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Furbag

@Furbag@lemmy.world

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Furbag ,

I signed up to do the free IRS filing but got rejected unfortunately because I had entered into a domestic partnership which made me ineligible. Not really sure why since I was filing single anyway but oh well, this is good news and I can't wait to try it next year.

Furbag ,

Precisely. They never check that you are who you say that you are or that you are in fact still alive, so this "rule" is unenforceable. Case in point, many years ago I told Valve that my birthday was Jan 1st 1916, the earliest date it would let me select when I get prompts to input my age for mature-rated content. It still remembers that and autofills it for me on every age-restricted game page I land on in the discovery queue. If it were true, I'd be a 108 year old gamer right now, which isn't impossible but would probably raise some eyebrows at Valve if they ever had the intention of enforcing the "no passing down your account to other people" rule as it would be highly likely that I would be dead and my successors are the ones actually spending 7 hours on the weekends binging TW: WH3 and Stellaris.

ChatGPT Answers Programming Questions Incorrectly 52% of the Time: Study (gizmodo.com)

The research from Purdue University, first spotted by news outlet Futurism, was presented earlier this month at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Hawaii and looked at 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow that were then fed to ChatGPT....

Furbag , (edited )

People down vote me when I point this out in response to "AI will take our jobs" doomerism.

Furbag ,

Yes, this is also true. I see things like UBI as an inevitable necessity, because AI and automation in general will eliminate the need for most companies to employ humans. Our capitalistic system is set up in a way such that a person can sell their ability to work and provide value to the owner class, but if that dynamic is ever challenged on a fundamental level, it will violently collapse when people who can't get jobs because a robot replaced them either reject automation to preserve the status quo or embrace a new dynamic that provides for the population's basic needs without requiring them to be productive.

But the way that managers talk about AI makes it sound like the techbros have convinced everybody that AI is far more powerful than it currently is, which is a glorified chatbot with access to unfiltered Google search results.

Furbag ,

One of the only fucking things we've done right in this country, right up there with banning coin-op pay toilets pretty much everywhere.

Furbag ,

Oh boy, and they just removed "steering wheel nag" in a recent update. I can't imagine that will have any unintended consequences.

Furbag ,

Cut him a break, he's pioneering sandwich making with this innovative tech. A few hiccups are to be expected.

Furbag ,

I don't believe in crypto either because it's current value is solely derived on how much you can exchange it for real money. Outside of a few edge cases, nobody buys anything with crypto outside of the black market.

I'm sure crypto is a great solution to some finance problems related to centralized banking that I'm too lazy or dumb to care about, but I look at the energy consumption to calculate these massive chains for little tangible benefit, and the scammers and hypemen who are profiting off of other people's hopes and desires to get rich quick on the next big boom, and I can't help but feel like it's an actively harmful element of society. At the very least, whatever regulations are currently in place that are attempting to reign in crypto are insufficient at reducing harm.

Furbag ,

Meta is a private company and can do whatever the fuck they like.

This guy shouldn't be let anywhere near a position of decision making, let alone the highest office in the nation.

Furbag ,

Which law are you referencing?

You agree to their EULA and TOS when you make your account. In that, there exists a clause that states that you can be banned for any reason or no reason at all at the site administrators discretion.

So explain to me again how meta is in the wrong here?

Furbag ,

Okay sure, but there's nothing on the books that says that meta has to allow people to use their platform. You are not entitled to unlimited access to a private service.

Ever single person from RFK and Donald Trump to you and me all sign the exact same fucking EULA and TOS when you register for an account. Stop holding these people above the law by pretending that the rules shouldn't apply to them.

Furbag ,

Meta is not the government. Something being government funded does not make it an apparatus of the government. There has been no curtailing of 1st amendment rights here.

Furbag ,

Again, what laws are you referring to? I want to hear you explain it.

Furbag ,

Okay, so you have no clue what you're talking about. Got it 👌

Furbag ,

I am refuting your statement that they don’t have to follow laws.

What kind of nonsense strawman is this? Quote me on where I said that, because I didn't anywhere in any of my posts.

Furbag ,

It's a big stretch to call this a debate.

I feel like the context of that statement is self-evident, considering it's a top level comment, but since you seem to be stubbornly obstinate about it, I'll break it down for you.

Meta is a private company and can do whatever the fuck they like.

This is in direct response to RFK complaining that his first amendment rights were being infringed by Meta. The thing that presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. apparently doesn't understand about the constitution is that 1st amendment rights shall not be infringed by the U.S. government. No law or statute can be passed that would limit or remove one's freedom of expression. However, as I mentioned in another post in this same comment chain, Meta is not a government entity. By using their platform, you agree to their rules. They get to set the rules as whatever they want and you agree to abide by them so long as you are an account holder. If they decided that they don't want anyone to say the word "Facebook" anymore and started banning people for saying it, that would be fully within their rights as a private entity, albeit unfair. This is no different than a platform like Lemmy banning you for posting Nazi shit or CSAM. You do not have unlimited free speech in private forums, and that's a fact.

