I’m actually super glad to hear they might have fixed that, shit was a nightmare. I watched the OS lock me out and brick itself in real time. Still never successfully recovered the contents.

Windows 10, but only a couple years ago.

Standing up for all “oppressed groups” is contradictory. For example, in western countries, LGBT people are an oppressed group, and so are Muslims, yet when the latter are in power, they treat the former very badly, so which side do you stand up for

Easy. The answer is that you stand up for the oppressed group.

Why, exactly, do you think that’s a contradiction? When a group is in power, they are by definition not oppressed.

In all of your examples - all of them - there are oppressors in power, and there are oppressed that are not.

As generalized groups,

• LGBT people are not in power over Muslims.
• Transgender women are not in power over cisgender women.
• Palestinians are not in power over Israel.

In case it really needs to be said - obviously, not all Muslims, cisgender women, or Israelis are oppressors. But all Palestinians and most LGBT people are oppressed.

Palestinians are not “the Muslim world” and by the way, painting such a massive and diverse group as an oppressive monolith is disingenious at best. The same should be said for associating all Jewish people with the actions of Israel - it’s fundamentally wrong.

The answer remains the same, in any and every case. You stand up for the oppressed group.

Doing so is the only way you stand for:

a society in which anyone is allowed to live their life as long as they aren’t harming anyone else.

And since you seem to really want to beat the nuance out of all human existence with your teacher comment - no, individuals being shitty to each other doesn’t change anything.

If an oppressed LGBT who happens to be a racial majority is racist against an oppressed minority who happens to be a homophobe - guess what, they’re still both oppressed - but as individuals, they can also just be shitty. They don’t have to be treated as oppressors, insofar as you need to stand up for one against the other.

Unless one is actively in power over the other’s life and uses that power to oppress them, in which case the answer remains the same - you stand for the oppressed.

I have had Windows corrupt a hard drive because it forced an update that exceeded the available storage.

If they only forced security updates by default, I would agree with you. But they don’t.

It sounds like they’re in a holding pattern. They think AI will functionally replace programmers soon enough that hiring new ones will just be a waste of money.

Too bad that even if it were only a year or two away (it’s not, at least certainly not in the way they think), programmers would still 100% be the only people that could successfully onboard an AI solution into a proprietary ecosystem.

Hah dang you should have told me to read the rest of the sample before I read the study! Now I’ll never know how far I’d get before I stopped imagining some nobleman drinking at a pub for no reason. I’m certain I would have figured it out eventually… but 35 English students never figuring that out? Almost half?

Given a dictionary and the words solicitor, injunction, affidavit, talk of tripping each other up with arguments and a literal reference to a “pile of money”?! They couldn’t make the leap to “court of law”? Couldn’t functionally use the dictionary as a tool for comprehending a sentence?

…That’s really scary, huh…

Thanks! Oof, I don’t know a particular favorite book, but favorite author is the late great Sir Terry Pratchett.

Oddly enough I overthought the first sentence, and imagined the Lord Chancellor was some type of local decorative feature like the Duke of Wellington. Then I realized it’s probably just a guy with a fancy title sitting at a table in a pub?

The rest is mostly straightforward to me. The text feels the way it literally reads - a bit muddy?

The streets are so full of fresh mud that they may as well be prehistoric mud flats after a Great Flood. I imagine it’s quite a large street leading up a big hill if he could imagine a giant dinosaur making the walk. So I picture basically a solid river of mud rising up in the distance.

If there are normally cobblestones or whatever, they’ve disappeared beneath the muck. I don’t know exactly what a chimney-pot is, but black smoke is pouring from the chimney somethings and mixing with the falling drizzle into dirty soot water. The rain is so blackened - and the weather so dreary - that the city itself could be in mourning.

It’s so muddy that the dogs are just dirty shapes in the muck, the horses have mud all the way up to their blinkers… which I read as blinders first, so I imagined it up to their heads and necks, like only the top 10% of the horse is actually visible and most of that is the headgear, and the rest of the horse is mud. I don’t know if that’s what a horse blinker is though.

The foot traffic feels cramped and irritable in the muck, people holding umbrellas against the dirty rain. It also sounds like a lot - tens of thousands of people walking the same paths. The edge of the sidewalk or whatever at the street corner is probably invisible under the mud, and because of that people keep slipping in the same spots. This pushes the mud more and more in the same directions, forming gross layered piles of muck in specific places against the sidewalk or something, causing more people to slip, adding more to the local mud (compound interest)

The day is so dark and dreary that it may as well be night. Overall, it’s muddy, raining, sooty, and depressing. There’s a big, wide, muddy street up a hill, filled with a constant flow of unhappy people.

I don’t know if I would actually read this for leisure, but I like it. I think I’m on the same page for most of it? But I still have no idea what’s up with Lord Chancellor. Is he a person staring out a window at the scene in the street? Does his title imply nobility and fancy clothing? What does the inside of the Lincoln’s Inn Hall look like?

I see it all the time whenever someone’s consumerism is threatened.

Lol how, exactly? Do you think I am the tech illiterate end user we are talking about?

Or maybe I am someone who constantly has to deal with end-users, and I’m forced to acknowledge that educating them is like trying to hold back the tide?

