If you think ‘voluntary’ is acceptable for anything important you want corporations to do, you have no business making decisions about real life. If it’s voluntary, they’ll only do it if it benefits them.

If those Internet duds that get mad about black people in video games spent like half that energy being mad about, like, wage theft, we’d be so much better off.

If they thought about things and came to good conclusions afterwards, they probably wouldn’t be driving this kind of car to begin with. The people who are driving it are probably not good thinkers.

Apply it to healthcare, science, finances, and the world will become a better place, especially in healthcare.

That’s all kind of moot if we continue down the capitalist hellscape express. What good is an AI that can diagnose cancer if most people can’t afford access? What good is AI writing novels if our homes are destroyed by climate change induced disasters?

Those problems are mostly political, and AI isn’t going to fix them. The people that probably could be replaced with AI, the shitty “leaders” and such, are not going to voluntarily step down.

There’s a shared theme with like all of humanity’s woes: people don’t care that much.

From pollution to injustice to shitty websites, if people cared just a little more the problem would be dramatically reduced or even eliminated.

But so many people are just apathetic. Overwhelmed and checked out.

Most people like to be productive.

There is enough money and resources. It’s mostly just consolidated in the hands of the rich. You’ve probably seen https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ . If you spread that around, you get more economic activity.

Lots of people choose to do stuff instead of just chilling. Go look at all the open source projects that are just made by hobbyists, or community gardens, or any number of other self organized projects. Capitalism with all the profit is theft bits isn’t the only way.

I’m not sure I follow. What do you think is bullshit?

Someone still needs to do work, but not everyone needs to work all the time.

We would probably be fine if people who wanted to work just kept working. Or if we had universal basic income, so people could more freely choose if they wanted to trade their time+labor for something else.

Like, if absolutely no one wants to tend the fields then that’s going to be a problem for food. I think there are enough people who would do it because they want to, especially for jobs that are local. But even if not, you could still offer money. Having basic income (or some other mechanism to assure basic needs are met) in place means it’s much less coercive, because it’s no longer a question of labor or suffer

No. Your reading of it is unusual, in most contexts. It almost always means “agreement, and I have nothing of substance to add”.

It can be rude if the thing you’ve said should warrant a substantial response. Like if you wrote “my brother just died in a car wreck”, a thumbs up (or probably any emoji) would be an inappropriate response. Heavier stuff warrants whole words.

But if it’s like “Can you get cat food at the store? The kind we always get” then a thumbs up is an acceptable shorthand for "yes, I understand and commit to this request "

true, though sometimes i find the more verbose style easier to read, and more maintainable (eg: you want to do something else in the block, you can just add a line instead of changing your ternary / etc). Small things

I had a thought earlier in the bathroom about AI. It’s like building a fancy indoor toilet when you don’t have plumbing.

If people’s basic needs were met, housing food health care all that, then it wouldn’t really matter as much if people want to fuck around with AI. People who do things for passion could still do so.

But we live in a capitalist hell, this AI stuff will primarily benefit the ownership class while everyone else suffers.

I don’t need a fancy toilet. I need clean running water.

I’ve heard of this one. Maybe I’ll check it out.

The downside of reading a lot of depressing non fiction is I increasingly feel like I’m living in a cuckoo clock, and get frustrated with how everyone else seems oblivious and uncaring.

I guess? With enough money you can just buy bonds, which sort of depend on consumerism but indirectly. Some municipal bonds return like 5%. 5% of a shit load of money is enough to live on.

Depends on how it’s set up. If the setting is going into the env it’s a string, so I’d expect some sort of

if os.getenv("this_variable", "false").lower() == "true":   # or maybe "in true, yes, on, 1" if you want to be weird like yaml
  this_variable = True
else:
  this_variable = False

Except maybe a little more elegant and not typed on my phone.

But if the instructions are telling the user to edit the settings directly, like where I wrote this_variable=True, they’d need to case it correctly there.

Is the backend Python and the frontend JavaScript? Because then that would happen and just be normal, because Boolean true is True in python.

Related: the idea that everyone needs to work all the time isn’t really true anymore. If we were in like 3000 bce in a small farming village outside Ur, yeah, people gotta pitch in so we don’t get eaten by wildlife, the neighboring tribe, or whatever.

But in 2025ce, where so many jobs have so much filler nonsense? And when the rich can just live on investment income? No, the whole “work or starve” thing isn’t needed anymore.

We should have basic income for all and public housing. Let people pursue what they want. Maybe it’s art. Maybe they just want to take care of the local library. Maybe they just want to be a local barfly that keeps the tavern interesting. Who knows? But wage slavery needs to go.

Yeah I realized admitting fault is kind of a power move. You can just be like “oh! I was wrong. Woops” and what might have been a like hour long argument about some unimportant minutia instead just wraps up. Nothing bad happens.

Yeah, you have to make them see you as a member of a shared in-group. That’s the most important thing to them (and many people, honestly. we’re all susceptible to tribalism and such)

I thought mercurial was older than git, but apparently it’s 12 days younger.

I’m going to guess

• poor media coverage
• media is explicitly hostile to protests and pro trump/right-wing-extremism
• many people are living paycheck to paycheck + we have minimal labor protection
• years of left-wing organizations being kneecapped (eg: the murder of fred hampton)

A lot of people are angry but there’s not really much organization. As much as I would love someone to take 50,000 of their closest friends, march down to DC, and shoot every republican in the head, without years of organizing that’s just a fantasy. Unfortunately, the right wing has been doing years of organizing and it’s now bearing fruit for them.