So when I said "Meta can do whatever the fuck they want", I'm not sure how you possibly came to the conclusion that what I meant was "Meta doesn't have to follow laws". Of course they have to follow laws, everybody does. But if they aren't breaking any laws, they can do as they please with their platform. When I asked you what the law in question was that was being broken, you responded with nothing but deflection, because you're a clueless simpleton and you have no idea what you're talking about.

This guy shouldn’t be let anywhere near a position of decision making, let alone the highest office in the nation.

Given that I previously highlighted how out-of-touch RFK is with the substance of the constitution, this should come as no surprise. Anybody stupid enough to use a response from a AI chatbot as "proof" of anything is technologically illiterate and deserves to be ridiculed.

"Debate" over. You are blocked.

Furbag ,

For example, they ( mostly miyomoto ) has been quoted to not understand that people want another f-zero, as the game’s principals and ideas have been fully flushed out and no new ideas could make it feel like something new.

This is also why we'll never get another Star Fox.

sad furry noises 😿

Furbag ,

This is well timed considering the TikTok ban timeline. Loops will have enough time to sort out any bugs or issues right now with a slow trickle of traffic and then probably grow exponentially in the power vacuum left behind when TikTok vanishes from the various app stores.

Furbag ,

It wasn't really. It certainly didn't make me want to go spend $70k for one, but I wouldn't have entirely dismissed the brand as a whole for one of their first forays into both auto engineering and EV production. If I got one for free, I'd drive it. By the time I need a new car, it would have been worth looking into again.

Furbag ,

Yeah, this was my first thought as well as soon as I read the image. We have tons and tons of literally empty housing units. Even if you take away the ones that are only temporarily vacant while searching for a new tenant, you're still left with a bunch of housing units that sit empty, waiting to be flipped for a profit by real estate investors.

Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores (gizmodo.com)

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.

Furbag ,

"Just walk out" was a cool idea, but I'm not sure the way they tried to implement it would have ever been successful even if they had perfected the technology. The fact that they tried to disguise it as a fully automated system when they had a team of thousands of people overseas analyzing the footage is disturbing. I like the idea of just having the scanner in the basket much better. It's still more convenient/efficient than a checkout line or a kiosk and it helps you keep track of your total balance.

I've never actually been to one of these stores. They seem pretty scarce.

Furbag ,

Okay, I was expecting something a lot worse than what the article describes. I hate ads as much as the next guy, but at least these ads seem somewhat topical and also give tangible rewards for doing something that you might do already anyway (stream a game to a couple of friends in a private Discord server). Maybe I'm misinterpreting the change, but this doesn't seem that bad?

I'm not sure what everyone's hangup is about Discord. My group that I play video games with swapped over to Discord from Skype years ago and it's still a good experience. You want to hear about enshittification? Just look at what they did to Skype over the years. That platform is completely unusable now.

I doubt Discord will remain totally useable forever, but at least there are budding alternatives out there that might be able to carry the torch if Discord can't continue it's freemium service. One that I've tried in the past is Guilded and they are sort of like a Discord clone if you really want the same general user experience - pseudoforum live chat with VOIP lobbies, streaming capabilities, etc. I tried it out and it was fine but not worth swapping everyone on our Discord server to the new one since it wasn't substantially different or better in any way.

Furbag ,

Did the DNC read your fucking mind like Charles Xavier or something? How have they "known for months" that you specifically are choosing to throw away your vote on not-Biden?

I agree with the other guy, you are not the main character.

Furbag ,

I was kind of hoping that Apple and Tesla would just feud with each other for control of the "economy-quality product marketed as a luxury-quality product" market share.

Furbag ,

Honestly, people getting out of that game now are the smart ones. Our roads just aren't set up to be able to handle FSD. It's a money pit and a lot of companies are falling for the sunk cost fallacy.

Reddit Is Letting Power Users In on Its IPO. Not Everyone’s Buying (www.wired.com)

Reddit Is Letting Power Users In on Its IPO. Not Everyone’s Buying::Reddit says it wants to reward users by letting them buy into the company’s public listing. Some say it’s too risky—others say they won’t pay a company they’ve already given hours of free labor to.

Furbag ,

Imagine being in /r/centuryclub but still not being cool enough to get into the real exclusive club - Group 1 reddit IPO.

Furbag ,

The motive was that the car drove down a crowded Chinatown street during Chinese New Year. I imagine something similar might happen if a human driver tried to do the same thing. Not saying the vandals were right to wreck the car, but you don't just creep a car down a busy street during a festival and expect nothing bad to happen to it when crowd mentality/anonymity takes over. Especially when there's no driver so no immediate consequences/accountability. I think it was quite fortunate that it was not transporting a passenger at the time.

