FRYD

I like to make Velveeta mac and cheese with added quesadilla mix shredded cheese and some cayenne pepper. Makes it thick and with a little kick. Sometimes I’ll put it in a small dish and bake it until the top is brown too.

Huh, fair enough. Still, I do delivery work as my day job and I’m not worried about a box on wheels taking my job.

A single company has some robots delivering short distances in three affluent FL cities. Boxes on wheels will work in a tiny fraction of places around the country and the world. The vast majority of the data collected is useless for them. The technology doesn’t exist to do any better either.

Like I said, Coco Robotics the company behind the FL robot deliveries is more likely to be a company hoping to be bought on the promise they can do more in the future than actually expecting to do any more. They’re private, so we don’t even know what their actual economics look like.

You’re not wrong, but my point was the fact that automated deliveries are a far off fantasy. By the time the physical technology exists to do this, the collected data will be irrelevant. Sure it would be better as a communist fantasy, but the reality is this is useless data being sold to companies that want to pretend it’s possible so their stock value goes up.

Is this bad? I mean I guess it has the potential to damage delivery workers, but isn’t working for grubhub or doordash already kind of a scam anyway? That’s before we consider that the likelyhood of any product coming to market that could actually successfully do deliveries. Sounds like a job complicated beyond the capabilities of any robot now or in the near future anyway.

It’s not totally clear in your story, but is “A” doing this just to mess with these guys or is it like a closeted gay thing? The first case is kinda messed up, but the second is more complicated. Either way, drugs, alcohol and partying makes everyone do stupid stuff. I pretty much always advise my friends not to take anything that happens at a club too seriously if they’re new to it. On its own, the idea of flirting with people and sharing your number while you’re seriously fucked up and then going “oh shit” and blocking them the next morning doesn’t seem especially cruel to me.

I’m not really blaming anyone. It’s a complicated idea. I don’t expect every person to philosophize about the problem. Ultimately I’m just one person who gets uncomfortable when I consider what a pets life really is. It’s not a high priority to me and I don’t get preachy about it. There are more pressing issues in the world to me.

To your point of an “absolutely right way to live”, I agree, but my belief is that living things should ideally have the freedom to choose how they want to live rather than someone assert their personal opinion of the correct way to live. Pets however have absolutely no freedom to choose how to live. They don’t choose their owners nor the conditions they live in nor can they truly do anything about how they are treated.

The fact that they are (sometimes) happy makes it an easier pill to swallow except for the fact that their happiness comes largely from a variety of factors that limit their perspective. That’s not even considering the unknowable number of mistreated pets there are or innocent creatures that lived entire lives of misery and abuse due to uncaring owners.

I think having pets is fundamentally unethical. Your dog lives in a tiny fraction of the world with absolutely no agency and only “loves” you because it is literally programmed to after centuries of breeding for traits that promote that. Your pet did not choose you and if it “loves” you at all, it’s only because they are utterly dependent on you because they have been taken far from where their species can survive or that place has been ruined by humanity. Animals cannot consent period and by extension cannot and never do consent to being property.

I’m not a PETA freak. I don’t shame people for having pets, but I’m unable to think of pets without considering these facts and it makes the entire thing seem gross and wrong to me. I rarely bring it up because it never leads to an engaging or productive conversation. No one ever really has an argument against it besides something along the lines of “Humans have had pets for millennia” or “It’s too late to put them back” which don’t actually prove me wrong in any way.

I mean sure, an imaginary LLM that exceeds the fundamental limitations of the technology could be convincing, but then that’s not an LLM. LLMs are statistical models, they don’t know anything. They use stats calculated from training data to guess what token should follow another. Hallucinations cannot be eliminated because that would require it to be capable of knowing things and then it would have to be able to error check itself rationally. In other words, it would have to be intelligent.

One unlimited day. I already don’t drink most nights and I rarely ever use the unlimited day.

No alcohol at home. 4 drinks a day max except once a month. I’m still an alcoholic and I don’t plan to quit drinking, but my therapist and I think I’ve got it under control after 3 years of these rules.