Systemic problems require systematic solutions. Anything less is just shouting into the wind.

That’s not a solution, that’s a vague idea.

How do you hold people accountable? How do you encourage them?

What cultural solutions do you suggest?

Nah, I just think that we spend too much time blaming people instead of systems. You can’t change people. You can change systems which will then change people.

To blame someone is to consider them responsible.

Do you consider the average user responsible? Is it productive to try to hold them responsible for any of this?

The end-user has always been the bane of all tech development. It doesn’t change the fact that the increasing tech illiteracy of end-users in the modern day is by design.

Nobody can fix the user, but we can fix the companies that build containerized little retail environments that encourage mindless engagement and discourage curiousity and experimentation.

It’s funny but sad. Vague, selectively-enforcable laws are the point.

We can’t just call something AI to prevent regulation.

They can, though. With “laws” like this, the government can freely pick and choose who is punished and who is protected.

Bonus points if your company mandates return to office, lays off people after they return to office, and then builds a nice new office overseas in a completely opposite timezone to fill with replacements. Then make the people there physically sit in that brand new office… and make them report to the people here.

The job? Data entry.

I just… I don’t… Why…

Anyone else remember kids watching videos of other kids nearly choking to death on cinnamon, and thinking “hey this looks like fun”?

Or the “chug a gallon of milk” thing? Those “trends” were just weirdly masochistic and sadistic. It wasn’t even misinformation or anything. Kids watched other kids suffer, and then chose to suffer too.

I can imagine that TikTok has been for Internet trends, to what slot machines did for gambling.

It’s closer to what mobile apps did for gambling. Crazy how quickly that was normalized in the US, and it’s tragic how easily people can just delete thousands of dollars from their bank account on a whim from the comfort of their couch.

I guess what I’m saying is, maybe sometimes children and adults really do need some protection from their stupid impulses.

I’ve seen bagpipers doing their thing in random parks. Alone, with a bagpipe, standing in a field, practicing. Bagpipers who needed the practice, btw.

I thought it was cool. Nobody seemed to mind.

You do you!

. A whole lot has to go wrong for the milk from an animal to be the margin by which a person survives

Listen - I get it. Dairy is unhealthy in the modern day. The agricultural industry is devastating the planet. There are valid moral frameworks under which any and all animal exploitation is considered abbhorrent and shameful. I’m not arguing against any of that.

But if you want to talk about this, you need to accept that historically, dairy was huge. A whole lot has to go wrong in the modern day for milk to be the margin. But back then, human life was constantly in that margin.

You want to talk about salt? Salt started wars. Salt was such a valuable resource that humans literally killed each other over it, because it could preserve food. You can talk all you want about how easy it is to preserve food, but talk to me when your neighboring countries regularly invade to take it from you.

Every year - every year - humans struggled to survive through the winter. And most required nutrients simply cannot be consumed through grain and tubers alone. Certainly not pre-industrial, pre-enrichment, pre-GMO grains and tubers.

Humans in the modern day are significantly taller than historical humans. Why? Nutrition. Humans literally weren’t getting enough nutrition. Constantly.

What sustains through the winter? A cow. It turns those long-lasting grains - even grains we can’t eat - into milk and cheese. As a bonus, it also serves as a heat source. Humans would bring their cows into the house over the winter for both to survive.

That is how hard life was. That is how close pre-industrial humans were to death, that they would choose to sleep in a confined space with a giant bag of loud, hot methane.

Every last goddamn calorie, carbohydrate, protein, fat, and vitamin mattered. Dairy changed the course of human civilization. It’s silly how modern humans cling to it so tightly - lactose intolerance is so common that it should really be called lactose tolerance - but dairy had very real benefit and value. Animal husbandry was one of the first key technologies required to build stable human settlements.

Edit - not to mention, crops failed all the time. Harvest yields fluctuated significantly, especially before we understood nitrogen fixation, crop rotation, fertilizer quality, etc.

Pre-GMO (the old-school selective breeding kind), wheat was much harder to grow in large quantities, and since they required so much water, droughts were devastating. There were no massive irrigation systems - you literally depended on the rain to survive. Good luck preserving food that you just never had to begin with.

Lol okay? I wasn’t arguing in favor of the dairy industry at all. I was providing historical context - essentially, I’m warning that we shouldn’t let AI go the way of the dairy industry. That is, we shouldn’t allow it to grow so massive that it starts having similar effects on the climate.

That being said,

Perhaps there have been times of famine where it kept people alive, but today and throughout most of human history, it’s simply killing people

This is just false. Most of human history was famine, compared to the modern day. Food lasted a couple days, at most. Dairy and grain were massive contributors to human flourishing.

It might not be healthy compared to other modern alternatives, but I invite you to find historical alternatives that were at all competitive. People were more likely to own a cow in the middle ages than they were to own land.

For the record, dairy production and consumption has been around for almost all of human civilization. It had time to really embed itself in society, and it served a very real, practical purpose. It kept people alive.

The AI hype has only being going for like a decade and shows no signs of slowing down. Those numbere are literally rookie numbers.

Dishwashing is a significant underestimate here, and don’t forget hand-washing (before/after bathroom, food, cleaning…).

Plus you missed outdoor and gardening, which would help explain why the Land of the Free Lawns uses more than anybody else.