Furbag ,

TurboTax lobbys the US Government heavily to keep free alternatives from existing. At one point in time, the IRS was going to allow everyone to be able to report their taxes directly via their website and Intuit and the rest of the tax preparation software developers moved heaven and earth to kill the legislation that would have allowed it.

So, to answer the question, there's nothing wrong with TurboTax except for the fact that it's run by a private company that charges you a fee for something that the federal government could operate for free. If you want to keep paying a 3rd party to send the IRS the information they already have, then the system works just fine.

Furbag ,

More proof that justice is a multi-tiered system in America. Restrictions over cruel and unusual punishment don't apply to to the bottom rung of society when you have made the mistake of offending a rich capitalist or corporation.

Furbag ,

I wanted to learn how to play after watching a few dozen episodes of Hikaru no Go, but it's such an obtuse game. Chess I can understand, but Go has a level of strategy that my mind just can't grasp.

Furbag ,

I really love the design aesthetics of older trucks. They were uniquely cozy in their own kind of way. I wish you could buy new small sized utilitarian trucks, but literally nobody in the industry sells them anymore because the consumer keeps buying these behemoth trucks and so luxury has become the standard when it should have only encompassed a small portion of the truck market share.

Furbag ,

No, those are usually embedded into the video itself as a segment by the content creator. However, SponsorBlock works really well and will automatically skip those bits for you (assuming someone else already put in the effort to mark the sponsored content).

Furbag ,

The cooled seats, passenger visibility, handling characteristics, acceleration, speed, and steer-by-wire system were also appreciated. The fact that the truck gets a lot of attention, including from people who want to touch the pickup and take photos, not so much.

So they bought the attention seeker pickup truck, but got more attention than they bargained for? lol

Elon Musk demands another huge payday from Tesla (www.cnn.com)

In a series of posts on X Monday night, Musk said that he would not want to grow Tesla to become a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics without a compensation plan that would give him ownership of around 25% of the company’s stock. That would be about double the roughly 13% stake he currently owns....

Furbag ,

Well, so much for the altruist Elon Musk who uses his genius intellect to make the world a better place out of the goodness of his heart and the shared benefit of humanity. if he actually gave a shit, he wouldn't care if his compensation package was $1. He would supposedly be doing the work he is the most passionate about and cares the most about.

Nah. Richest man in the world says it's more important that he gets paid first. He's always been a fraud.

Furbag ,

It depends a lot on the specific store, but I don't usually have to wait in a line longer than about 3 people and it moves quick.

On one hand, I agree with the video that the system doesn't solve the problem of lines at the supermarket. It was fairly obvious that they never anticipated queuing because there's never a dedicated section for where to stand while you wait for the next available terminal, so the line often spills into the end of some aisle and blocks all the cross traffic trying to navigate to the other end of the store.

On the other, it's not like we're going to go back to not having to stand around and wait if we get cashiers back filling the old school checkout lines.

IMO, the way forward is going to be to eliminate pay stations altogether and do either RFID tags on all the items so you are just charged for what you take while walking out of the store, or you have a scanner in the cart so you can total up all your purchases as you shop, reducing friction at checkout.

Furbag ,

It's pronounced Gif, with a soft G as in Graphics.

I don't give a fuck what the idiot creator thinks it should be pronounced as, I'll die on this hill with my honor intact, surrounded by the corpses of everyone who thinks Jif is referring to anything but peanut butter.

Furbag ,

This was beautifully written and well sourced. I don't have anything else to add, I just wanted you to know I appreciate your contribution.

Reddit is bringing back r/Place at perhaps the worst possible time (www.theverge.com)

Reddit is bringing back r/Place at perhaps the worst possible time::Reddit is bringing back r/Place — a collaborative project where individual users can edit pixels on a giant canvas — at a time when user dissatisfaction with the platform is very high.

Furbag ,

Sadly, nothing bad will happen to reddit no matter how many people try to protest with pixel art on /r/place. Last year, admins unabashedly removed entire swathes of canvas that they deemed inappropriate, sometimes catching legitimate art in the crossfire. Not to mention the admin who got caught red handed placing multiple pixels off of the timer, with video evidence.

So no, a giant fuck /u/spez will never be allowed to exist long enough to be anywhere close to complete. They'll do the same thing to any API related banner or whatever you might think of.

The best thing you can do is not engage. They are doing this again so soon after the last one because they desperately need clicks and traffic to boost their site metrics for the upcoming IPO.

Besides, it's just going to be a canvas covered 75% in flags maintained by bots anyway because reddit sucks at programming in safeguards to prevent abuse, so your 1 pixel of contribution won't mean squat.

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