I love the first season of the Witcher because it respects the source material and was clearly made with passion by an actor who really loves the Witcher.
I hate the other seasons of the Witcher because it was clearly made by shitty writers who actively hated the source material.
Never forget the cardinal rule of adaptations: The source material is what made millions of dollars, not your shitty untested ideas.
it respects the source material
That’s a hard ask, considering how often writers will completely fuck over the source material. Especially egregious are the ones who just slap a IP on top of whatever shitty script they were writing at the time.
democratic centralist government run by the communist party
Sounds like a dictatorship ran by one party.
It’s international. It doesn’t need to be based in England.
Lenin wanted to create socialism from the top down, establishing a dictatorship
When somebody casually says the word “dictatorship” as a serious solution to a problem, they have already failed.
The Soviets tried socialism as a ladder to communism, were about instantly corrupted.
No, they tried communism as a ladder to socialism, entered the dictatorship of the proletariat phase, and were instantly corrupted. Because, you know… dictatorship.
Lenin’s idea of socialism will never work, because it is far too optimistic, and does not factor the corruptibility of humans. Every single example of communism that has ever plagued a country is a prime illustration of that failure.
Capitalism ain’t the problem. Capitalism for the economy and democracy for the government is the best we humans have figured out. Problem being, money, as in any system, has been funneled to the top. The top took our vote via lack of education and media control, and their power has been snowballing for the last 20-30 years. Now we’re too ignorant and misled to vote in our own best interests. We’re seeing the end game, the end game of any unregulated system.
Capitalism was the system the rich wanted to ensure they still had a foothold. In the past, it was fiefdoms and land ownership. Then a bunch of rich Americans got together (the founding fathers) and democracy wasn’t going see the light of day unless there was some level of compromise, and they got to keep their power in some way. Democracy was supposed to be a counterbalance, yes, but capitalism isn’t actually necessary for a functional society.
Ever since humanity evolved into a barter system, the enemy has always been the rich and powerful (who also happen to be rich), and the tools they use to keep themselves in power. Never ever forget that.
Instead say, “The GOP did this!” (politically) and “The billionaires did this!” (economically). Words matter if you want to win hearts and minds.
The GOP is a tool for the rich, and billionaires are just another identity of the rich. It all funnels to a single root cause.
The internet was a bubble. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful. It just means that companies are overselling its value. There are too many companies jumping on the bandwagon, and not all of them with survive when the bubble pops.
It’s still bad and destructive, but I think far too many people are interpreting this bubble as “if I wait a few more years, this technology will disappear and I won’t have to worry about it any more”. No, it’s more like the internet where if people wait a few more years and don’t use it, they will lag behind and be replaced by people who understand the tech. Companies that don’t use it will die out.
I like Hank Green’s recent takes on AI.
The level of competition is extremely high, and no one will be willing to pay for AI services.
Companies are already paying for AI services. You think everybody has a free account? Please!
I use LLMs every day in my job. It’s a useful tool for programming, and it’s saved me a lot of time searching for information.
The writers famously hate the source material, and seem to forget the cardinal lesson with adaptations: The source material is what made millions of dollars, not your shitty untested ideas.
I feel like this would be as batshit crazy as handing the beloved Dune series to a madman like Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Or torrents. If piracy’s on the rise (again) as a replacement for streaming, you can sure as hell bet that it was already replacing sites like PornHub way before that.
Enter The Matrix was one of the rare exceptions. That game genuinely slapped.
The game was glued together with duct tape. And not the good kind. The cheap Chinese knock-off brand that’s been sitting in the hot garage for 5 years.
Every country has a whole bunch of “that guy” who likes to do stupid shit to the detriment of society. Sometimes it’s the poor and uneducated, sometimes it’s the ultra wealthy unburdened by their sociopathy. It varies.
The poor and uneducated are that way because it’s in the ultra-wealthy’s best interests.
“I love the poorly educated!”
If the data is falsified that’d be illegal.
Oh no! It would be illegal!
And what would be the punishment if it was found out that they released illegal data? A fine that could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars? On top of their tens of millions of dollars of profits?
Do you have a reason to think otherwise?
Yes, they are directly incentivized to either push their data in a biased direction or outright falsify their numbers, in order to facilitate the marketing strategy of these taxis being a “safe” technology, and increase their profit margin.
Fuck… have we learned nothing from the tobacco industry?!
I know about trans people and cross-dressers. But, in a political cartoon, with characters that are light on details, artists (or AI in this case) will use easily-identifiable, stereotypical signs to showcase a trait or gender. For example, lipstick, or a bow, or a dress or skirt, to identify a character as female.
We all know this and are exposed to this pattern all the time. Or are you seriously suggesting that the bill is trans, but is somehow also pregnant?
Funny how most laws are incentivized to punish the poor, by setting static monetary fines that rich people and corporations would scoff at.
Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.
Wow, you think the “company’s data” is a trustworthy source? Where is your critical thinking skills?
There’s around a million people dying from cars every year and we just shrug and normalize them. Human or not, we just have to have cars and “accidents” are just that.
The difference is accountability. If a human kills another human because of a car accident, they are liable, even criminally liable, given the right circumstances. If a driverless car kills another human because of a car accident, you’re presented with a lose-lose scenario, depending on the legal implementation:
If the car manufacturer says that somebody must be behind the wheel, even though the car is doing all of the driving, the person is suddenly liable for the accident. They are expected to just sit there and watch for a potential accident, but the behavior of what an AI model will do is undefined. Is the model going to stop in front of that passenger as expected? How long do they wait to see before they take back control? It’s not like cruise control, a feature that only controls part of the car, where they know exactly how it behaves and when to take back control. It’s the equivalent of asking a person to watch a panel with a single red light for an hour, and push a button as fast as possible when it blinks for a half-second.
If the model is truly driverless (like these taxis), then NOBODY is liable for the accident. The company behind it might get sued, or might end up in a class-action lawsuit, but there is no criminal liability, and none of these lawsuits will result in enough financial impact to facilitate change. The companies have no incentive to fix their software, and will continue to parrot this shitty line about how it’s somehow better than humans at driving, despite these easily hackable scenarios and zero accountability.
Humans have an incentive to not kill people, since nobody wants to have that on their conscience, and nobody wants to go to prison over it.
Corporations don’t. In fact, they have an incentive to kill people over profits, if the choice presents itself!
If a robotic taxi can lower the taxi category of accidents by 91% across the board, including death rates, then that’s a positive improvement to society any way you slice it. Not saying it isn’t a horrifying dystopian world we’re potentially building, but at the moment, given the numbers, it would be 91% safer in that category.
You need to prove this number. Looking at the behavior of current driverless cars, the software is still shit, and nothing has reached Level 5 Autonomous Driving. There are too many edge cases, and conflicting behavior points. Navigating a world of humans driving in different ways with complex urban and rural streets is a very very messy affair.
Hell, nobody in the space can even answer this simple question correctly: If the speed limit is 55 MPH on the highway, and everybody is going 65 MPH, and we know that the delta of speed is what kills people in highway car accidents, what speed does the driverless car use?
(Hint: the correct answer is not 55.)
I’m sure a large part of that has to do with David Zaslav.