• 1 Post
  • 131 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • How can a regular person block shipments of arms or dismantle AIPAC? That’s not possible.

    What does boosting voices of soon to be dead people do to stop them from dying? What does organizing or donating do?

    Trump has promised Israel everything they need, no questions asked, no limits. And they already have so much, they don’t really need a lot more. They can already destroy Palestine, they can already destroy parts of Iran and Lebanon. They just need the extra stuff and funds to do it quicker and destroy more of those countries.

    And don’t think for a second Trump and their cronies won’t block any money flow from the US to anywhere near there and divert it to Israel instead. And block organizations in the US from doing anything. Israel is already blocking aid for Palestine even from organizations like the Red Cross. What are small organizations going to do?

    Plus the time to act has come and gone. Time is up, this is going to happen within months. We can’t organize, lobby for policy change, set up aid and demonstrations. It’s done, there is a deadline and that means death for a whole lot of people.

    All we can do at this point is look with shock and horror as the far right grips the world and destroys a lot of the things we hold dear.




  • There’s doomerism and there is reality.

    This is reality and it’s bad. It isn’t a maybe it will be fine maybe it won’t situation. Trump has promised wealthy powerful people a lot of stuff to get him into power. And they put him into power specifically to do that stuff. They have plainly said exactly what they are going to do, laid out an agenda and promised to follow it as best they can. The final hurdle was the election, which even if it went a bit bad for them could have still worked with lawsuits about voter fraud or plain insurrection. But it didn’t went bad for them, it was a major victory. They couldn’t have dreamt of a better outcome. There are no more hurdles, no more barriers, no more limits. At this point it’s denial to think they aren’t going to do what they set out to do.

    I feel there are things we can do for our own mental health and maybe the people around us. But as for the big picture, it’s done, it’s over. We’ve seen first hand what happens if this kind of thing goes down in a country and the outcome is always the same.





  • We have this awesome thing in a lot of places where you can use a scanner and scan as you shop. You can put the bag in the cart and bag while you shop. When you get to the self checkout, you can use the scanner and instantly pay for everything and be out within seconds. I pay with my phone so just a touch is needed and I’m out of there. If you are the carry bags kind you can even take the bag out of the cart, return the cart to the correct place and walk to the car with the bag. It’s so fast and efficient.

    I’ve become so spoiled I actively avoid places that don’t have such a thing. And I hate people who have a full cart at the self checkout and scan everything much much slower than the regular checkout with a person who’s job it is to do that. It’s fine if you have like 5 items and just scan them quickly at the self checkout. Anything beyond that really should be scanned during the shopping or just go to the regular checkout which is designed to handle a lot of stuff.


  • For me being impressed with SpaceX is kinda like loving a piece of art even though the creator turned out to be an asshole. Or liking Star Trek, even though Berman was shady af to put it mildly.

    What SpaceX does is very impressive from a technical point of view. Even if the rocket never amounts to anything except this one successful test, it’s still amazing they pulled it off. It tickles my engineer brain. And I think it’s worth to honor all the people that made it happen, despite them having to work for Musk. Combine this with what could be in the future and you can hopefully see why people hail this test flight.

    Now I still have serious doubts about Starship in the moon program. The on orbit refueling seems very sketchy and unproven at this point. Sure they will get two rockets into orbit, mate them up and transfer some fuel, that’s a given at this point. But how much fuel are we talking? And how fast does the turnaround need to be to prevent losing a lot of it? How many ships and how many launches? Will this completely offset the cheaper launch costs due to reusability? It’s a huge unknown and will push back the moon program to well into the 2030s.




  • I hope this is the case, but I don’t really think so. I got a call Thursday from a friend and he told me he and his whole department were losing their jobs. He was pretty upset about it. Apparently management decided they could be replaced with AI.

    He and his team manage a medium sized in-house developed management application. It’s a combination of stock management, product management and sales tools. Because the products their company sells are pretty unique, they never found a good off the shelf application to do everything they wanted. So they developed their own and connected it to the off the shelf applications they have for ERP and CRM. Pretty slick and his team and him are praised across the company.

    Apparently the IT manager had gotten a very impressive demo for Microsoft Power BI with AI integration. Using AI tools to realtime develop an application. He was so impressed he decided they were going to fire the in-house team and have an external company use the AI to develop a replacement tool. The external company said they could use very cheap people as the AI would do basically all the work. And it would be done before the notice on the current team ran out (2 months).

    He called me kinda in shock about the whole thing. Like that’s not realistic right? That’s not something Power BI can do? With or without AI? And even with AI it can’t do that on such short notice? I told him he was right, that’s not how anything works and the IT manager got duped. Either way, they are out on their ass. Now they are very skilled people and will probably find new jobs right away, but it still sucks ass. AI sucks!