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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 6th, 2024

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  • One fun version of this. I once read a fanfiction that included a character with an interesting trait. They were cursed to be completely, hopelessly, comically lost. They get lost going to the bathroom in their own home. They end up hundreds or thousands of miles from where they intend to be.

    But the tradeoff is, if there is ever somewhere they actually really need to be, they will be there every time. A loved one about to get hit by a bus? By random chance, the character would just happen to be wandering at the right place and time to intervene. Their kid has an important school play they need to attend? They’ll by dumb luck find their way to the auditorium. They live a life completely unable to get to where they want to go, but in turn they will always be where they need to be.



  • I propose a new law. If the victim of a murder is someone who owns a fortune more than 1000x the median household income, then someone on trial for the murder can make an affirmative defense that it was ok, simply because, “he needed killin.'”

    Literally, if you can convince the jury that the guy had it coming, you get off Scott free. Anyone who wants to avoid potentially being killed and having their killer escape unpunished can avoid this fate by simply not hoarding wealth over the critical threshold. Those who hoard such fortunes will just have to live with enough kindness that no one could ever convince a jury that they deserved to die. We’ll end up with no billionaires or every billionaire becoming like Fred Rogers. I’ll take either outcome.




  • Yeah, I enjoy the clankers meme as much as anyone, but it’s not hard to see how it could quickly end up in a dark place. Consider this. How hard would it be for the term “clankers” to drift from referring to the LLMs themselves to instead refer to the people who use LLMs? I could certainly see the word being adopted as an epithet for the fools that produce AI slop.

    And now we’ve shifted from just joking about robots to actually referring to living human beings with a slur.




  • Generally true politically. But these are questions that need to be asked.

    Yes, it’s tempting to say, “a human life is priceless, no price to save a life is too high.” But there are an infinite number of ways dollars can be spent to save lives. And by making cars more expensive, that puts less money in people’s pockets to pay for healthcare, quality nutrition, etc.

    What if someone invented a miraculous but expensive safety device? Imagine if someone invented a device that decreased traffic deaths by 95%, but at the cost of $250k per vehicle. We would make vehicles incredibly safe, but at the cost of completely shutting working people out from vehicle ownership. Would it still be worth it? There will always be some point where safety just isn’t worth the cost. Not because we don’t care about human life, but simply because there are many potential ways for us to spend money to enhance human safety and well-being.