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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Captain Obvious would like to chime in: (sorry 😅)

    Every color that we see is created by different types of receptors being stimulated together. A linear combination of three of these types. Arguably there isn’t really a wavelength that only stimulates one type of receptor exclusively as their absorbtion areas overlap - so it isn’t even that precise to call one receptor the “green” receptor as it sees a continuum of wavelength (of which a lot are also detected by the (so-called) “red” receptor.

    It’s a little egg-and-hen-problem with the naming here.a way out of it would be to only speak about spectra if it’s in the physical realm and color of its in the percetral realm.



  • That happens when a brand is about one person. Musk made Tesla all about himSelf. In a way he was the product - you could buy his cool car. Be a part of the company with that cool weird funny CEO. He posts memes just like you!!! Loom at his funny flamethrower! How random! Hahaha! He would also lie about so many features that nobody could actually believe it was a lie (full self driving next year™, battery range etc). So they still went ahead and bought it - and had a lot of sunken cost associated to his cool image.

    But oh no! It turns out the guy is actually an asshole, a racist, likes nazis, is an delusional and unpredictable drug addict, not that smart, born with money from aparthheit-enabled-exploitation - who could’ve known!?!?

    now people don’t like him, so they stop buying his product.



  • Sorry, are you saying other people should be allowed to “put down” someone whenever they decide it’s mercy? Are you applying your example about putting down pets directly to humans?

    You know who had a big euthanasia program? The Nazis. They murdered people who were unworthy to live. They killed (among many groups of people) people born with disabilities and justified it as “mercy”.

    I think you meam something else so please be careful what you are writing. It’s easily misunderstood.










  • We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.

    So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.

    Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.

    This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).

    It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.

    Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.


  • I agree, but as long as we still have capitalism I support measures that at least slow down the destructiveness of capitalism. AI is like a new powertool in capitalism’s arsenal to dismantle our humanity. Sure we can use it for cool things as well. But right now it’s used mostly to automate stuff that makes us human - art, music and so on. Not useful stuff like loading the dishwasher for me. More like writing a letter for me to invite my friends to my birthday. Very cool. But maybe the work I put in doing this myself is making my friends feel appreciated?

    Edit: It’s also nice to at least have an app that takes this maximalist approach. Then people can choose. If they’re half-assing it there will be more and more ai-features creeping in over time. One compromise after the next until it’s like all the other apps. It’s also important to have such a maximalist stand in order to gauge the scale in a way.




  • It’s also a great example why these mega corps should be broken up into smaller pieces.

    If forced arbitration persists (and this argumentation from Disney is successful and then used as precedence) any service used from one company can be used to forever ban you from taking legal action against that company again even if the service and the reason for the legal action have nothing to do with each other.

    Am I right in understanding that this case is about someone dying from eating in a Disney owned restaurant that by accident was a Disney+ subscriber?

    If one company owns everything like Amazon, Google, Apple and in the future maybe even water supply, garbage collection, operates my car and is my insurer or bank account (and owner of one of the 4 remaining fast food chains in the country) how can people actually sue a company then ?