And so many things were just ‘common sense,’ and not enshrined in laws because the thought was that anyone breaking them would be held accountable by the populace. We now have a critical mass of stupid, self absorbed, or malicious people that laws don’t matter, much less norms.

I love this list of oaths we (collectively) take as part of taking office… However, what I think is missing is that we have no oath-breaker laws – to my knowledge – that punish people for breaking their oaths. The military might be an exception, as there seems to be a penalty for ‘false-swearing,’ but I don’t know how that’s enforced and how objective it is.

Theoretically, oath-breaking is a social issue, and so we’re back on the issue where there are tons of guidelines that imply that we should all behave, and we make people “swear” that they will behave certain ways, with the assumption that if they break those oaths, they will be punished socially – by being primaried if elected, voted out, “sanctioned”, or similar – but these punishments require the society to determine the oath was broken. When that contract is broken and there are enough people who agree that ignoring the oath is acceptable, those oath-breakers have no punishment.

Presidents ignoring the constitution, service-members following orders that are unconstitutional, judges failing to be impartial, etc. The solution is supposed to be ostracism, impeachment… social. But when the social penalties are outweighed by the potential gains, then an oath is just empty words to someone with no morals.

The party of law and order, of family values, of tradition and respect certainly appears to have turned a blind eye to anyone disregarding oaths or promises that they find inconvenient.They preach mightily about how to be good, but are seldom good when they think no one is looking.

I find it funny how most of these oaths end with ‘so help me god.’ Maybe at one time, the rich and powerful feared god’s wrath. They certainly don’t now. As an atheist, I don’t fear it either, but that doesn’t stop me from being kind to others and striving to make the world a better place.

sadly. I don’t have enough money to turn this shit-hose off.

Gen AI is neat, and I use it for personal processes including code, image gen, llm/chat; but it is sooooo faaaar awaaaay from being a real game changer - while all the people poised to profit off it claim it is - that it’s just insane to claim it’s the next wave. evidence: all the creative (photo/art/code/etc) people who are adamantly against it and have espoused reasoning.

There’s another story on my feed about a 10-year-old refactoring a code base with a LLM. Go look at the comments from actual experts that take into account things like unit tests, readability, manageability, security. Humans have more context than any AI will.

LLMs are not intelligent. They are patently not. They make shit up constantly, since that is exactly what they do. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, the shit they make up is mostly accurate… but do you want to rely on them?

When a doctor prescribes you the wrong drug, you can sue them as a recourse. When a software company has a data breach, there is often a class-action (better than nothing) as a recourse. When an AI tells you to put glue on your pizza to hold the toppings, there is no recourse, since the AI is not a legal thing and the company disclaims all liability for its output. When an AI denies your health insurance claim because of inscrutable reasons, there is no recourse.

In the first two, there is a penalty for being wrong, which is in effect an incentive to be correct – to be accurate, to be responsible.

In the last, as an AI llm/agent/fuckingbuzzword, there is no penalty and no incentive. The AI just is as good as its input, and half the world is fucking stupid, so if we average out all the world’s input, we get “barely getting by” as a result. A coding AI is at least partially trained on random stackoverflow posts asking for help. The original code there is wrong!

Sadly, it’s not going anywhere. But people who rely on it will find short-term success for long-term failure. And a society relying on it is doomed. AI relies on the creative works that already exist. If we don’t make any new things, AI will stagnate and die. Where will we be then?

There are places AI/LLM/Machine-Learning can be used successfully and helpfully, but they are niche. The AI bros need to be figuring out how to quickly meet a specific need instead of trying to meet all needs at the same time. Think the early 2000-s Folding at Home, how to convince republicans to wear a fucking mask during covid, why we shouldn’t just eat the billionaires*.

*Hermes-3 says cannibalism is “barbaric” in most cultures, but otherwise doesn’t give convincing arguments.

Become more involved. Do you know your mayor?

If you are not helping pick the candidates on the ballot, then you just need to pick the lesser evil. If you want to do more than that, then be part of the decision of WHO ends up on the ballot, because that process has already started.

There’s a significant hurdle to run for even the mayoral office: it doesn’t pay well relative to a corporate job, and doesn’t have the same job security. People can only run for the decision-making positions when they already have enough wealth to be comfortable without a “real job.” Help find or select people with your values and we can take this back.

If you are mad at your options, the solution is not to give up, but to make better options.

It’s almost like you read Lucid’s message, decided to type up a reply, but then missed the fucking point. These establishment dems are only ‘allies on some issues’ because we keep fighting amongst ourselves on what the top priority is instead of getting anything useful done.

Yes, we have “dems” that are not solid on issues we/you/I think are important, but the result is that when we don’t vote for them, the much worse regressive party wins and makes things shittier for everyone.

I do agree that the solution is to get involved. Start local and engage with your local democratic org. Help support or find people to run for office with your opinions, but - and this is crucial - when someone better than a republican is on the ticket, fucking vote for them, even if they are not your perfect politician.

If you are not involved in local org politics, you can use our favorite mantra: vote blue no matter who. By doing so, you are ceding your opinion to the people who have more at stake or are more invested, but at least you are not letting evil win by default.

This look to be amazing. I live by a CLI, but most browsers have some keyboard shortcuts at best. This one seems to have the capability to be fully KB using a VIM-like command line, which is awesome.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Another thing you can do is to separate the grease from any residual solids.

If you have a jar of bacon grease with brown bits floating around in it, you can put it in a pot with a similar amount of water and bring it all up to a boil or just near it for just a moment. The grease will sit on top of the hot water, but anything else will fall down. Then let the pot cool and put it in the fridge to solidify the grease. You can then scoop the now-solid grease in big chunks and put it back in the jar and discard any bits in the water.

I learned this from people who do at-home soap-making from their rendered fats. They would repeat it a few times before adding lye, as it will leach impurities such as salt, aromatic and favor compounds from the fat, but I find doing it once or twice leaves me with a nice cooking fat that still has bacon-y aroma.