jcg

Testing scams

Any non-scams yet? Or is it safe to assume anything that looks like a scam, is one?

Computer monitors are significantly more expensive for the same size and are overkill for the applications TVs are generally used for.

I personally go for "wizzywig" but to each their own.

Yeah, what do people expect? It's not like they own massive, self-sufficient data centers on several continents.

Emacs really can do anything huh

For the record, I don't think focusing solely on taking money away from the richest people is the only way to lift people out of poverty, I think there are many factors that create poverty and that there being billionaires at all is a contributor to it due to the power they wield with it. Mind you, I don't really include millionaires in the "wealthy" category here, I'm talking about billionaires - those with many orders of magnitude more wealth than somebody you'd just consider "rich". I'm certainly not against feeding, housing, and educating people and contribute to efforts to do so locally. I was thinking more along the lines of hypothetically long term eradicating poverty, not how to realistically approach treating it today so that's probably where our wires got crossed.

It's not fair to apply that defeatist outlook to one perspective and not the other. You can say that about your idea too, of lifting people out of poverty. How do we lift people out of poverty when the people writing legislation and funding elections have no concept of poor and no incentive to give a shit about the poor?

Here's the thing, if we imagine for a moment that change can be brought on, then taking money out of billionaire pockets is inherently necessary to solve the issue of poverty. Poverty is not a problem of static amounts of money, it's a problem of inequality. In the real world it looks like some people have a few dollars to their name while others have billions, but it'll work exactly the same if some people have a few thousand dollars to their name while others have trillions.

Imo, if we don't "level the playing field" at least a little bit, what'll happen is that as we uplift people out of poverty in one way - e.x. giving them a home, feeding them, and educating them - it'll just get more expensive to do everything else like eat out, go to movies, go on vacation, have internet, have a phone, have electricity and water. We as a society will have freed up some additional money by subsidizing education, housing, food but if left unchecked the wealthier among us will seize the opportunity to take that. And they will, because they have an incentive to. But if you take that extra money away - you can alleviate the incentive and make it not so appealing to try and take every last dollar. And yes, current income tax in most places does not account properly for how billionaires actually hold their money, but they could in this hypothetical scenario. I'm not gonna try and draft legislation here but it's certainly possible, though it might cause all the billionaires to just leave.

And that's really what all these guys saying "AI will take er jobs" don't understand. Good programmers are not just good coders, coding is really the easy part. They're also good analysts and listeners. I understand what he's saying - if you spend time accruing specific domain knowledge instead of computer science then you can perhaps make better, bespoke solutions because the "coding" can be handled by AI. But in present day, AI makes garbage code all the time and you'll be left there not being able to do amything about it because it doesn't make any sense to you. So who do you call? Someone who can code. Even if we get to this hypothetical dream scenario where you tell an AI to do something and it just does it perfect (gigantic IF), who's making that AI? The interface for it? The important safety nets to make sure it doesn't go on a rampage? Itself? Too much context is already lost in conversations between humans, let alone an AI. I can think of one kind of AI that would be able to do it perfectly though (assuming AIs could be perfected, that is), and that's an AI pre-equipped with full understanding of the domain. But then in that case, why do you need the human in the mix at all?

Are you a mod of something? Might be related to that, cause I got an invite too and the only thing I can think of is I have moderation activity.

Nothing you can do. This is the implicit (and sometimes explicit) contract we have with cloud services, that they'll keep our data safe and keep the lights on forever. If you think about it, though, unless you're paying for it this is untenable. A single user, when paying with their attention, will only ever generate a fairly fixed amount monthly. And yet the cost of keeping them on as a user grows steadily over time as more data is accumulated.

Man, I can't believe people fell for this. Seeing it now, the copy on the "ad" is just horrendous.

How much for your markdown files?