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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Why buy a new car? It would be cheaper to build your own car at this point.

    Edison Motors (in British Columbia, Canada) can do a full EV conversion on any pre-1995 vehicle (few complex electronics that require futzing with) for $15k-$50k CAD depending on the type of vehicle and its power requirements.

    Pick up a late-80s Type II VW Jetta and it’s likely to be at that lower end.

    Pick up a late-70s dent side Ford F-350 dually, and it’s likely to be closer to that upper end.

    Still, you’re looking at half to a quarter of what a new vehicle costs.












  • everyone can see the AI BS right out in the open

    To me it is four things in particular:

    1. How AI use erodes skills in the subject AI is being used to assist in. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been demonstrated across all industries from software developers to radiologists. Most experience a 10-20% erosion in their skill set within the first 12 months of AI use, but others in the study groups have seen up to a 40% erosion in their skill sets.
    2. How AI use shuts down critical thinking, and makes users more stupid. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been clearly demonstrated by MRI scans of the prefrontal cortex while users are actively using AI.
    3. How AI use makes the user slower. This is the only user point that is not 100%, as only less than 2% of the most senior and skilled users show a slight increase in work completed… after more than 12 months of using AI. Projections have been made on the other 98%, and over 90% of them will never work faster with AI than without it, regardless of training or experience.
    4. The gratuitous hallucinations, which are only increasing in scope and severity with every AI generation. It arises entirely from the constraints the AI are rewarded with - providing no answer is weighted just as negatively as a wrong answer - and anywhere from 60-80% of all responses are hallucinatory or incorrect in some fashion, depending on the current model.

    In prior generations, any industry with such performance would be laughed clear out of the boardroom.

    But because capitalism is desperately seeking a solution to what they perceive as a problem - how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour - AI is being adopted hand-over-fist.

    After all, the underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.








  • Aside from the Rotary Un-Phone, there are pretty much no dumb phones anymore. Those that market themselves as dumb are just reskinned full-fat platforms.

    Even almost all flip phones are smart phones with a dumb skin, as they run either Android or KaiOS.

    The main reason why I would switch is for device security - a true dumb phone OS that operates purely out of the ROM and has no ability to install anything that could survive a reboot.

    And for something that primitive, it would be a flip phone on par with the Motorola StarTac. Simple black-on-green screen, low-res display, with a calendar and address book as the only non-phone, non-SMS functionality.