• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Once more, overcompensating way too hard and needlessly throwing around terms to try and make yourself look like an actual leftist. You know what the clearest sign of this is, liberal? Other than you basically going “no u”?

    I never said a thing about the USSR lacking compassion to animals. Nor did I ever mention NASA nor make a judgment on which group was morally superior. That all came from you, because you felt the need to bolster your leftist “credentials”. But I see through it.

    It’s not terribly surprising that both NASA and the USSR space program did awful things to animals. They were racing each other, moving quickly and breaking things. It would be too risky to test humans in incredibly novel technology like that, but they wanted data and results. So they tortured poor animals instead of taking the time to go more slowly and do safer tests. And let me be explicitly clear, both space programs are guilty of this and damnable for it.

    What’s your next reply going to be, I wonder? Ignoring basically everything I said, and talking about more of NASA’s fuck ups, like “well we don’t know it doesn’t work” with Challenger? Sprinkling in some leftist terms to convince yourself you aren’t a liberal? Or will you totally pivot to something else and call me Clyde again?

    Please, mix it up a bit this time. The formula is getting rather dull. There’s better ways to try and convince us you aren’t a liberal.


  • I think there’s something to be said for medium sized companies. I work for one that’s trying to grow and become much larger, but it’s decidedly not big. Our execs though actually seem like pretty cool people, and the CEO seems to be a legitimately good person. He’s generally been open and honest, and he’s told stories that make me think he does actually value employees as people.

    He was talking about gay rights and the value of diversity during our weekly company forum the other day, and I asked him about our company’s support for DEI given the political pressure from conservatives to abandon it. He said he didn’t give a damn about them, and doing the right thing was more important. I don’t agree with everything he’s done – we’ve had layoffs, and morale isn’t great, and we’re totally broke – but I respect that he actually seems to mean what he says. And even when we had layoffs, executives and management weren’t safe either.

    I think a lot of what it comes down to is the genuineness of leadership and how closely tied they are to rank and file employees. That’s easier at small and medium companies. Large companies also tend to attract greedy robber barons.





  • The old saying goes that Russian history can be summarized as “And then it got worse.” The Russians are victims of their own history, and they are the first group that Putin terrorized (quite literally with the known false flag operation).

    They have such a rich culture and truly bright minds. There could be wonderful scientific collaboration and cultural exchange. I’d love to see a technological rivalry reminiscent of the cold war (without all the proxy fights and nuclear threats and animosity).

    I hope that it’ll be in my lifetime where we’re able to sit down and drink beer and vodka together and be on friendly terms as countries.


  • That’s not disappearing. That’s blatant killing.

    Disappearing is sudden government abduction with no paper trail. You criticize the government and then all a sudden, your colleagues and friends don’t know what happened to you and can’t contact you.

    It’s an important difference. Disappearing is more ominous and has a greater chilling effect. The government isn’t putting you in a comfortable hotel, and they aren’t killing you silently. They’re torturing you for punishment and for information, and threatening your family. It’s far more sinister.








  • I think what it comes down to is intention. Are you intending to mimic someone else’s likeness without that person’s permission? That’s wrong. But if you just like someone’s voice and want to use them, and they happen to have a similar likeness, that’s fine.

    Where OpenAI gloriously fucked up is asking Johansson first. If they hadn’t, they would have plausible deniability that they just liked the voice actor’s voice. If it reminds them of Johansson, that’s even fine. What’s wrong is that they specifically wanted her likeness, even after she turned them down.



  • Oh the engineers probably perfectly understood what was going on. But they don’t have the ability to correct Musk when he’s spewing bullshit.

    Ethically speaking though they’re supposed to refuse signing off on the work and whistleblow the issues, so they aren’t free of guilt.

    Right now at my work we have a gap in our safety analysis with a contractor’s product, and we’ve had to fight the VP to explain how we can’t just say “it’s their problem so we won’t deal with it” if its part of our product. One of my colleagues had to go up a head to inform the head of safety that we were having issues. It’s still an ongoing fight, but I cannot in good conscience allow the product to be finalized when we know there’s a safety issue that needs to be addressed.

    Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t an easy thing to do, and I’m really grateful that my coworker is very steadfast on this. But engineers aren’t supposed to approve of any work they know is unsafe.