ultimafan

Shame that people are down voting you, there's an uncomfortable truth to it I don't think people want to face.

Culture is defined by people not borders- simply crossing an arbitrary line doesn't change someone's beliefs and values.

The immigration boom especially on the West coast has vastly diluted assimilation into American culture- coming from an immigrant, who married into another family of immigrants- too many people move here and stick to their own cultural enclave, building a version of their home country in miniature instead of trying to integrate.

It's been years since I've read it but iirc the difference between the book and movie is that in the book voting is limited to those who have done some form of public service- not necessarily military, and it's specified that regardless of your aptitudes, disabilities, etc. the government will find at least SOMETHING for you to do regardless of how hopeless your case is. Perhaps the point OP is trying to make is that that form of democracy is healthy in the sense that the only people leading it are those that, at the minimum, showed an interest in contributing to it.

Strongly agree, I feel like my passion for development as a whole has waned away as AI has gotten more prevalent.

We do things to achieve some end result but it's the journey there that is the most cathartic to me. The "skilled crafts" element of development where careful deliberation and hours of tinkering to get any kind of appreciable output you can admire has been replaced with a one stop dopamine button that skips the whole process that I could find myself getting lost in.

I've taken up carpentry/metal working as a result. Maybe someday we'll have live in robots that do the same for those hobbies that AI did for programmers but I can't see it happening any time soon.

I agree with this wholeheartedly, it's harder to notice this in a field you are a professional in, but what really opened my eyes was noticing how often friction kept me from making mistakes in hobbyist metalworking/woodworking projects. More than once I've either made or didn't make mistakes based entirely on if the tool I "needed" for the next step was in arms reach or a walk across the garage and a search through multiple toolboxes.

Except cheating in games isn't the equivalent of steroids in the gym, since they let cheaters do things that literally no one can without them. And steroids at least have the argument behind them that you still have to put the work in (it's not "free" gains like cheats are, that guy that looks like Arnold is still putting hours into the gym every week to look like that, you can't just take steroids and look the same if you aren't willing to put in the effort)

A much better analogy would be showing up to a weightlifting competition with a construction crane and thinking competing with it against human lifters is fair.

Not just CS, I don't think people realize how prevalent cheating is in any multiplayer game. The issue is compounded by the fact that many high skill ceiling games are plagued by "micro cheats" being used by players that are already fairly decent at the game even without them, making it borderline impossible for casual players to tell if what just happened to them was a fair skill gap or someone cheating.

I don't play multiplayer games anymore for that reason. Too easy to go on an emotional tilt where you feel like you're suffering from paranoia and suspecting too many players of cheating. It's absolutely ruined competitive games for me.

I think you and the previous comment are talking about different types of drones- the smaller commercial quadcopters used in the Russia-Ukraine conflict can be shot down with shotguns fairly effectively.

Both sides have been seen with one member of a squad carrying around an issued shotgun in an anti-drone role- the fact that it shoots pellets in a cone is precisely why it's so effective. Skeet shooting is a great example of how relatively small fast moving targets can be hit consistently at range with a shotgun and they are usually using much smaller/lighter pellets with poorer velocity/range, I would assume the loads used in an anti-drone role are bigger.

I feel like bigger studios have definitely been playing it safer in the last 10-15 years. You used to see a lot more unorthodox ideas and mechanics or just flat out bizarre premises that I'm sometimes baffled even got the green light to go ahead. Today for the most part that kind of daring seems mostly relegated to the indie space. Everyone else looks for the safest option they hope will sell.

Product/tech fanboyism has always existed, sure, not going to argue that point.

But I don't remember it ever being getting anywhere near as heated or pushed in real life conversations. That kind of borderline religious fanaticism mostly lived in online spaces.

I think a large amount of AI skeptics are just tired. I'm what you would call in the AI skeptic camp and the most I'll contribute to in person conversations anymore is feigned indifference towards the topic or something along the lines of "Oh, I haven't really been keeping up with AI news lately."

For me personally (and maybe for others as well?) there's two parts to this. The first is that it's exhausting to constantly be pulled into "debates" with staunch pro-AI supporters who can't accept that you have some reason to be against it or agree to disagree and move on from the conversation. The second is that I've noticed that even mild anti-AI sentiment lately seems to make people (especially tech people) see and treat you as an anti-science luddite or conspiracy theorist.

It's easier to just pretend I don't care or that I'm not interested in public than be a skeptic.

Eat it- plenty of people hunt boar for the meat just like other wild animals. I'm not the biggest fan of the taste but have friends that enjoy it.

The biggest thing I miss about smoking myself and smoking being common and prevalent in general is the social aspect (you immediately both have at least one thing in common and 5 minutes of free captive time with each other)

Stepping outside for a smoke on the job, at parties, while out running errands, in foreign countries as a tourist, to kill time outside an appointment waiting room, etc. was a guaranteed way to strike up an unexpected conversation with all manners of characters from all walks and levels of life that I wouldn't have had the chance (or courage or social skills I suppose) to do otherwise.

Some of the most entertaining or thought provoking conversations with strangers in my life have been a result of this. Approaching random people busy with their random lives outside of a smoking area feels intimidating and often doesn't seem to have the same result (which makes sense- someone smoking is actively not busy)

And in the office, it always felt to me like the smoking areas were the only place you could get real, no bullshit answers from people across teams/divisions "off the record" about actual deadlines/timelines etc.

I've heard people say something to the effect of, just go hang out in a smoke spot and don't actually smoke to get the same perks but as an ex-smoker if I saw a non-smoker doing this I would definitely feel a bit weird about it / less open towards them.

I feel like just about everyone knows of (through friends/family/community) or has experienced some form of life changing harassment, assault, blackmailing, scamming, or otherwise malicious activities that have happened over social media / online platforms and the perpetrators are rarely if ever caught or punished. And it feels like thanks to the AI boom these problems are only going to get significantly worse over the next decade or so, maybe longer, thanks to the ability for bad actors to easily scale their efforts and create more realistic lies/threats/setups using AI tools to accomplish what they might not have had the skills to do beforehand.

I have little doubt that people looking back in the future on the first few decades of widespread internet usage and adoption without guardrails in place will see it as a huge moral failure on society's part. We've created a system that has enabled predators, scammers, and the like all over the world to cause untold amounts of harm to victims they would otherwise never have encountered, and get away with criminal behavior that, lacking a physical out in the open component isn't seen or caught by anyone until the damage is already done.

Instead of slowing down or reflecting on if a 24/7 deluge of social media / entertainment / bullshit novelties are really worth the harm companies are just ramping up the potential for future danger in the name of profit with all these new AI tools for "innocent" purposes.

How often do you see people trying to recreate the lifestyles or belief systems of extinct cultures / societies for themselves to live by in a genuine day to day manner, and not in a academic or archeological capacity?

The content of their belief system might be known and recorded in that scenario but the teaching of it as a genuine belief/truth to live by and to be passed on from generation to generation probably wouldn't be.

It is not a comment on the religious/philosophical validity of the belief as I initially understood it.

Just that for a specific belief to survive, some number of members need to survive to pass it on to the next generation, which if their beliefs bar them from killing or violence requires them to rely on people who aren't.

I don't think this comparison to early/mainline Christianity is entirely fair. It was murder, not "just" killing that was prohibited by their values.