Yeah. Half the people I’ve dated are trans.

And I don’t have to hold my glasses in my hand, look away from what’s in front of me to see through them, or pull them out of my pocket. To me that’s way more convenient, but I already wear glasses; so I could understand how it could be annoying or intrusive to others.

Edit: Also, an eventual AR interface would open the door for all kinds of uses we could never get out of a phone.

Your first two examples are just as easy and legal with a phone. Nobody watches all their windows all the time nor watches every other beach goer. The third example is already illegal and if a doctor or nurse is already committed to illegally recording patients, what’s stopping them from just hiding cameras in their rooms?

I’m not saying it’s good that people can unknowingly be recorded at any time, but it is already true before the glasses. There’s already cameras everywhere and hidden cameras are already easy to get your hands on. The glasses don’t enable anything new as far as cameras go, they’re actually just way more expensive than any basic hidden cameras you can already buy.

I think people will want the glasses for their ease of use and people will get used to there being cameras everywhere because they already are.

I think they’ll become mainstream eventually. It seems obvious to me that they’d be useful and eventually a far superior experience to a smart phone. If and when they start to gain steam, there will be a backlash of some degree that will likely die out because the vast majority of people have no concern for digital privacy. I think the google glass backlash was a result of them looking weird and the personalities of the people willing to drop $1000+ to get one and wear it around.

I think the real question is what kind of world will bring them into mainstream. With surveillance on the rise, I imagine the most powerful people would actually like everyone to have cameras on their faces.

I think the new meta glasses will be decently popular relative to the rest of the MR market, but will ultimately be held back by the tech industry’s insistence on AI. I don’t think any new technology will become mainstream so long as AI is a headline feature, it’s too inconsistent as a feature and wildly unprofitable as a technology. Once the AI bubble pops and the economic consequences are sorted out, that’s when I think smart glasses will get big.

So I worry if we’ll live in 1984-esque surveillance hell by then or if somehow things will turn around. Either way I think smart glasses are coming and they’ll be common soon.

AI in fiction is a boring concept to me. It’s presented either as “What is a person?” or “What if we create an evil god?”. To me anything with feelings is a person and the other is just a chrome paint job on evil god characters in non sci-fi genres, so it’s just a speculative dead end.

AI in real life is much more interesting and its proliferation makes fictional AI seem even more bland. Real life AI is first and foremost not intelligent and probably not even close, that said we have no rubric to grade it by because we don’t even really know what intelligence is yet. That said, machine learning algorithms highlight patterns in the world and in our behaviors that are fascinating just because they show just how complicated the world and people are in ways our brains just passively process. Kind of like how QWOP highlights just how difficult and complicated walking is.

I’m a very anxious person and I kinda liked the Taco Bell AI drive thru thing specifically because it was way less pressure even if it was annoying. There’s plenty of other stuff I simply won’t buy because I don’t want it enough to overcome my anxiety.

If the chatbots are reliable, I’d much prefer them in most shopping scenarios. So this makes sense to me.

What could possibly spook The Heritage Foundation of all groups to make this tiny leftward shift just a few years after their big evil strategy was released? They’re still an evil organization, but they’re that last group I’d expect to say the government needs to spend more money on more people.

I haven’t tried any, but it seems like an inevitable endpoint. I’ve long held a rule that I can’t meet a cow in person because they look so cute on the internet and if I met one, I fear I’d have no choice but to go vegan.

I feel like the ethics of meat consumption is inarguably bad, but it’s a fundamental part of my diet and meat is some of my favorite stuff to eat. If I could eat meat like stuff that’s indistinguishable from the real stuff, that would be ideal.

people usually just say the pre tax price and everyone already knows the sales tax. Sometimes people say the total, but that’s usually for smaller items. For example:

A sandwich from a deli costs like $11 total and that’s what they’d say.

A video game costs 59.99 and people would say it’s $60, but everyone knows it’ll really be like $66.