The tax system is so complicated, most people can’t handle navigating it on their own. Most people have jobs where taxes are automatically removed from pay checks and sent to both state and federal tax agencies. However, that amount is just an estimate and once a year (or quarter) you need to file paperwork to confirm whether you over or underpaid and then you either get a rebate (without interest), or you’ll need to send in a payment to make up the difference. That paperwork has been lobbied to remain as complicated as possible so that companies like Intuit can provide services that tax payers find useful and continue to pay for. This is more complicated for business owners, both big and small.

Agreed that everybody SHOULD be educated. It’s definitely POSSIBLE to become informed, but holy fuck man, it shouldn’t take this much effort.

Blaming the citizens is insane. If you think that a large enough percentage of the voting population is capable of even FINDING digestible unbiased information… I don’t know what to tell you. I’m more informed than the general public and I didn’t even have a reliable source. I want something that doesn’t just explain the contents of every piece of legislation, but also the impact, knock-on effects, and true underlying motivation. Getting a full picture that I trust involves cobbling together multiple sources and attempting to filter out biases and conspiracy theories.

Who has that kind of time? Most of us out here are trying to keep our head above water and not spiral into unrecoverable debt. There are centuries of people in power molding their constituents into complacency through systemic oppression to ensure this is the case. The average person has a government sponsored education and is religious. They’ve been indoctrinated with a pledge of allegiance and a set of values that everyone around them seems to follow. Few folks have the disposable income or the desire to travel outside their bubble of comfort and develop empathy for someone unlike them. People who are informed know that the root cause is capitalism, which has been peaking in the last few decades with lobbyists and citizens united. The average person wants to ignore politics, if they do vote, they vote like the people in their community. For them, a vote isn’t something that’s done to better the country, it’s something that prevents them from being ostracized.

Australia didn’t yet exist

The American mind wonders why the yolks are a deep orange instead of neon yellow.

If your blade tastes cardboard, you need to study more. You should be quickly and cleanly gliding through tape, between the edges of that pulpy/corrugated paper that grips like molasses.

As a San Diegan, I wish this were true. We’ve got 3 major military bases, the population to staff them, and the retired officers/enlisted folks that set down roots here when they were active. When I was a kid, I thought it was so cool that Top Gun was set here. Now, not so much.

I feel like people are massively downplaying the mission statement and potential impact of this organization because they’re caught up on the mental image they’ve conjured of a prisoner being forced to grow marijuana while being imprisoned for selling marijuana. That’s not at all what is happening.

As you mention, a decommissioned prison is being used as a legal grow site. The non-profit organization running the operation has the intention of using the income generated from this to free people that are were imprisoned for doing this very same thing before a legal pathway was possible.

It’s crazy to me that people were not set free once we flipped the switch and decided that selling marijuana was something that should be taxed and regulated. Yes, I get that it’s still possible to sell weed illegally if you don’t have the proper permits. I also understand that these people broke laws when that’s what the law was. But it just feels wrong. Especially considering this was a once a way for people with limited income opportunities to take control of their financial future, and now the people profiting from this are mostly people with stable finances that are looking to increase their profits.

Anyway, I applaud Last Prisoner Project and I think the idea of using a former prison has helped spread their message. I just wish there was a concise way to explain where the irony actually lies.

There’s a difference between offering opposition to outright fascism, and being the hope of the future of a political party. The bar is so low right now that I’m happy whenever I hear of someone pushing back in any amount, but AOCs passion and unrelenting sense of justice is fucking inspiring.

I want this to be so much better than it is:

https://www.dropout.tv/um-actually

I don’t get why we don’t call the “anti-woke” crowd “the asleep.” It seems like if they want to treat becoming awakened as an insult, we should be reminding them that they’re the ones who have their eyes closed and are attempting to ignore all of history.

The optimist in me believes that some day the majority of them will wake up, the same way the majority of Germans eventually denounced the nazi party.

The U.S. left from EIGHTY YEARS AGO is why those things exist. There’s been a drift to the right over time. It has RAPIDLY accelerated in the last 50 years. The present day left has been dragged right by trying to be polite in the face of so many evils. I’m not promoting both side-isms, the democrats are still far preferable to the republicans, but the greed and corruption are not exclusive to the right. The system is broken and my only hope of the incoming disaster is that it may get so bad that we are forced to enact real and substantive change. I only think that will happen if the horrors that come are extreme enough to defeat the current apathy of the country. GOP voter numbers went up less than a percent, DNC voter numbers went down over 12%.

Neither Linux nor Lemmy are a multi-billion dollar company.

If the advertisements were the product, then the exchange would be give ad, receive money. The advertisers are both giving the ad and the money to Meta. The thing the advertisers receive for giving the money are the potential customers. Meta is exchanging money for users. You are the product.

Meta’s entire model is categorizing the users so effectively and giving the advertisers the tools to target the users who are most likely to spend money once they see the ad. The advertisers pay Meta for access to users as well as the data about all of the different ways that groups of users are categorized. Then the advertiser can make a new ad or new product that will appeal to either a wider audience, an audience that is willing to pay a far larger amount of money than something costs to produce, or both.

