hobbes64's recent activity

  1. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of July 6 in ~society

    hobbes64
    Link Parent
    Probably because it's an outrage that we don't expect more from our representatives, who really represent powerful lobbyists and donors instead of the people who elect them. Here's a humor post...

    Probably because it's an outrage that we don't expect more from our representatives, who really represent powerful lobbyists and donors instead of the people who elect them.

    Here's a humor post from The Atlantic that points out the situation:

    If Other Jobs Were Like a U.S. Senator’s - The Atlantic

    It’s time for your scheduled open-heart surgery. Unfortunately, no one has seen or heard from the surgeon in weeks, since the Incident. The nurse says that she spoke with him at length on a wide variety of important subjects and that he had never been more eloquent. “Will he be along shortly?” you ask. “I hired him to perform a specific job, and I would like him to do that.” The nurse is appalled by this disrespect for the doctor’s privacy. You lie there for several weeks, your chest flaps held open by clamps.

    You visit the zoo. THE RHINO IS IN, a large sign informs you. But you don’t see any rhinoceroses, just some zookeepers crawling around in a rhino suit. “We’ve worked with the rhinoceros for years,” the zookeepers explain, when confronted. “We know exactly what he’d do in this situation.”

    “Do we need to get another rhino, though?” you ask. “Is there a rhino in this zoo, currently?” No one answers. You don’t deserve an answer.

    Your child’s babysitter has not been heard from in weeks. First Lady Edith Wilson is answering all correspondence on her behalf. “That’s fine,” you say. “There’s precedent for this.”

    You are watching the Olympics. The gymnasts simply don’t show up! An ESPN commentator assures you that he called one of them and spoke for 20 minutes about the situation in Iran. “Did you get any response?” you ask. “Or did you just talk to them?” Everyone says this question is rude and ill-timed.

    You are at the dentist’s office. No one has seen or heard from the dentist in months, but he’s been making stock trades. “That’s something,” you and the receptionist agree. “Should I wait?” you ask.

    “He’ll tell you what’s going on in due time,” the receptionist says stiffly. You wait. Your tooth aches.

    “I’ve finished all the Far Side compilations,” you tell the receptionist. “Should I keep waiting?” She shrugs.

    You have called the fire department. “Don’t worry,” the 911 dispatcher tells you. “The firefighters are thriving!”

    “That’s great!” you say. “And they’ll be here soon, to put out the fire?” There is a long pause on the other end of the line. “Because if they won’t,” you say, “I’d really like to know.”

    You call your senator to complain about all these goings-on. “Hi,” you say. “I just think there’s a certain standard of, well, presence to which you should be able to hold people in important positions!”

    “The senator agrees,” the staffer answers. “He was just saying so at length this afternoon. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any video footage of it.” You sigh. Seems about right.

    5 votes

  2. Comment on Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles in ~games

    hobbes64
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    Hostess Discontinues Physical Twinkies - The Onion

    Hostess Discontinues Physical Twinkies - The Onion

    ORRVILLE, OH—Stressing that the change in the product line was a necessary adjustment to keep apace in the digital age, snack food manufacturer Hostess announced Monday that it would discontinue physical Twinkies. “While we know fans have been collecting Twinkies for years, we believe that online-only snack cakes will help reduce physical clutter and allow for faster cream consumption without all the lengthy installations and updates,” said Hostess general manager Judd Freitag, adding that only 3% of the brand’s current customer base still purchases tangible sponge cakes. “Now instead of driving all the way to the store and picking out a box from the shelf, Hostess fans can just do a brief 200-gigabyte download from the comfort of their home and start snack time whenever they want. While this decision may seem unpopular, I believe we are merely ahead of the curve, and the baking industry will be fully online by 2029.” Freitag added that the company reserved the right to revoke the license of any purchased Twinkies at any time

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Cambria, California banned fireworks. Then came the dogs. in ~society

    hobbes64
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    Due to the paywall, I wasn't able to read the article to see why Cambria is special for this, but I think that almost half of the cities in California ban fireworks. And people set off a lot of...

    Due to the paywall, I wasn't able to read the article to see why Cambria is special for this, but I think that almost half of the cities in California ban fireworks.

    And people set off a lot of fireworks in areas where they have been banned.

    (5 minute research shows there's about 500 municipalities and fireworks are legal in under 300).

    3 votes

  4. Comment on The Atlantic republishes JD Vance article about Donald Trump from 2016 in ~society

    hobbes64
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    The Atlantic also published another article that refers to this one and has very harsh criticism about Vance's hypocrisy. What J. D. Vance Once Knew ...

    The Atlantic also published another article that refers to this one and has very harsh criticism about Vance's hypocrisy.

    What J. D. Vance Once Knew

    ...

