I don’t know that I’d agree that the EU and the articles of confederation are comparable. There were a few big differences, including states printing their own currency without a common exchange medium (as opposed to the Euro), and that the mechanism for funding the federal government was (IIRC) entirely voluntary. States could just choose to not send money without consequences, and most or all made the obvious choice of not funding the federal government. The articles of confederation also had a few things about it that were more progressive than the constitution; for example, if I’m remembering right, it offered automatic citizenship to all native Americans, which pissed a lot of the farmer-settlers right off.

This is how nations destabilize. States perpetuate themselves through maintaining the exclusive monopoly on violence and using that monopoly to secure certain guarantees for or against its people. The Roman empire saw a similar decline of administrative willpower and rises in both vigilantism and shitty little civil wars between the wealthy elite who really ran the show (spoiler alert). I’m convinced that Balkanization of the US is, at this point, inevitable. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good or bad thing in its own right. On one hand, it might be better for both the states and the world if we went to more of an EU type structure. On the other hand, a nuclear armed independent Texas.

This is really cool, but it would have been cooler if they’d named their scouting missions Hugin and Mugin, since they’re Odin’s ravens that scour the earth for secrets to give to Odin.

I fuck with this energy, let’s get it done!

I don’t know if I can; it’s not, well, in my lane as a bicycle/pedestrian committee member. I still show up and advocate for lane narrowing and traffic calming at the city council meetings.

Edit: disregard. I thought you meant lanes, you clearly mean sweepers

I’m trying to secure wholly separate bike lanes, or at least flexi-posts, anything but a sharrow or a line of paint. Tbh, I dunno how that’ll work with a street sweeper.

Day 30 of being fucking bewildered that I, a non-voting member of my city’s bicycle commission, have stricter ethical laws binding me than those for judges and politicians.

Is this ceasefire deal in the room with us now?

Good point. I think a bigger problem than the customer facing AIs is going to be the internal ones that make shit up. Someone on here claimed to be working somewhere where they gutted their HR department and replaced them almost completely with an LLM that was fed their documents. They claimed the AI had already told them several blatantly illegal things. Any company that does that is just begging to get sued to death, and I’m sure the investors will be reeeeeaaaaal happy with the, what, 1% they saved by killing HR? I mean, HR aren’t the good guys here, but just imagine a company being brain dead enough to say “hey, let’s get rid of the people that keep us from getting sued to death and replace it with a chatbot lmao”.

If I was a Cisco investor, I’d be looking to move my money elsewhere. All these companies laying people off, shuttering whole ass teams, and replacing them with non-proprietary and, frankly, unproven LLMs are going to blow their own legs off here pretty soon. I have a feeling that a pretty dramatic change is AI pricing models is coming soon, since all of these companies are providing access to their models for a fraction of the cost to run them, and the VCs are going to want their money back. Is chatGPT good enough at, what is it, 0.004 cents a token? Maybe, I guess, if the ghost of quality control doesn’t haunt you at night. Is chatGPT still good enough at 0.1 cents a token or more, or with surge pricing models? I sincerely doubt it. If openAI implements surge pricing, stay on the lookout for articles about some company or user getting a surprise bill for a million dollars, AWS-style. Given the current quality of LLMs, I don’t think that the cost shakes out for what you get.

Yep, that’s me. You could probably find a few more good examples of me stepping in shit on Hexbear, that’s hardly the first.

I was wondering if this was a legit tribe or one of those shitty “white people desperate to open an Indian casino” tribes with two registered members that are like 1/24000 native American or some shit. I kind of looked them on Wikipedia, they seem legit.

You’re not really using the fediverse until you’ve been told that you’ll get the bullet, too. Sometimes, it’s exhausting commenting something pretty uncontroversial and then seeing like eight notifications and realizing it was on Hexbear.

The narrative is already being set that he agreed to the ABC debate. So, regardless of conditions, what will be remembered is that he said he would be there, and then wasn’t. I don’t think there’s a way he could safely back out of ABC at this point, regardless of what Kamala does.

I swear bro, please, I just need one more negotiation where Israel doesn’t even bother showing up. Please, bro, c’mon, bro, just one more negotiation and I swear it’ll work. We can totally get Israel to stop using the weapons we’re giving them if we just wait for the next negotiation, I promise Nettanyahu won’t pull the football back this time, bro, I promise, he promised me and I trust him. He was super cool and promised not to clown on me any more and said he was super sorry. Don’t you get it, bro? He’s changed, we can do this, just give peace one more chance, just

It’s not often you find a comment that’s both pedantic and well executed. Good job!

Get out of here, stalker

Idk. I live in a food desert, I’ve thought about trying to scrape up the capital to start a grocery bus to serve my area, but I’m pretty worried about whether I’d be able to pay my bills if I made it my full time job. I’ve pretty consistently heard that grocery is a sector that operates on thin margins, and I wonder if the notable disappearance of small neighborhood grocers over the course of my lifetime isn’t evidence to that end.

It’s my understanding that grocers themselves tend to operate is miserably thin margins, especially when they don’t have the kind of leverage of large, national chains. I know someone whose family operated a community grocery and they were actually relieved when the building caught fire. They didn’t depend on the income, it was just something they took over to serve the community, and it ended up feeling like an anchor around their neck. Seems likely that this is largely an issue that lies with the food producers.