This sucks.

Can’t ditch it completely due to family, but got a few more contacts over on Signal after this announcement.

Completely agree.

It’s just a popular quasi-religion for rich people to keep doing what they do while coming off as megabrain angels.

Longtermism is a cardboard halo. A thin excuse to act in complete self-interest while pretending it is good for humanity.

The further into the future we try to think, the more different factors and uncertainty dominate. This leaves you room to put in any argument you feel like, to make any prediction you feel like. So you pick something vaguely romantic or appealing to some relatively popular opinion, and hey you’re golden.

I am approached by a beggar. What do I - the longterminist - do?

I feel like being kind today. My longterminist argument is that every bit of happiness and relief today carries compound interest into the future, and by giving this person some money today, they are content and don’t have to resort to thievery, which again makes another person have a safe day and have mental energy to do a lot of good tomorrow. The goodness becomes bigger every step, over time. I give them $100. It’s pretty obvious, really.

They smell and I don’t want to deal with that right now. My longterminist argument is that helping out beggars actually just perpetuates a problem in society. If people can’t function in society without random help, it’s just a ticking bomb of a humanitarian disaster. Giving them money just postpones the time until the crisis is too big to ignore, and allows it to grow further. No, this is a problem that society needs to handle right now, and by giving money to this person I’m just helping the problem stay hidden. I ignore them and walk on by. It’s pretty obvious, really.

My wife left me and I want other people to hurt like I do. My longterminist argument is that unfortunately, these people are rejects of society and I can’t fix that. But we can prevent them from harassing productive citizens that work hard to create a better future. If fewer beggars make commuters sad and it gives a 1% improvement in productivity, that’s a huge compound improvement in a few hundred years. So I kick him in the leg, yell at him, and call the police on him and say he tried to assault me. It’s a bit cold-hearted, but it’s obviously good long term.

Software Developer pro tip: Never ever get involved in any effort to rebuild the old system in new tech.

Make a new, smaller system to take new market instead of the old system? Good.

Suffer for years through an endlessly growing checklist of things that must be in this new thing because they were in the old thing? Arguing with sales whether you have to again rush out a fix for a customer that is important and absolutely depend on this integration with Microsoft Bob that nobody in the dev team even knew existed in the old system until the customer complained? Have release schedules set years in advance and constantly pushed because this thing will never ever ever be accepted as a replacement of the old system? Bad.

I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a child, I’m a mother. I’m a sinner, I’m a saint, I do not feel ashamed. I’m your hell, I’m your dream, I’m nothing in between. You know you wouldn’t want it any other way.

__import__("difflib").SequenceMatcher(None,"billion","billion").ratio()
1.0

Que?

“Arr, this ❌ marks where I buried 44 billion doubloons!”

If the AI doesn’t determine Musk is super smart and the most important person in the observable univserse, he’s gonna throw such a tantrum.

I question:

People who are unwilling to put in a mild amount of effort to understanding something.

Are they going to improve or impair healthy online discussions?

Most chatbots are speed bumps. Like phone menu trees and hold times, they slow you down on your way to get actual help.

Sometimes that means you give up before getting to the real help, which saves money on support.

Whether it’s the intended effect or not, it is so well known at this point that we shouldn’t excuse anyone using this tactic. It’s malicious.

So in legalese, it basically says “we are scared but not sure why. GRR!”

okay eyes clised, now whar?

I do love the “it may do so later” part. It reads like the journalist was writing this via speech-to-text from the shower, just rambling off whatever thoughts came to mind.

And hiring people up to the last second. Last few hires probably barely have time to sell their old apartment and pack their families on the plane to California before being laid off.

It will probably happen soon also. :/ The global economic situation that drove Reddit and Twitter to desperation applies to everyone else also.

Same here. Reddit had me going only on inertia for the past few years. Whether they revert their API lalala doesn’t matter - the communities are broken and I don’t feel like getting up again.

And even if through some divine intervention they manage to repair the communities, I’m like… eh. I went to sit over here now and it’s comfy.

nail gun noises

The day I don’t see “join our Discord” where I would earlier expect to find “visit our forums” will be a good day.

A bloated live chat monolith is not what I want to use to discuss game bugs or podcast episodes.