    Which brings me back to J. D. Vance. Ten summers ago he understood, better than most, the threat Trump posed to America. Vance, who described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” thought Trump was an “idiot.” He admitted to a friend at the time that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” But then ambition made its offer, and Vance, who had seen the danger so clearly, discovered he could see his way around it. The first stop was the Senate; the next was the vice presidency.

    Along the way, the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy—a teller of hard truths, a morally serious person committed to honesty even when it cost him, beholden to no one—became a cynic, a partner in a cruel enterprise, a peddler of lies he is surely clever enough to recognize as such, a man whose only fixed commitment is to his own rise to power.

    In his memoir, Vance wrote, “Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.” It’s a poignant line, referring to a man raised amid the addiction and volatility he feared he might inherit. The monster Vance feared was a private one; the monster he became is a public one. His legacy turns out to be a much more destructive than the one he was afraid of inheriting.

    The past decade in America has been a lost decade. Far too many Americans have cheered on the men tearing at the temple. But Americans can now see, later than they should have, the cost of the damage. It is within our power to make it whole. What remains is to find the will. There is a name for those who do: renewers of ruined cities, repairers of the breach, restorers of streets in which to dwell.

    21 votes

  5. Comment on The Atlantic republishes JD Vance article about Donald Trump from 2016 in ~society

    hobbes64
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    To many, Donald Trump feels good, but he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis, and the eventual comedown will be harsh.

    To many, Donald Trump feels good, but he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis, and the eventual comedown will be harsh.

    What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.

    The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.

    I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.

    9 votes

  7. Comment on Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy in ~humanities.languages

    hobbes64
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    Interesting, I’ve only seen git used pejoratively, never as meaning “you two”. I probably first heard it from Monty Python, they used it a lot in skits to roughly mean “twit”.

    Interesting, I’ve only seen git used pejoratively, never as meaning “you two”.

    I probably first heard it from Monty Python, they used it a lot in skits to roughly mean “twit”.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on To my fellow Americans: Happy 4th of July, I hope you end the day with the same number of fingers you started with! in ~talk

    hobbes64
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    Happy 4th! This time of year takes me back to when I was a kid and how exciting little things like fireworks are when you are young. So I'd like to write a few things about that simple thing, and...

    Happy 4th!

    This time of year takes me back to when I was a kid and how exciting little things like fireworks are when you are young. So I'd like to write a few things about that simple thing, and not about the current political mess.

    Where I grew up, fireworks were always illegal and not sold, but they were in neighboring cities, so everyone would drive over there and get some. The type they sold were marketed as "safe and sane" because they didn't explode or shoot projectiles. So mostly they were cones that made a fountain of sparks a few feet in the air, and also some sparklers and caps and "snakes" that would stain the concrete with black soot.
    Although I said that the fireworks didn't explode, some could be easily altered so that they would. There was a type called "Piccolo Pete" which were small and burned quickly, making a loud whistling noise. And everyone knew that you could take pliers and pinch the cardboard tube about halfway down, which would cause them to explode once the burn got to that point.
    I was a very little kid when I would use these fireworks and light them. I think the most dangerous were the sparklers, which were bits of metal wire coated with gunpowder and whatever else, and they would glow white-hot after they burned. We would have an old coffee can filled with water to douse them afterward so we did have some safety prep I guess.
    When I was a little older, maybe in my early teens, I was able to get some more dangerous fireworks. I knew some cousins or neighbors who could get them from Mexico and bring them back. So I would go around for hours with a brick or two of these, and blow up all kinds of model airplanes and spider webs or blow soda cans into the air. We would also sometimes get bottle rockets and that was really fun.

    Somehow I never injured myself but I did get a lot of little burns on my hands.

    On the 5th of July, the streets would be littered with used fireworks. My cousin and I would go around and check if there were unburnt ones, or any "duds" that we could fix or something. I remember that when I took them apart, the inner paper was usually newspaper. Frequently the paper would have Chinese writing which was pretty interesting and kind of funny to me.

    When I was in my later teens, I had a neighbor who would get his hands on very dangerous fireworks, including "m80s" and "buzz bombs". m80s were very illegal and dangerous, and could definitely remove fingers or even worse. I'm not sure if all of them were like this, but the ones he had had waterproof fuses which made them even more dangerous. The buzz bombs were probably more dangerous still. They had a plastic propeller on them, and when lit they would spin and fly into the air, then explode. Somehow we all survived the year we had those, but in the next morning we saw that a window had been broken by one of the explosions. One of the m80s probably caused a rock to fly into the window. Luckily rocks or glass wasn't thrown into one of our faces.

    The police in our city definitely knew that people were setting off fireworks in the streets, but it was mostly tolerated. I think they would try to stop people who were doing skyrockets, but only if they did them for more than a few minutes. It definitely was so widespread that they could not have really done anything about it anyway.

