FaceDeer

And self-interested benefits aside, it’s just the right thing to do. If a thing is capable of suffering then I want to minimize that.

Even though AI is IMO not anywhere near human-level intelligence yet, I’ve tried to already get into the habit of thinking to myself “am I being cruel to this AI?” When I set up scripts or tasks or whatnot. So far the answer has always been a resounding “no” but it’s a good habit to get into because someday the answer might be “well, maybe.”

Considering I take the effort to make sure I’m not being excessively cruel when it comes to killing insects it seems like the least I should be doing.

Eh, not necessarily. Hollywood hates piracy and Trump hates Hollywood, it might actually be as simple as that.

This is very important, I’ve seen people try this and it just makes things worse. In another comment I suggested my favourite solution to getting stuck like this; have a one-handed garden pick or similar tool in the car so you can dig the tires out of the ice.

I’ve got a spray bottle filled with windshield wiper fluid I sometimes use to “pre-treat” an icy windshield before I get to scraping it, it’s often able to loosen the ice’s grip on the glass so the scraper can just lift it off. Simpler and more controllable than relying on the built-in windshield sprayers.

A one-handed garden pick is a nice tool to have handy if you find your car’s wheels stuck in some hard-packed snow or ice. Don’t spin your wheels fruitlessly, the friction is just making the ice slicker and harder. Use the garden pick to dig the wheels out instead, creating a rough surface to get some initial traction on. There are also traction plates or mats that you can stick in there to help get moving, though you need to be able to move the car far enough to get them caught under the wheels for them to work.

Make sure your car battery is in good condition. Cold weather will reduce its power output, so if your car’s going to fail to start it’ll be in the dead of winter when that happens. For peace of mind I bought one of those battery booster packs that you can use to jump-start a car with and I really like it, it’s got a built-in air pump, USB charger, and light source as well and I’ve used it for all of those things now and then. Wasn’t very expensive.

Stash a warm hat and a pair of warm mittens in the car somewhere. If you end up stranded on a roadside you won’t have known ahead of time that you were going to be stranded so you might not have brought adequate clothing with you. A flashlight, too. In northern latitudes there’s a lot of darkness during winter time.

IMO the best feature of democracy is not that it results in better selection of who gets to lead, because it doesn’t really - the vast majority of the electorate is not educated in the sorts of things they’d need to be educated in to make truly good decisions about this. The best feature is that every few years we “throw the bums out” and put a new batch of people in charge.

I used to be kind of ambivalent about term limits, I figured it was kind of suboptimal to have to get rid of a leader who’s doing well at some point. But with the size of the population of most democracies there’s really no constraint on the pool of perfectly adequate candidates to draw on. I’m starting to think that “one and done” might be an even better approach, at least for the highest levels. Make it so that there’s no motivation whatsoever to cling to power. Do the same with congressmen and senators, perhaps. Let them prove their capabilities with a political career in local politics, where it’s less important if someone ends up with some kind of corrupt fiefdom because the higher levels of government can keep them in check.

To achieve that, we must decommission all existing fossil fuel powered machinery, from power plants, to manufacturing, transportation, and agricultural equipment, and replace them with net zero emission alternatives.

By 2030? Not going to happen, then.

That means we need to come up with a different “right” action in the meantime. We shouldn’t be relying on a dream scenario that has basically no chance of actually coming to pass.

You’ve made a heck of a lot of assumptions about how a time capsule like this would be set up. But even so, how is being mined for raw materials better than having some of my stuff be misattributed?

No.

There’s rather a big difference between a time capsule and a landfill.

We’d need to take some cues from how the ancients did it. Either arrange for long term security, like the Egyptians, or rely on secrecy, like the Mongols. It won’t work forever, but as long as it works for a couple of generations I’d be satisfied.

One idea that comes to mind for modern grave goods would be to bury them in a nuclear waste disposal facility.

I’m thinking more along the lines of future archaeologists. We learn so much about ancient cultures from what they bury with their dead, I figure we should return the favor.

You should watch the video I linked, it’s only 6 minutes long. The problem is that if you did manage to get more success for a third-party candidate that would be a bad thing. It would mean that the resulting government will be less likely to reflect your positions and ideals than it would if there had been no third-party candidate you supported.

In a first-past-the-post voting system trying to figure out how to make third-party candidates viable is a self-defeating goal. Unless you’re focusing on trying to make third-party candidates who appeal to your opponent’s voting group more viable, that is. Which is why you keep seeing sneaky donations from right-wing PACs to the Green party and such. The Republicans would love to see the Green party become a more prominent and viable option for left-leaning voters. And likewise, a lot of Democrats are cheering for RFK Jr. to be on the ballot because he draws more support from the right than from the left.

There have been many systems developed over the years for handling decentralized data storage, decentralized user identities, and decentralized decision-making. There are excellent options out there for all this stuff.

IMO the problem is that there’s a huge “not invented here” problem, combined with a popular “ew, I don’t want to be associated with that technology (or more accurately with the group behind that technology)” reflex that has nothing to do with the technology itself. So projects like the Fediverse keep reinventing the wheel over and over, and whenever a project manages to do something right it’s rare for the other projects to abandon their own implementations to borrow from the best.

Personally, I think we should bring back the custom of grave goods. If there’s some precious heirloom that holds sentimental significance to a person but isn’t otherwise valuable or useful, why not bury it with them?

I’m already thinking about getting some land and making an “indefinite time capsule” for storing a bunch of stuff that I have no use for but that I wouldn’t want to see go off to a landfill for sentimental reasons.

It’s more fundamental than that. First-past-the-post voting systems inevitably turn into two-party rule. It’s built into the foundations of how the American government is voted for.

Those jobs are also being replaced by AI. Modern AIs are trained on synthetic data, which is data that was generated from source material specifically for training purposes by other AIs. AIs reformat, rewrite, and vet the source material more reliably and efficiently than humans.

People can post whatever they want. Communities can be about whatever they want. It just looks pathetic when they post stuff like this as if it was significant news.

AI models don’t actually contain the text they were trained on, except in very rare circumstances when they’ve been overfit on a particular text (this is considered an error in training and much work has been put into coming up with ways to prevent it. It usually happens when a great many identical copies of the same data appears in the training set). An AI model is far too small for it, there’s no way that data can be compressed that much.

Those sadly will also be replaced over time with machines and there is something we will really lose.

Not all of the things we lose will be sad, though. An AI researcher has the potential to be more thorough and less biased when it comes to digging up and interpreting resources.