ArchRecord

I prefer using the self checkout, I don’t consider it work, because I also consider it work to mentally deal with meaningless small talk, and to deal with waiting in line for ten minutes when I’m buying just a few items.

You might feel like it’s work for you, and that’s fine. You can then use the staffed checkout lanes, which are explicitly there for anyone who dislikes doing self checkout.

The problem isn’t doing “work” by using self checkouts, the problem is capitalist cost-cutting, which would be done with or without self checkout machines.

To counteract the somewhat clickbait-y title:

[the adult] was hospitalized on Aug. 22 and has recovered.

There has been no evidence that H5N1 […] has been spreading from person to person.

the patient in Missouri is the 15th human case of H5 reported in the U.S. since 2022. Since the beginning of 2024, 14 poultry and dairy workers have been infected.

There’s still no indication it’s spreading between humans, and it doesn’t seem to be “raising anxiety,” at least not in any significant way. “This will be of enormous interest” - DR. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert

And on top of that, even in cases where it is demonstrably true that any given group/population/region, say, does more crime than the average, it almost always boils down to the fault being laid on the existing discrimination against that group causing further harm.

Like how racists will say that black people do more crime because they’re fatherless, (and that it’s a result of their culture that causes the fatherlessness) but don’t see the problem with specifically over-policing those neighborhoods and arresting the fathers they say need to be there for the kids, thus perpetuating the cycle in the first place.

Even if it were true that, somehow, miraculously, trans people did indeed do more crime than the average for their gender or sex, they also face multiple times higher abuse rates than non-trans people, which is known to perpetuate cyclical violence. But yet, somehow, they still do the same amount of crime as everyone else (at least, comparative to their birth sex, generally.)

"MtF transitioners were over 6 times more likely to be convicted of an offence than female comparators and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent offence. The group had no statistically significant differences from other natal males"^{https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/}

LGBTQ+ people are also more likely to be incarcerated after being convicted, and were more likely to serve long prison sentences. The graphic cites prison service data, the amount of currently incarcerated people, as a way to determine the rate of sexual offending, which is is a patently bad measure of offending rates.

I could see this as a way to make fun collage photos of yourself (i.e. you in multiple different poses in a wide shot of you in front of some cool mural/object)

But I feel like this then takes the meaning out of being there in the photo when you directly edit your entire presence into the photo.

I can understand tweaking eyes to remove red-eye, or replacing the background with a slightly better lit one from a different photo in the same shot, because that still captures the original essence of the shot, but when half the people in a photo quite literally weren’t even next to the others, it doesn’t feel like one side of the photo recognizes the presence of the other side, because they weren’t really there.

I find those kinds of chatbots useful, but those aren’t the ones I encounter 90% of the time. Most of the time, it’s a chatbot that summarizes the help articles I just read, giving faulty interpretations of the source material, that then goes on to never direct me to a real person unless I tell it multiple times that the articles it’s paraphrasing aren’t helping. (and sometimes, they have no live support at all, and only an LLM + support articles)

Oh yeah, it’s definitely useful for that!

Since LLMs are essentially just very complicated probabilistic links between words, it seems to be extremely good at picking the exact word or phrase that even a thesaurus couldn’t get me.

I primarily end up using LLMs through DuckDuckGo’s private frontend alongside a search, so if my current search doesn’t yield the correct answer to my question (i.e. I ask for something but those keywords only ever turn up search results on a different, but similar topic) then I go to the LLM and ask a more refined question, that otherwise doesn’t produce any relevant results in a traditional keyword search.

I also use integrated LLMs to format and distill my offhand notes, (and reformat arbitrary text based on specific criteria repeatedly for structured notes,) learn programming syntax more at my own pace and in my own way, and just generally get answers on more well-known topics a lot faster than I would scrolling past 5 pages of SEO-“optimized” garbage just designed to fill time for the ads to load before actually giving me a good answer.

I have never once found an “AI” feature integrated by a corporation useful.

I have only ever found “AI” useful when it’s unobtrusive, and something I chose to use manually. Sometimes an LLM is useful to use, but I don’t need it shilled to me inside a search bar or in a support chat that won’t solve my problem until I bypass the LLM.

Nowhere near that amount of people was actually added to the population that would need housing.