    Now that I'm grown, I live in a city where the fireworks are illegal for miles around, and most people go to an officially sanctioned event where professionals set off skyrockets and the fire department and paramedics are standing by. It's nice, but nowhere near as exciting as being a little kid playing with fire and doing something slightly wrong.

    9 votes

  9. Comment on Consequences of advertising and enshittification on the Internet in ~tech

    hobbes64
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    I have a different take on this. TLDR: let’s keep this in perspective, these websites are neat and fun but not a basic right, and I think that the quality of these things rise and fall over time....

    I have a different take on this.

    TLDR: let’s keep this in perspective, these websites are neat and fun but not a basic right, and I think that the quality of these things rise and fall over time.

    When I was a little kid, we only had broadcast TV. There were about 5 channels and you had to turn the thing on at a specific time of day if you wanted to watch a specific show. During a 30 minute show, there would be about 8 minutes of advertisements. I watched many hours of television and the same commercials repeated over and over. Decades later, I can quote many of those commercials.
    Then videotape came out and HBO and Netflix and there was a window of time when you could watch a lot of things with almost zero advertising. It was pretty great.

    Nobody owed me the shows I watched. If I hated the commercials, I would choose not to watch the shows and read a book instead.

    I used to talk to friends on the telephone for hours. Because that’s all we had. There wasn’t any reddit or facebook or discord. So we talked on the phone. In a house with a wire, and my dad would yell at me sometimes because my sister wasn’t able to use it while I was.

    More recently, I used to watch quite a bit of YouTube. Then they added too many commercials so I stopped using it. But then I found the freetube app and SponsorBlock so I watch YouTube again. Sometimes freetube stops working for a few days so I do something else with my time.

    Nobody owes you social media. Every once in a while, a new form of entertainment or communication appears and it’s good for a while. Then it gets bad and something takes its place.

    Rich people being able to pay for premium ad-free websites is no more unfair than rich people getting good seats at a sports event.

    13 votes

  10. Comment on Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles in ~games

    hobbes64
    Link Parent
    All those games that need the fast storage already install themselves to hard drive. Whenever you buy a new physical copy of a PS5 game you have to wait 30 minutes or whatever while it's doing...

    All those games that need the fast storage already install themselves to hard drive. Whenever you buy a new physical copy of a PS5 game you have to wait 30 minutes or whatever while it's doing that. They just make you put the physical disk in the drive as a key to prevent you from loaning it to a friend while you play the copy.
    Since they're copying one disk, why not copy 2 or 3?
    The problem for PS5 owners is that the hard disk only fits a few games so you have to keep uninstalling and reinstalling if you go back to previous games. This is a problem whether you have digital or physical, but the physical drive is slower than the cloud usually.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles in ~games

    hobbes64
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    It's true that games are bigger than the size of the current disk technology. But that problem has been solved in the past. PS6 could continue using disks. In the 80s, many games, such as Infocom...

    It's true that games are bigger than the size of the current disk technology. But that problem has been solved in the past. PS6 could continue using disks.

    In the 80s, many games, such as Infocom text games or Ultima games, didn't fit on one floppy disk so there would be two or three floppies in the box and you'd have to swap them during gameplay.
    In the 90s, there were playstation games such as Final Fantasy 7 that needed 3 CDs. Again, you had to swap them as the game played.
    Once PCs had hard drives, it was common to have an installation process which copied multiple disks to the HD. There's no reason why that can't happen again.
    Sure it costs more to put more than one disk in a box. So charge more for it.

    5 votes

  12. Comment on Could I travel back in time? How physics tackles the paradoxes – with Jim Al-Khalili in ~science

    hobbes64
    Link Parent
    I don’t remember where I got the following idea from, but it may have been a marvel multiverse thing lol. But, If you could travel back in time, maybe it could be individual because you are...

    I don’t remember where I got the following idea from, but it may have been a marvel multiverse thing lol. But,

    If you could travel back in time, maybe it could be individual because you are creating a fork of the entire universe where that time travel event happened.

    Actually you don’t really need to create a fork if there are infinite universes you could just jump to that one where you had traveled.

    Note that this presupposes that time travel is even possible in some parallel universe. I’m not claiming there are parallel universes where everyone is a talking piece of toast like would happen in a Rick & Morty cartoon.

  13. Comment on US Congress clears housing bill, cementing a rare bipartisan feat in ~society

    hobbes64
    Link Parent
    This analogy is mostly true, except the family watches a show every day that tells them that they love eating diarrhea which is chock full of vitamins and will make Jesus love you. Also the owner...

