Are you a friend of Dorothy?

No worries, like I said in my edit, you fixed it while I was writing my comment. I’m just leaving mine unedited for the extra info.

That article disagrees with the second part of your comment. It says that the Welrod replicas are rare and mostly used by veterinarians, and looking them up, they’ve only been available for import to the US since 2021.

I don’t know where you got your 300 million figure from. Wikipedia puts the total number of civilian firearms in the US at about 393 million, and that includes shotguns, hunting rifles, etc. The most popular pistol in the world I think is the 1911, and I imagine that holds true for veterans as well, and there have been about 4.3 million produced in the past 110 years. The most produced handgun is the Glock, estimated between 10 to 20 million guns.

It’s also not confirmed that that was the pistol he used, just suspected. I saw people talking about how you’d potentially have to manually cycle a regular semi-auto pistol like he did if you were using a suppressor and subsonic rounds because they wouldn’t produce enough force to cycle the gun on their own.

Edit: You fixed your comment while I was writing this, but I’m gonna leave it unedited for the info.

I heard my first Christmas Carol on the radio the second week of September this year. I’m ready to burn it all down.

Yeah, I figured you didn’t mean that and wasn’t trying to imply that you did, lol. I was just trying to specify that when I was talking about the Wright Brothers I meant the technological jumps between their first flight and the moon landing. We’re probably several technological leaps away from anything that could be considered actual AI.

The Wright Brothers didn’t figure out the moon landing. They figured out aerodynamics. There were plenty of other discoveries that went into the moon landing such as suborbital flight, supersonic flight, and orbital dynamics to list a few. It’s less about the specific time as it is about the level of technology. The timescale is much harder to put down due to the nature of technological innovation.

As for the rest, I completely agree. One of the most dangerous things about these AI programs is the lack of responsibility or culpability.

Definitely not a question of AI sentience, I’d say we’re as close to that as the Wright Brothers were to figuring out the Apollo moon landing. But, it definitely raises questions on whether or not we should be giving everybody access to machines that can fabricate erroneous statements like this at random and what responsibility the companies creating them have if their product pushes someone to commit suicide or radicalizes them into committing an act of terrorism or something. Because them shrugging and saying, “Yeah, it does that sometimes. We can’t and won’t do anything about it, though” isn’t gonna cut it, in my opinion.

I think Facebook had an advantage in originally being targeted at college kids (I think you even needed a school ID to make an account originally) before becoming open to everyone. This meant that the userbase was a little older than that of most social media at the time and it worked as a way to stay in touch with people after you graduated. Then, when they opened it up, it became a way to stay in touch with family as well, which got the parents onboard with something that they had just considered a fad before, like MySpace.

IIRC, people have previously reported that Windows 11(?) switched their default browser back to Edge after installing an update.

Optimism, realism, and pessimism.

Big Carrot is coming for your stew

If you’re watching something on TV, record it and watch it later instead of when it airs. Even starting it 15 minutes later would probably let you fast forward through many of the ads.

I mean, Lemmy definitely runs more techy than most other places, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say the average user here knows any better than any Reddit idiot or something lol

And my point wasn’t to peer review your example or anything, just to say that people keep complaining about it because these snake oil salesmen keep getting richer while using the same tired lines about how AI will do everything and anything, and do a handstand while it’s at it.

It’s like all the complaints historians keep finding about that one guy selling shitty copper bars or whatever. Nobody is gonna shut up about it until the bubble finally bursts and these AI companies can’t unload their shitty copper on anyone anymore.

In your example, the thing missing is that the belt sander companies are selling their belt sanders as screw fastening, band saw multitools.

I always say about AI that it’s not the tool but who’s making it and why, and this is especially true for the average person. Your average person isn’t seeing the LLMs that are trained to identify anomalies in MRIs or iterate on chemical formulas to improve drugs in a simulation that takes milliseconds compared to the months of research it would take technicians to replicate the same experiments. So all they can talk about is the AI that is in their face all day, every day, as every company in the world tries to shoehorn it into their product somehow. And so they complain about the belt sanders that the company told them would fasten their screws and cut their 2x4’s.

The only way the complaining is going to stop is when the bubble bursts and these companies have to find a new way to chase the infinite profit pipedream.

There’s a much better correlation between wealth and conservatism than age. Almost like those who begin to benefit from the system of oppression are incentivesed to keep it going.

I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

Yep, they literally cannot work any other way than as a ponzi scheme. Because the people “earning” want to take more money out of the system than they put in, and the company is taking money out as well just to keep the game running and the employees paid, as well as to make a profit. So you need substantially more suckers buying into the system than the money that is being paid out.

Eventually, somebody is gonna be left holding an empty bag.

Better than blaming addicts for being addicted.

As usual, vote local, vote often applies here, but personally, I’m in 100% agreement that the odds of it happening in our lifetime are slim to none.

But when people think “whale,” they think of the rich idiots with more money than sense. They don’t think of the addict being fleeced like kids by cigarette companies. And we need to change that mentality. Because we’re just victim blaming here. You can’t shame a heroin addict into a sober person.

And there are plenty of irresponsible parents. There was a story about 5 years ago I remember of a young kid (like 6 years old) who literally emptied his parents’ bank account on mtx in an iPhone game because they didn’t know it had mtx in it.

And saying that people with mental health issues need to git gud is like saying that people in wheelchairs need to git gud and use stairs. What we need to do is replace the idiots with people who understand how bad this shit is so we can get something done about it.