That's also how I act when I haven't been doing my job, lol.

It makes a lot more sense for portable devices. The idea of a desktop PC that's nothing but usb-c front and back seems silly. However, my work laptop connects via usb-c to the docking station and that's pretty awesome. Through the usb-c ports I get multiple monitors, power, ethernet, audio, and of course peripherals and storage and other USB devices.

I hear that if you super-upgrade to the enterprise plan, they will promise your legal department to be totally cool with ALL your data and prompts!

That's the neat part when you blur the lines between the government and the private sector. So-called leaders who are interested in power, control, and "winning" more than upholding their oaths of office can just use the private sector to do the things the government is restricted from doing. Then when their businesses can't compete on their own, they can lean on the legal + force options the government has.

I'm starting to think this habit we have of electing selfish sociopathic bad-faith actors to powerful positions of service is less than optimal.

It seems like a pretty common thing for people to expect that the luxuries of modern technology include not having to do anything you don't want to, including being present for your own life.

People make self-destructive choices every day. (insert "always have been" 🌏🧑‍🚀🔫🧑‍🚀)

You gotta have somebody with an established, honorable bloodline. Somebody like a Wormtongue!

There are a handful of times per year where we are streaming a live channel or watching cable TV at somebody else's house because local_team being in the playoffs for in_season_sport.

It's horrifying. Downright dystopioan.

Well, if I assume the point of an LLM trained on the entire internet is to give an output that passes a sort of Turing test as "a random human on the internet wrote this," then the good news is that the trillions invested are working exactly as designed!

They have sold out our environment and our economic stability in order to giga-scale the experience of growing up before the internet where some schmuck in your physical vicinity would answer your question with some bullshit, and with some real Dunning Kruger Confidence in their voice, and you would hold on to that shit for decades!

I think the divide on this issue has a lot of parallels with the paradox of tolerance.

In the eyes of many, punching down and crossing lines of social/human decency is permissible when dealing with high-profile professional peddlers of punching down and crossing lines of social/human decency.

I'm not exactly arguing in favor of it or trying to convince you, but I think that's the angle when you're dealing with a crowd that has contempt for the person but not for actual racial reasons.

said it would be easy

Ah, the innocence of inexperience. (Giving them the benefit of the doubt of course. )

I work on old undocumented c/c++ spaghetti code for embedded systems. In multiple planning meetings I have gotten to use lines like "this looks like a single character change but testing it makes me really nervous" and have gotten zero pushback or raised eyebrows.

It's usually a few laughs and often another engineer or our manager will chime in to agree with me and describe some more of the context or whatever, lol.

I wonder if many superstitions in rational secular people could just be bad terminology for behavior that can have some good reasons behind it.

One is using intuition to access your brain power in a way that's different than conscious thought and verbal reasoning. For me at least, when I have spent months and even years troubleshooting or upgrading different parts of a system, I develop an intuition where I can track down certain types of issues really quickly or with very limited information.

There are often things that, in the wise words of Mr. Plinkett, you didn't notice -- but your brain did.

Second, and most important, is the ubiquitous one-two punch that there are always hidden variables and that they are by definition not easy to predict.

I have had my time wasted by way dumber and more seemingly random things than that worm drawing. I'm not a biologist but I could still speculate a bunch of potential reasons that, while wrong, would still be way more predictable than actual issues I've dealt with at work and home.

I can also predict that in that situation I would absolutely keep doing the drawings. My line of reasoning here applies to many other situations as well: The world is complicated. There could be a helpful effect from some part of the drawing process, or there could be no effect, OR there could be some crazy interaction of 3 different variables. Don't change anything, finish the current task, then decide if figuring out the cause & effect is worth doing next. (some of that also comes from my internal voice tasked with keeping my adhd in check)

They need to be the victim, but they also believe they (and other white males) are the smartest and best.

That also explains why they are so susceptible to fascist propaganda, as in the enemy is both strong and weak.