    This analogy is mostly true, except the family watches a show every day that tells them that they love eating diarrhea which is chock full of vitamins and will make Jesus love you. Also the owner is handing you $3,000 as he says it. He got the money from the diarrhea vendor.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on Could I travel back in time? How physics tackles the paradoxes – with Jim Al-Khalili in ~science

    hobbes64
    Link Parent
    I don't think it necessarily would work that way. Maybe the time travel is like being on a train track, and all the moments that you would travel to are part of that track. If the train goes in...

    I don't think it necessarily would work that way. Maybe the time travel is like being on a train track, and all the moments that you would travel to are part of that track. If the train goes in reverse, you don't end up in a building near the track. You end up on another point on the track.

    In other words, you aren't traveling to infinite points of time. You are traveling to a point in space-time that the earth was on at some point.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on On vulgar materialism in ~society

    hobbes64
    Link Parent
    Also the article doesn’t properly weigh how much influence the oligarchs have over the populace through their control of media. In western countries this is Facebook and Fox News and the New York...

    Also the article doesn’t properly weigh how much influence the oligarchs have over the populace through their control of media. In western countries this is Facebook and Fox News and the New York Times etc, all basically controlled by billionaires and free to manufacture consent however they want.
    Even in the most authoritarian state, the leader doesn’t have unlimited power so they rely on propaganda through media controlled by oligarchs.

    9 votes

  16. Comment on Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix 2026 - Race Weekend Discussion in ~sports.motorsports

    hobbes64
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    Maybe this is the start of "The Summer of George"

    Maybe this is the start of "The Summer of George"

    7 votes

  17. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    hobbes64
    Link Parent
    This is awesome, and also the top posts in r/poisonai are hilarious

    This is awesome, and also the top posts in r/poisonai are hilarious

    4 votes

  18. Comment on Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie in ~humanities

    hobbes64
    Link Parent
    These tech dudes probably believe this stuff, but they are also saying stupid shit for engagement because that's the ridiculous world we live in now. Just yesterday The Atlantic posted My New Life...

    These tech dudes probably believe this stuff, but they are also saying stupid shit for engagement because that's the ridiculous world we live in now.

    Just yesterday The Atlantic posted My New Life With the Palantir Chore Coat which has a few sociopathic tech bro billionaire quotes:

    The Palantir chore coat is made by the same Palantir named in homage to Lord of the Rings, the same Palantir that has developed a reputation as ruthlessly committed to any number of national-security imperatives, and, yes, the same Palantir that builds AI tools for the military and tracks migrants for ICE. The mysterious tech giant now also wants to sell you outerwear. Only a tiny Palantir logo is embroidered into the coat’s left breast pocket, but flip the coat inside out and you’ll find a message from Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, sewn into the lining.

    ASK YOURSELF CONSTANTLY, AM I WINNING? IF THE ANSWER IS YES, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. CHAOS IS TOLERABLE; PAIN IS TOLERABLE. THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS TO WIN.

    ...

    Mine arrived two weeks later in a giant box labeled SOFT WEAR COLLECTION. The package included a placard signed by Sankar, a SOFTWARE DOMINATION sticker, a postcard urging me to CHEW THE GLASS

    The end of the article sums up this stuff pretty nicely.

    In that sense, the jacket is perfect. No other product better encapsulates how exhausting and predictable it is to be online right now. The merch-industrial complex has come so far from KFC-branded clogs and Panera’s baguette purse that even a company like Palantir is hawking swag for the likes and lolz. Next month, Palantir plans to release a tennis skirt and, to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, boxing gloves. One day, Younes said, he wants to drop a Palantir espresso machine. Sure, why not? It’s more than a bit sad. But so is the alternative, in which Palantir disappears entirely into the shadows. At least online, Palantir is just like everyone else.

    5 votes

  19. Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech

    hobbes64
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    The problem I have with treating an LLM as conscious is that I don’t know where it physically is. If it’s a physical being (a human or a dolphin for example) I know it’s inside a body that resides...

    The problem I have with treating an LLM as conscious is that I don’t know where it physically is.

    If it’s a physical being (a human or a dolphin for example) I know it’s inside a body that resides within a small cubic space that is completely knowable.

    If it’s HAL 9000, I know that it’s inside the Discovery One spaceship, and maybe specifically in a locked room with orange lighting.

    If it’s Claude, I don’t know where it is. Maybe it’s in aws US East 1, but is that even a single data center? If I ask Claude opus a few questions over an hour, is it even going to the same circuits, or is it many different circuits and just the memory/context of a few megabytes is carried around?
    So if we give rights to AI in cloud computing, what has the rights?

    It’s a super duper Chinese room.

    3 votes

  20. Comment on Should the plural of "milf" be "milfs" or "milves"? in ~humanities.languages

    hobbes64
    Link Parent
    You mispronounced gifs though, I think you meant jifs.

    You mispronounced gifs though, I think you meant jifs.

    12 votes