The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other?

But in fact both The Democrats and the Republicans raise money.

Yes, and so what? $5.5 billion was spent on the 2024 presidential election. That’s very little. There are individuals capable of spending more than that. So if spending more could actually affect the outcome in a significant way, why wasn’t much more spent? Surely the difference between Harris and Trump is worth more than just a few billion dollars to some person or group with that much money. My conclusion is that while some amount of money is necessary to run a campaign, even the relatively small amount being spent now is so far past the point of diminishing returns that spending more isn’t worth it even to billionaires who could easily do so and care a lot about the outcome.

At least they’re not hiding that the solution is generated by AI, but the random usernames make me suspect that they’re trying to avoid blocking or banning.

I think that even in the scenario where AI is great at voice acting, there will be human voice actors left in the same way that there are people who perform live music left - a tiny number of superstars (new AIs will be trained on their performances), a few talented but obscure professionals who manage to make a relatively meager a living, and some hobbyists who do it for fun. There might even be more human voice actors than there are now simply because of population growth (or rather because of the growth of the population well-off enough to worry about that sort of thing). However, what Béart seems to be saying is that there won’t be excellent AI voice acting, not that at least some human voice actors will have jobs despite the AI, and I don’t think she’s particularly qualified to make that prediction.

(I admit that I am baffled by the fact that people think AI won’t be able to do something at all simply because AI isn’t particularly good at doing it right now. Why are these people ignoring the extremely rapid rate of progress of AI?)

I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to those guys, at least because an older relative of mine was a skilled mechanical engineer who simply could not make the transition from pencil-and-paper drafting to CAD software despite trying very hard. He had the common “old people have difficulty using computers” problem despite actually having a great deal of interest in the new technology.

With that said, he was out of a job whether or not he deserved that.

I think Béart is a good voice actor but I don’t think that gives her special insight into the future of AI development. On the contrary, those people who would lose both money and meaning if a certain task is done well by a machine will be biased towards underestimating the probability that that task will be done well by a machine in the near future.

Sorry bro, but you’re too late. I already proved p ~= np in the same manner.

If you can prove a contradiction then you can prove anything, and here we have ¬ads = ads. BRB there’s some stuff I want to prove that I have.

I sometimes buy games just because I watch videos of other people playing them, in order to support the developers.

_{Yes, that will be believable…}

I wish they would enable that in battle.net games so I don’t have to choose between trading and it.

I played Diablo II so much as a kid and then when the remake came out over twenty years later, it was just as great as I remembered and I play it regularly. I haven’t bought Diablo III or IV.

(It was much harder when I was a kid so I do wish there was more challenge now.)

I live in NYC to support (and have the support of) my relatives, not because I want to. I also never said that I was rich. Even without the toll, driving in Manhattan is at the edge of what I can reasonably spend. Just the parking costs several times more than all my other discretionary spending put together.

I grew up in a Texas suburb and it was pretty nice (except for the humidity) but I don’t have first-hand experience with driving in a place like Houston or LA. I know that there’s a lot of traffic, but I’m genuinely curious about whether it’s really slower than mass transit in NYC is.

I want to clarify that I thought that Cambridge and Somerville were pretty nice - nicer than where I lived at the time. I had friends in Cambridge and I enjoyed visiting them, but I didn’t know anyone in Boston so I never felt like I had any reason to go there. I actually saw more of Boston earlier this year when a friend invited me to go there with her as a tourist than I ever did during the six years that I lived in Massachusetts. The waterfront was pretty, there was an Italian bakery with really good cannoli, and overall the city was cleaner and less crowded than NYC. I don’t have any particular desire to visit again, but that’s not because of anything wrong with Boston in particular.

I do see the irony in the fact that I spend a lot of money to live in a place that tens of millions of tourists visit every year but I really don’t like it. I’m here because this is where my relatives are and they’re not going to leave. (I tried to persuade them to, but it really would be very difficult for them.) I admit that while I know that many people like being in big cities, I don’t really understand why. The tourist attractions presumably get boring quickly even if they were interesting at first, and after that what’s left?

I just want to leave and go somewhere more pleasant and they’re going to charge me $9 every time I do that.

(Full disclosure: right now I want to save some money so I park my car in a Brooklyn neighborhood that doesn’t have street cleaning and then when I want to go somewhere, I take the subway to my car first. I won’t have to pay this toll if I keep doing that, but it isn’t fun and I really want to go back to having my car near me. I’m actually blowing off a dinner invitation as I write this post, because seeing those people would be nice but not nice enough that I actually want to get on the subway.)

Edit: Also I don’t really mind the downvoting. I know most people around here either like urban areas, dislike cars, or both so I wasn’t expecting sympathy from everyone. I do wonder whether the people talking about how wonderful taking mass transit is have ever actually taken mass transit.

I used to live in the Boston area, but out by I95. That’s actually where I learned how to drive. The Boston subway is a lot less gross than the New York subway, but I still only went to Boston about once a year. There wasn’t anything in Boston that was worth getting on the subway for me. However, Cambridge and Somerville weren’t too bad to drive to, as long as I had a plan for where to park.

I’m not saying Boston is a bad place. I just don’t like most of the things that people go into a city to do. The funny thing is that I live in Manhattan because I work around here, driving to work is entirely unrealistic, and I’d rather walk than take the subway.

Those people who can’t afford groceries shouldn’t be complaining either. After all, they’re not literally starving and there are starving children in Africa…

Even in NYC (where driving is particularly slow and mass transit is particularly well developed) it’s still usually significantly faster to drive than it is to take mass transit unless you’re traveling within Manhattan or between two stops of the same express train. The trips I frequently take are about twice as fast by car as by mass transit, so from my point of view I am forced to take mass transit (when I have nowhere to park at my destination) while people outside the city have the luxury of quickly driving directly from where they are to where they want to be.

I’m not going to get into my opinion of how pleasant (or not) taking mass transit is compared to driving, because that’s subjective. However, I will note that according to the MTA’s own survey, a little over half of the people who do take mass transit are dissatisfied by it.

Mass transit is necessary here because the city has an old layout not designed for cars and so it wouldn’t be able to function if everyone had to drive. That doesn’t imply that mass transit is pleasant or convenient. It’s just often the only option.

Yeah, I live inside the congestion pricing zone.

My intuition is that it is a hardware failure. GPUs can develop issues that show up intermittently. You can try running GPU stress-testing software to check if that’s the case.

However, did you recently update your graphics drivers? If you did, try rolling back to an older version.

printer ink was somehow related to breakfast

For when you want your coffee really, really black.

Separating the trimmings from the rest of the waste isn’t the only thing that requires effort. I presume that the management doesn’t want to give ordinary employees the authority to just give stuff away, which makes sense. Even if it isn’t a problem in this specific case, it can be a problem because employees won’t always be knowledgeable or honest. Having management review what is being given away involves overhead, and deciding how much to charge you because of that overhead involves more overhead. I probably wouldn’t bother with all that if I ran the supermarket unless I really hated throwing things out, because I would assume you won’t be willing to pay enough to make it worth my time.