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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Define useful.

    Will any martial art make it a good idea to engage in a street fight, ever? Will any martial art prevent you from getting shot, stabbed, or ganged up on and beaten? No. Your best bet is situational awareness and a keen sense of GTFO.

    However, martial arts are physical activities. They involve precise movements, and allow you a safe space to build conditioning. All of that means that, even if the techniques of the specific art you practice are fundamentally useless in the situation, you’re going to be just better able to use your body effectively. Hopefully to run.

    I’d say the biggest thing a martial art has over a traditional sport is conditioning yourself to take a proper hit. Beyond any technique, the first hit is usually the deciding hit in a street fight. Knowing what it’s like to be hit, and being able to not immediately crumble, go further than any technique.





  • See that’s all fine and well. More people should do that. But then you get the people who don’t want to live near people, in the middle of a city. The “have your cake and eat it too” kind. And that’s just not feasible.

    There really is no one-size solution to housing. We need, and all benefit, from having some degree of options, but importantly, those options should be attainable, and all have their costs/drawbacks.


  • Of course it can. It can also spit out trash. AI, as it exists today, isn’t meant to be autonomous, simply ask it for something and it spits it out. They’re meant to work with a human on a task. Assuming you have an understanding of what you’re trying to do, an AI can probably provide you with a pretty decent starting point. It tends to be good at analyzing existing code, as well, so pasting your code into gpt and asking it why it’s doing a thing usually works pretty well.

    AI is another tool. Professionals will get more use out of it than laymen. Professionals know enough to phrase requests that are within the scope of the AI. They tend to know how the language works, and thus can review what the AI outputs. A layman can use AI to great effect, but will run into problems as they start butting up against their own limited knowledge.

    So yeah, I think AI can make some good code, supervised by a human who understands the code. As it exists now, AI requires human steering to be useful.


  • There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. And yet, we’re still forced into capitalism, with little choice but to participate or starve. You can object to a system and say that it’s unethical, but also necessarily play into that system.

    We all gotta eat. Long as there’s our current form of capitalism, we all gotta pay rent (or mortgage). Until those needs relax, we’re essentially saying “pick between your needs and being a good person.” One of our strongest drives is to survive, and so if the only way for some to survive is off the backs of others, it’s the inevitable outcome.

    Of course we should all be striving to change this. Effective change comes from slow, repeated effort though, not just fruitlessly chasing an ethical job. If you just stay where you are, then that’s fine. Do what you can from within, safely. We all do that, and we’ll slowly steer this ship.