Even if they don't care about looking strong, they also define themselves by the things they hate, and they get genuine pleasure from punching down.

You know, like a bad person!

Granted, the latter but about punching down is probably from the same inadequate corner of their brain as the "look strong" stuff.

This is the most accurate thing I have read in a long time.

Yeah, more people need to be taught that generative AI models are literally auto-correct like on their phones. It is the gigantic, multi-trillion-dollar, ultra high tech, ultra high powered version of auto correct, but that's what it is. Would they trust something important that, sight unseen?

For those of us who write code, it can be handy to have an auto correct that can suggest chunks of code rather than just the next word or filling in a partially typed variable name. But you have to treat it like a suggestion, and read the suggestion, and make a conscious decision about whether that is how you want it. Giving up your agency is bad, but that is what a huge portion of the population seems to want to do at every turn. Not having to do anything is a nice-sounding option to have, but it's not good for your brain or body.

But on top of that, as an engineer, you are also losing out on familiarity with the design when you give up that agency. I find that when I let the neural net in my head -- the one made out of actual neurons -- get more exposure to the internal workings of a system, it is better at helping me diagnose problems with our product more quickly and intuitively.

At past employers it has seemed to me that most of what the internal recruiters do is look back and forth between resumes and job descriptions and throw away the resumes that don't have enough bullet points matching.

And now we have AI that can do it even worse and even faster!

Senior engineer of embedded c/c++ here. I have referred to myself a few times on here as trying to live the superposition of the engineer and the goose farmer. Now that I've built a palace of a chicken coop and there are grown chickens running around with the dogs betweenn the play house and koi pond, my back yard is turning into a village from a Zelda game or something.

My power tools are newer and more numerous than my computing devices by far, lol. And it's all higher end DeWalt stuff because using a good tool can be satisfying as hell. Plus I've already spent more money on wood, and the tools will last a long time.

The kernel (heh) of truth underpinning this meme is real and profound. If you spend all your time on screens and in cyberspace, if you go beyond touching grass and get your fingers in the dirt or build something physical, it could be extremely good for you. It works great for me!

Being a regular medical cannabis user, when I occasionally take a break from it the dreams come rushing back in full technicolor.

These vivid dreams are not exactly nightmares, but they aren't the fun kind either. They are usually mundanely weird to anxiety inducing, but the next day anything I remember will feel like snapshots of real memories more than normal dreams.

I can see there being a large number of seemingly intelligent people with enough self-awareness to know that Trump gives no shits about them, but they are still totally fine with him because they are a bad person in some other way. I could see it being because they are both "alphas" and "game respect game," and/or because (they think) he will produce some result they want.

Conservatives can be very "ends justify the means" which is why fascism is such a natural evolution. Hell even forgetting what I said about alpha douches... There are tired old ladies all over this country who would agree that Trump world not piss on them if they were on fire, but it is still an overwhelmingly good thing that he is president because Roe got overturned. I was born into a white catholic family, so I'm pretty sure I'm related to some.

My cynical but not wrong take as a US citizen who drives an old normal-sized car:

The vehicles people choose to drive are so freaking huge that their electric versions will probably need 200kwh battery packs, making them even more expensive than EVs already are here.

Though on the other hand, the people around me DO love spending ridiculous sums on their cars too.

I am reading #4 saying "oh my god" while looking like the dude in the anti-AI memes who is stunned when the computer says what he told it to say.

This subthread feels like home.

The thing is, the US is so big that even once you account for the few biggest ones, all the rest of the states in the top 10 each have a population as big as something like Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, or Greece.

Those aren't additional Frances, granted, but still pretty significant.

You'd need about 5 Frances just to cover the population, ignoring the area.

Maybe they meant the end of "the United States as we know it," which could be right. Or, arguably, already is.

But as a lifelong resident of the US, your point about how long regimes can last is extra scary. Two of the biggest facets of this country's identity have been that we have a lot of money/resources and that we have a lot of weapons. Plus we have our special brand of "fuck y'all; got mine" culture.

It seems like a nasty recipe for a fascist regime to isolate and turtle up and just grind along for half a century.