Not to mention the fact that there are over 11 million year-round vacant properties in the US, 6.7 million of which are simply held off the market, and 3.1 million are for rent, but not receiving any tenants year round (a tactic often used to artificially keep rents high for surrounding properties)

There’s also an additional 3.5 million homes that are “seasonal” properties, (i.e. vacation homes) that are still perfectly good for housing human beings, but are only actually used for part of the year.

There are an estimated 662,000 unhoused people in the United States, (Including those already in temporary shelters) so only a fraction of the available empty housing would completely house every homeless person in the United States.

The problem isn’t a made up “crisis” from immigrants, it’s a lack of care for other human beings that drives landlords, property investors, and multi-home owning individuals to hoard housing that people need to survive.

I, too have seen the ability of Sci-Hub to give me free access to research papers.

It’s terrifying how easy it is to get access to scientific literature for free! Wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

At least they seem to have addressed some of the security implications:

The database will be encrypted at rest and will require authentication (and periodic reauthentication)

The feature will also be off by default

But of course, nothing on the front of whether or not Microsoft will collect data on you using it. We can trust them there, I’m sure.

Surely they would never add even more telemetry that reports back nearly all of your important online activity to Microsoft.

Right?

The paradox of tolerance at its finest.

You decide. We all decide.

On an individual basis, you can decide if you think an action is ethical or not based on if it, for instance, causes harm, and you dislike causing harm to others.

As a society, we broadly come to a consensus on what we consider ethical or not by majority opinion, and turn those into laws. It’s why murder is considered wrong, in both religious and non-religious institutions and societies at large.

For example, as a society, we deemed killing other humans to be wrong because then we would be at risk of being killed, and it made it harder for us to survive overall. Those who killed were ostracized, those who didn’t were not. No religion was required to form such a belief, but it can certainly be a part of religious teachings.

You can use the Bible as a framework for how you decide what’s moral or not, but it’s not the only way to do so.

If you fat shame a person, it could bring motivation to become healthier.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6565398/

“exposure to weight bias triggers physiological and behavioural changes linked to poor metabolic health and increased weight gain.”

“The more people are exposed to weight bias and discrimination, the more likely they are to gain weight and become obese, even if they were thin to begin with”

“Fat shaming is also linked to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, eating disorders and exercise avoidance”

What you are advocating for directly leads to higher rates of obesity.

Suppressing them.

Your entire argument here is around discouraging sexual promiscuity (which is exclusively being advocated for specifically with consenting adults) and yet you also argue that a lack of reproduction/sex directly leads to grooming.

You can’t have both sides.

On top of that, many aspects about the church can lead to grooming that aren’t sexual repression, namely the power dynamics of religious officials, and the idea that those who are religious are more inherently “ethical” or “good” than others, and are thus less likely to do wrong.

she’s also promoting the decline of the nuclear family, because sexual freedom also means relationship instability.

“We find little evidence that having non-marital sexual relationships with multiple partners signals a disruption […in] marriage, or signals the future disinclination of singles to marry eventually” (1)

A woman that is sexually free also means that fatherhood with such a woman isn’t asured because a man can’t tell if the kids are his or not.

Wanting sexual freedom outside marriage is in no way similar to infidelity within existing relationships.

Men are substantially more likely to cheat than women. (2)

This also means that kids are more prone to be fatherless, lack proper guidance and get into crimes and delinquency.

This would only be affected by the initial personal freedom argument if the prior statements were true, which they are not.

Yes, the Bible and religions are restrictive, but they are somewhat useful and served purposes.

Certain individuals may find its restrictions useful to them.

Others may find them stifling.

You are arguing for morals based entirely on the writings of humans who witnessed unprovable events to be applied to all in society regardless of their current faith or beliefs.

If you find the Bible’s restrictions to be useful, then that’s perfectly fine for you, but don’t attempt to say they should apply for everyone, because of your faith.

Everybody is prone to sins and misconducts, me, you and priests too.

Should the people actively preaching against sin, supposedly following religious best practices, actively steeling themselves against sin not be substantially less likely to ever engage in such misconduct?

You’re not actually making a point here, you’re putting the very real threat of abuse by religious officials using their power in religious institutions as a means to groom children on the same level as the average person.

I feel like this says more about these students’ schools, rather than the students themselves.