The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t honor your wishes. There is no button you can click that says, “opt me out of all AI and cloud data features.” You can disable apps, buttons, and tracking today, but there will be new ones out tomorrow. And there may be a period of weeks or months of them sucking your data up before you figure out what they’re tracking and how to shut it down.

The rich aren’t accessible, but their property sure is awfully flammable.

It’s not enough to reform campaign finance. We need to destroy the class of people behind this. We need to really wage class war, a class war of annihilation.

We need a national wealth cap. 1000x median household income. Anything more is taxed at 100%.

Yeah that does seem odd. Cabinets, closets, and cupboards don’t generally require ventilation. What little ventilation they require is provided by the fact that their doors aren’t air tight.

Finally a killer app for AI. Create social media profiles and use AI agents to populate them with bland uncontroversial drivel.

Those who seek outrage will find it every time. Yes, obviously there are some trans people that don’t seek out medical transition. That’s why I said “trans people who medically transition.” But language can be overly inclusive. We don’t need to start every single writing on trans people with three paragraphs describing every exception and caveat. Obviously when you talk about a group, any group, you have to talk in generalities. If you insist on starting every comment about trans people with paragraphs of caveats and provisos, you make actually getting to the point impossible. You water down the language to the point of uselessness. At at time when trans rights are under assault on all sides, I don’t mind focusing most trans discussions on the material realities and needs of most trans folks.

Most trans people want to medically transition. Are those that don’t somehow invalid? No. But we also don’t need to start every discussion with a thousand caveats describing every sub-category within a group. There are atheist Jews and there are gay Muslims. That doesn’t mean every discussion of those faiths is centered around these rare exceptions.

Trans people transition BOTH their sex and their gender. The term “transgender” is a broad umbrella term. But most people under that label do seek to physically change their bodies. You’re arguing semantics, I’m arguing the lived experience of living breathing human beings.

Do you know what an actual scientific attempt to define races would look like?

Let’s say you wanted to scientifically define races. Instead of using subjective things like facial structure, you look at actual DNA and the groupings among populations. Let’s say we want to group humanity into a half dozen races, and to avoid bias, we do it based on some statistical analysis of DNA patterns.

You know what you would end up with? The computer would spit out that there are five racial groups represented the population of Subsaharan Africa…and one racial group representing everyone else.

The vast majority of human genetic diversity lies within Subsaharan Africa. If you tried to rationally define a list of ‘races,’ you would end up with a bunch of African racial groups and then one group for literally everyone else.

This is what people mean when they say race isn’t real. Our culturally-defined racial groups are completely unrelated to the actual diversity and distribution of human DNA patterns.

Disengaging does not help spread propaganda. Engaging and giving horrible ideas a platform does help spread propaganda.

Your “debate bro” advice is about ten years out of date.

The differences between the sexes is much less than people like to pretend. Every cell in your body has different modes it can operate in. Many, perhaps most, cells have estrogen-dominated and testosterone-dominated modes. If you change the dominant hormones in the body, every cell in the body switches between these modes. Trans people who medically transition are simply taking advantage of the body’s existing mechanism of secondary sex characteristics.

Ultimately, any person could have a male- or female- typical phenotype. If you put the right hormone injections into a fetus at the right time of pregnancy, an XY fetus would be born with a vagina and a uterus. And the opposite is true as well. These conditions sometimes happen naturally with intersex conditions. Every human body has the potential to develop along a male- or female-typical path. It’s just a matter of what hormones are passing through the body at what stage of development.

But race? There’s no comparison. Cells don’t have different expression modes that correspond to different racial phenotypes. There are no “black hormones” that a white person could take to gain many of the characteristics of black bodies. There is simply no equivalent to the medical transition process many trans people undergo. There is simply no equivalent to the fundamental rewiring of the body that occurs on a cellular level with trans medical treatments.

Well trans people, if they medically transition, quite literally change their sex.

[CITATION NEEDED.]

Police, like all bullies, are ultimately cowards. They have no problem abusing people when they can do so with impunity. But if their own lives are on the line, suddenly they’re on their best behavior.

If you’re like, from a country where that’s a capital offense, and you’re applying for asylum somewhere…then yes, you would have to prove it. But other than rare occasions like that? No.

My version of this lately. Really captures the vibe of the last few months.

I absolutely can deny that it’s unethical. In fact, you could argue that using an LLM for memes is not only morally neutral, but actually morally positive.

First, environmental concerns. Is there any evidence that it takes more energy to quickly generate a meme image than to draw it on a computer? That seems highly unlikely. You would have to power a computer for hours to produce such a drawing by hand. It almost certainly takes a tiny fraction of the energy to generate an image via an LLM than it would to generate it via computer drawing software. And even hand-drawing doesn’t escape this, as all the supplies you need also have high energy input requirements.

As to your other general ethics point, that’s superstitious mumbo jumbo. You’re arguing that an LLM is magically cursed because of how it was created. A tool can be created ethically or unethically, but something being created unethically doesn’t magically make its use unethical. The only potential issue is that if you’re funding the creation of the tool or giving the toolmaker money, you can provide a greater market for the creation of more unethical tools.

If anything, using the LLMs of the big AI companies to make memes is an absolute moral good. No one is going to pay OpenAI to make memes. Meme images cost the AI companies money to make but don’t provide them any revenue at all.

Every meme image made by AI is a small blow against these companies. It costs them money but generates them no revenue. But because apparently AI is magically cursed with evil, any use of it must also be evil.

This is religious thinking, not rational thinking.

I see nothing unethical about using AI, as long as you’re not making something that will put an artist out of work. But memes are completely ethical. You’re not going to hire an artist to create such a thing.

Just because I reply immediately does not mean I expect a response immediately. If someone emails me when I’m able to immediately respond, I’ll sometimes get the response out of the way right then. But email is asynchronous. I don’t get mad if I respond immediately but then I don’t hear back for quit awhile.

Yeah, it takes a little bit of effort, but no more time than using jiffy pop. You’re paying more, generating a bunch of waste, and not saving any time.

You mean…your knee?

Obtain raw popping corn kernels. In a medium saucepan with a lid, lay down enough kernels to cover the pan’s bottom. Then add just enough oil to cover. Heat on medium-low to medium heat. Make sure to do this with the pan’s lid on. Now simply wait for the kernels to pop. Audibly monitor the popping rate of the kernels. When popping slows, remove from heat. Add toppings and serve.

Experiment with different oils. Canola and peanut are good starting points. But even olive oil has its own nice flavor profile to it.

Save yourself some money, learn the skill, and open up an entire universe of popcorn discovery. Try different oils. Try frying in butter. Try using different varieties of popping corn. Experiment with different cooking temperatures and thresholds of completion. A whole world awaits you. Put away the Jiffy-Pop and see what wonders await!