The users and their data are the product of nearly every profitable business that provides something free to users. It’s up to you to decide how you feel about that. Maybe you see an ad for something and think “That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for!” and happily pay for it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Honestly, I love this, but I think the impersonator aspect cheapens it. Take clips of things he’s said and play them on a screen behind a podium across the stage from her. Have a moderator prompt the clips, have her rebuke/fact check them. Done.

He doesn’t want to debate? Fine, we’ll have the debate without him. He’s already said what the people need to know. We just need to cut through the mountains of indecipherable bullshit he’s said while meandering around the point. Do him a favor and edit that down to his actual stance, as succinctly and clearly as possible. Don’t turn it into a joke making fun of how terrible he is at speaking, show people what he really wants to do.

I’m beginning to think the play is for Joe to only last till the election because there’s no fucking way the country is going to learn about and be excited by one single person with the amount of time the completely incompetent DNC has left us with. If Joe decides he’s too banged up on day one, he can leave the office then.

Having worked (as a designer, not an engineer) on a PS3 launch tile, this post also aligns with my understanding.

I am both frightened (the race to market without considering the near- nor long-term costs to society as a whole neither ethics in many cases) and hopeful about the whole thing.

Same! I’m downright terrified about the impossibility of determining what should be legal/illegal because our politics move at a glacial pace and rarely involve experts in the field. Some bad actors can AND WILL really fuck things up here. I do think that the possibilities are a net positive. If I were in charge, I would pump the brakes until we could better ascertain what the fallout will be.

I have largely had bad experiences with AI assistants (coding, search, and other domains), except maybe helping with finding/generating code samples for libs/packages with poor or missing documentation (though I go to the docs and code first and those results aren’t always correct).

Maybe my current scenario is in some Venn diagram of the perfect situation, but I’ve been having the opposite experience. I’m a game designer changing from about a decade of Unreal (and another decade and a half of various proprietary engines) to learning Unity. I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what I want to do, I’ve just got no clue how to do it. I’ve been using a combination of GPT-4o and co-pilot to figure things out and it’s been great! GPT has been a combination of pair programming and Google replacement. I’ll tell it what I’m trying to do and it not only spits out a code example, but it describes what each section is doing. Occasionally it’ll tackle problems from the wrong end, like yesterday it was placing a UI element and then clamping it to ensure it was drawn on screen instead of figuring out the proper screen space scale first and properly converting world space to that specific space/scale. But if you’re familiar with the methodology and need help with the syntax/structure, it’s kind of amazing. Co-pilot is SO FAST! I’ve got no idea where a property I’m looking for is being stored and that shit auto-completes (almost always) exactly what I’m looking for, purely based on context or comments. Some times it hallucinates properties that don’t exist, but the IDE calls my attention to that pretty quickly and co-pilot usually sets me on the right path.

It’s happening right now with AI. It’s currently in the Usenet phase. A few people understand it and are using it to positively alter their daily lives by improving their ability to gather and filter information, but (ironically) thanks to the internet the vast majority of people are distracted by some niches like generative art or writing book reports. In the next year or two, we’ll start to see mainstream people have AI personal assistants that will have conversations with other AIs. Even without the robotics component, daily life will change. Remember before you could order Amazon same day delivery, or Door Dash a meal? Imagine that level (and better) of tracking and communication for every service you could need, all completely automated. Your sink broke? A perfectly fine plumber can be here in 20 mins, be advised to expect an 80% chance that you’ll see their buttcrack, a 40% chance that they aren’t wearing deodorant, and a 100% chance there will be multiple off-color remarks about the current political situation. Does this bother you? Your AI already knows and an instant deep dive of reviews and social media has found a plumber that may in fact be your soul mate. They’ll be here on Thursday. Your AI queued up a playlist of your mutual favorite songs.

In a slower but possibly as life altering revolution, AR. Apple is starting this with Apple Vision Pro, but this will need to be miniaturized down to a discrete pair of glasses (like Meta Ray-Bans) with 3 pieces of tech that aren’t there yet:

1. Even smaller computers (remember when they were the size of shipping containers?)
2. More efficient batteries
3. A display technology that both adjusts focus depending on the distance your eyes are focusing at while also occluding reality.

I’m confident these will exist in our lifetime, but probably not within the next decade. Once they all come together, the way people experience life will change. Both for the better and worse. If capitalism hasn’t been legislatively reigned in a bit, the ads are going to be insane.

They’re not making a choice. They’re anti-choice.

Bastille Day is next weekend. I think that’s enough time to order and assemble a guillotine. IKEA has those, right?

Ah yeah, Pechanga Arena was just “The Sports Arena” in the era before sponsoring venues was a thing. They still to a swap meet in the parking lot of that place every weekend. Random other info about that place, they shot a scene from Almost Famous at one of the freight entrances there.