I’ve been following 3d printing since the early 2000s, when it was all homemade machines printing with weed whacker line, slicers weren’t a thing, and resolution was garbage. Now I have a resin printer that cranks out tiny detailed tabletop miniatures no problem. What a time to be alive.

Either Tom Petty or Geddy Lee. Both of their bands would be greatly improved if they didn’t sing.

I think the obvious answer is “Yes, some, but not all”.

It’s not going to totally replace human software developers anytime soon, but it certainly has the potential to increase productivity of senior developers and reduce demand for junior developers.

Lots of options, but ol’ reliable based on availability is mustard with a bunch of black pepper.

Die wurst man I’ve ever seen

I believe the most productive framing of UBI is directed toward the capitalists:

Say automation replaces the workforce you employ, with monumental savings to you! Now what?

The products that the businesses you control create require consumers. No consumers, no sales. Henry Ford realized this a century ago, which is why he championed a robust minimum wage. What good is the most efficient production if supply dwarfs demand? Even if you produce luxuries for the capitalist class, the buying power of those capitalists is predicated on their own profits. Elimination of the consumer class decimates the purchasing power of the capitalists which rely on their consumption, trickling up the chain.

Logically, it’s best to view the taxes that enable UBI as akin to the ante at a poker table, with returns on production and marketing resembling the strength of your cards. If everyone at the table pays in, and you have the strongest hand, you get out more than you put in.

If Coke, Pepsi, RC Cola, and the various generics pay in relative to their revenue, but Pepsi secures an outsized market share, their profits outpace the ante.

This is inevitable, the alternative being total collapse for all parties. Maybe you’d be the last to exit the market, but without the ante system, everyone will exit the market soon enough.

There are entrenched entities heavily invested, literally and figuratively, in aligning the government with their interests, and against the interests of the majority. Their primary methods are propagandizing the gullible to vote for the representatives they have invested in, and fomenting apathy in those they cannot propagandize.

The solution is two-fold: supporting candidates aligned with your interests throughout their career from local elections up to more powerful ones, and voting in every election for the front-runner who is less detrimental to those interests.

If you think the current government has their heads in their asses, it’s a good bet that this two-fold solution takes the form of voting for progressives in local elections and greater primaries, and showing up to vote for whichever of the front-runner candidates is comparatively more progressive.

Voting for a candidate that is progressive but vastly unlikely to win is counterproductive. Not voting because none of the likely candidates is sufficiently progressive is counterproductive.

If everyone understood this, and showed up to vote, within a few election cycles we’d have a government composed of un-assed heads.

It’s like when someone says something like “Oh if men could get pregnant there’d be an abortion clinic on every corner”. Not getting pregnant is the core attribute that makes “men” a concept.

Optimists are aspirational. The placebo effect is real, and pessimists use it counterproductively.

Her is set in 2025

I do everything in black anyway, and 4 packs of Elegoo PLA are like $45. No complaints so far and $11-12/kg is hard to beat

“It would be nice to develop an auxiliary sign language to bridge the accessibility gap between the hard of hearing and those who don’t learn a dedicated sign”

“You’re just as bad as the colonizers that decimated native American cultures”

Get out of here with that bad faith savior complex nonsense. Teaching indigenous people English wasn’t the problem, the problem was beating children for using their native language. I guess you think literacy is racist too because literacy requirements were used to disenfranchise black Americans, huh?

Your sanctimonious colonization comments are dripping with irony. I asked a question, directly to another person, about their opinion of the concept as a deaf/hard of hearing person. You interceded uninvited, deliberately ignored the explicitly stated context of the question (gestural languages having unique properties from verbal ones) so you could shoehorn in your opinion about a topic explicitly excluded by that context, which you smugly assumed I wasn’t familiar with, purporting the relevance by referencing authors who wrote very little about the actual topic at hand.

You want to talk about colonizers, look at your own actions here.

My goalposts are in precisely the place they started: a collection of basic international gestures to facilitate the most basic communication. Where are you jumping to colonization? Where did I say that my cultural group gets to decide what the signs are? You’re, again, wildly overestimating the scope of my proposal and jumping to ridiculous, unsubstantiated conclusions.

You get a group of signers from around the world to develop an international pidgin (like they already do informally at international gatherings) and come to consensus based on commonality. When the majority agree on a sign, use it. Where there’s little agreement, choose a new sign. No finger spelling, no complex abstract concepts, just a formalization of gestures most people could probably figure out anyway. I fail to see how that perpetuates colonization unless that’s what you’re setting out to do with your methodology.

I am familiar with the regionality of language. I don’t understand your point, you’re simultaneously saying that you can’t have universal understanding, but we have gestures we instantly understand instantly so there’s no need to codify them, but they look different.

I think you’re wildly overestimating the scope of my proposal.

It would certainly be limited and rudimentary; I wouldn’t suggest a solution exists capable of any broad nuance. But gesture is a unique variety of communication, in that it can convey “innate” meaning in ways verbal language simply cannot, except in the case of onomatopoeia. Pointing is nearly universal, smiling is nearly universal, beckoning is nearly universal. Gesture is a spatial form of communication, centered around our primary means of material interaction with the world.

Grammar and syntax aside, I’d argue that it would be possible to assemble a vocabulary of universal concepts (eat, drink, sleep, travel, me, you, communicate, cooperate, come here, go away, etc). Certainly not a language for extended detailed conversation, but a codification and extension of gestures which are already nearly universal by virtue of their innate implications alone. Enough to communicate that you’re hungry, but not enough to send for takeout.

A universal language, at the level of any other sophisticated language, is obviously impossible. A formal codification of simple gestures to communicate at the most basic human concepts is much more doable.

I know this is a point of some contention among the deaf community, but how do you feel about the development of a “standard” international sign? Personally, and I’m speaking as a fully hearing person, I think a basic international sign should be developed and taught to everyone. Not only to facilitate communication with the hard of hearing, but also in loud environments and with those who don’t share a spoken language.

It’s my understanding that a large portion of the deaf community is hostile to the idea of a universal sign from a cultural perspective, since each regional sign has cultural content. However I think it’s a potential solution for numerous issues, with more pros than cons.

More of a “Whoops” guy myself

The best thing about being an adult is that there’s no one to stop you from just buying a whole cake at the store and taking it home to eat it.

The worst thing about being an adult is that there’s no one to stop you from just buying a whole cake at the store and taking it home to eat it.

I don’t understand this deliberately pessimistic perspective I keep seeing around AI development that stubbornly ignores every other technological development in history. Even just considering the singular transformer architecture, we’re still seeing significant and novel improvement. In just a couple years we’ve watched the technology go from basic predictive text to high quality image and even video generation, now to real time robotics control.

The transformer architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible. The notion that the basic technology staying the same is an indication of stagnation is as ridiculous as if you said the same of transistors half a century ago. Most of the improvement we see in the near future will be through recursive and multi-modal applications, meta-architechtural developments that don’t require the core technology to change at all.