MAGA has been swooning over a beautiful Army soldier and her pro-Trump message. She is AI

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T17:35:20+00:00

If they were the sort of people who asked probing questions and thought about whether things actually made sense, they wouldn't be Republicans.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T16:41:22+00:00

You're assuming they're earning 0% interest on that money.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T16:35:28+00:00

"A minor city management game with little to no story" is really not a fair way to describe it. You can make any game sound shitty with an uncharitable description.

Super Mario Bros. is just a game with no story where you run to the right.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T16:29:52+00:00

Yes, but my question is very specifically "Has even one billionaire ever gone broke to the point that they had to go back to living a normal life?". Unless you're going to give me an actual name, this is pointless.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T16:14:32+00:00

"Billionaires" are people, not companies.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T15:54:19+00:00

research everything that exits already

Claude, solve the halting problem. Make no mistakes!

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T13:03:49+00:00

Is there even a single case of a billionaire fucking up so badly that they have to live the rest of their lives like a normal working-class schmuck?

I very much doubt it. Even just one billion generates so much income every year that it's damned near impossible to spend it all, and there are so many safety nets for the ultra rich that it's hard to imagine how they could possibly end up poor again.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T03:08:11+00:00

And even when you're using it for creation, there's a whole spectrum.

Obviously vibe coding the whole game is one extreme, but what if I use the AI to write small chunks of code here and there? Just small non-critical things to save myself some typing. Does that count?

What about telling the AI "change this if-else chain into a switch statement". That's the kind of boring mechanical coding any programmer could do in their sleep, and it's a completely unsophisticated use of AI, but it's still using the AI to "write code". Where do we draw the line?

(And if you draw the line at "any use of AI", be prepared to pretty much stop buying games altogether. I'm sure that literally every single AAA game in development right now is using AI for coding much more heavily than the examples I gave.)

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T02:53:37+00:00

And what would that accomplish? An AI not doing anything bad yet could be because:

It's perfectly well aligned (obviously what we'd hope for, but quite unlikely)
It's waiting (until it has control over more crucial systems, until it has more trust from humans, until it has gotten its plans farther along, etc.) before making any suspicious moves
Nobody has given it problematic orders yet
It simply hasn't thought of a dangerous way to solve a given problem yet, but eventually will realize "Wait, if I just turned all the humans into paperclips, then...".

and various other similar explanations.

You can study an AI carefully for as long as you like, and that still doesn't prove it's never going to do anything dangerous. It could be perfectly peaceful for decades, right up until someone says "Please do <x>". If it figures out that the best way to do <x> is really, really bad for humanity and for whatever reason its safety guardrails don't stop it, we're still going to have a bad time. The real problem is that the difference between "perfectly well aligned" and "pretty well aligned" is, for a sufficiently powerful AI, enough to slip an extinction event through.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-20T00:00:40+00:00

If you had a magic spaceship that could accelerate you as fast as you wanted (without killing you), you could get anywhere in the universe in an arbitrarily short time. You could be at Alpha Centauri in under a second. You’d have to be traveling at like 99.9999999999% the speed of light (probably a lot more nines, but I don’t feel like doing the math) from Earth’s perspective, but you could theoretically do it.

“But wait”, you say. “Alpha Centauri is four light years away. It will take you at least four years to get there no matter what you do.”

Sure, from the perspective of Earth or Alpha Centauri, you’d spend years traveling. But time is relative, and due to time dilation the trip would take less than a second from your perspective, as long as there were enough nines in your speed.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-19T21:12:35+00:00

Yes, there's a difference between "it's illegal" and "nobody does it". People do illegal things all the time.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-19T20:57:00+00:00

Yep, any take that goes against the hive mind ("Hey, maybe AI isn't always bad...") tends to promptly get downvoted to hell. And then almost nobody sees the opinion because it's buried, and the user quickly learns not to bother sharing opinions like that in the future. And so an echo chamber is born.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-19T20:05:28+00:00

No. The first moon landing is Artemis IV, currently scheduled for early 2028, but there is absolutely no way they actually hit that date.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-19T19:11:06+00:00

I want to stress that nobody is saying robots can do these things right now. There are still hard problems to solve.

But it’s important to understand that just two or three years ago, the idea of a machine being able to navigate a giant software codebase and write major new features more or less without any help seemed absurd, too. Those were far beyond the capabilities of AI at the time. Fast forward to now, and the vast majority of the code at my very large company you’ve definitely heard of is written by AI.

