that it’s clear to anyone with eyes that Elon Musk is a literal Nazi, just sell it and buy a different EV.

“Mutual aid”? Is that what scammers are calling it now? What exactly is “mutual” about this interaction?

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with creating a community where people who are struggling financially can ask for help or plug their GoFundMe or whatever, but allowing these guys to essentially cold call individuals with DMs/Mentions is unacceptable.