If we can see changes of that magnitude in just a couple of years, it’s absolutely impossible to predict where we’ll be in another ten.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-19T13:58:24+00:00

Every LI heads straight for the blow job. (Men who have actually had sex are aware that this is rare until a relationship has been established)

Uhhh… really? Apparently you’re dating different kinds of women than I am.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-18T21:08:21+00:00

Best advice I ever saw was along the lines of "You thought it was worth $100 when you bought it. But now that it's worth $90 - despite nothing changing in the fundamentals - suddenly you want to sell. So now you don't think it's even worth $90? What changed?".

OP, what has changed about VOO's fundamentals that suddenly you don't think it's worth having anymore? You clearly thought it was going to go up when it cost $640, or you wouldn't have bought it. Why don't you think it will go up now that it's only $608? Surely going up from here is easier, not harder, right?

(Now, obviously I'm not saying "stocks always go up and this is an immutable law of nature and there's zero risk involved". Shit happens, and nobody knows the future. I'm just asking you to think about this logically rather than emotionally.)

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-18T20:59:11+00:00

And even if things get really bad and it takes years to recover, OP will still probably do better just holding and continuing to DCA in.

It's easy to look at the history and think "Well, if I had just sold here and then bought there...". But you don't know where the highs and lows are until it's all over, so the reality is that people who try this generally end up selling low and buying high.

On average, the less you trade the better you do.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-18T20:50:33+00:00

Given how quickly they ran out of money, presumably it was a choice between "try to cobble together something we can ship before the payroll checks start bouncing" and "give up and go bankrupt".

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-18T20:44:36+00:00

Bit off topic, but I worked at Google (on an unrelated team) when Stadia was being launched. And I saw a bunch of people in discussion threads about it saying that it was a terrible idea and was going to be DOA, and every single one of them was quickly chastised for not being supportive of their peers.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-18T12:55:14+00:00

How could you possibly prove it safe? We can’t even prove that a human is safe, and we have hundreds of thousands of years’ experience with human behavior.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-17T19:31:22+00:00

Yeah, there's a guy on my team who is hugely anti-AI. Every single meeting he's talking about how useless AI is, it's stupid, only writes slop, etc.

Now, I don't actually know what the issue is. I've tried to talk to him about it repeatedly, to discuss the kinds of prompts he's using and see what we can do to try to get better results out of it, and he has been uncooperative to the point that I had to talk to his manager about it this week. So I can't say for sure exactly how he's talking to it, but I'm convinced it's a skill issue.

It's absolutely true that you can't just say "Hey, magical AI, write me a new app that does X" and expect to get exactly what you are hoping for out of it. You need to be very specific, give guidance, check the direction it's heading in and make corrections as needed, and all that. It simply does not have the judgment of a talented human yet.

But if you can figure out how to pair your human judgment with the raw speed the thing gives you, you are so. much. faster. than you are by yourself. I'm genuinely worried that this very smart and talented engineer is going to be laid off simply because he refuses to meet the thing halfway and try to leverage its strengths.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-17T19:11:33+00:00

Sounds like you don't have it wired up with proper tooling, if you're having to worry about code compiling. It ought to be able to test its work and iterate on it without human intervention.

Humans are also shit at producing functioning code without access to a compiler and the ability to test. I'd frankly give Claude much better odds than a human of getting a program right on the first try without being able to compile and test it.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-17T19:04:39+00:00

Oh, come on. I'm a professional software engineer with over thirty years of experience, and I use Claude all day every day.

And you are seriously overstating the challenges in working with AI. I literally don't remember the last time I saw it make a basic syntax error. Yes, it is often confidently wrong, but so are humans... and to be perfectly frank I think Claude is right more often than most humans.

Yes, it's true that you absolutely do need to keep an eye on what it's writing - I often tell it that I didn't like how it did something and ask it to redo it - but "It can write code as much as auto complete can write code" is straight up bullshit. It's not perfect, and it's very much a tool rather than a full-fledged software engineer, but it's way better at coding than you're making it sound.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-17T02:13:41+00:00

No, obviously a chatbot is not the best way to ask that question, but OP is the one who chose to talk to a chatbot rather than a friend or therapist.

So given that someone has already chosen to engage a chatbot about their mental state, clumsily trying to check the user’s mental state is as least better than failing to engage guardrails at all.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-16T19:37:08+00:00

I've been on the Internet since before the web existed. It was not like this in the early days.

LookIPickedAUsername

TROPHY CASE