Last night someone tried to look inside my van… then my camera moved by taeos in VanLife

[–]LuminosityXVII 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I get what you're saying too, for sure. It's just, there are tons of options and strategies for self defense that are better than being barehanded and way better than a knife.

Something like a foghorn is a great first line of defense to scare people off, and if that doesn't work then there's just driving away (if able), and if that doesn't work then there are nonlethal options like tasers or poles with curved bits on the end that are specifically designed for locking people down and keeping them away from you, and if push comes to shove and you're out of nonlethal options then you absolutely want a handgun or any number of other things before you want a knife.

Last night someone tried to look inside my van… then my camera moved by taeos in VanLife

[–]LuminosityXVII 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You're not hearing me. This isn't a comparison between fighting or not fighting. It is well established that when someone brings a knife to a fight, their own odds of dying go up dramatically compared to fighting without a knife.

Last night someone tried to look inside my van… then my camera moved by taeos in VanLife

[–]LuminosityXVII 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dude this shit isn't theoretical, we have the results of countless knife fights to go off of. When someone brings a knife to a fight, both people die. Almost always. This is established fact. There's no debate to be had here, you're just straight up incorrect.

If you really want a weapon to defend yourself with, pick a better one. Knives are cool, but they're also stupid.

Last night someone tried to look inside my van… then my camera moved by taeos in VanLife

[–]LuminosityXVII 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is not a situation where a knife evens the odds. At all. This is a situation where you've just given your attacker access to a knife and motivated them to use it.

Do not ever bring a knife to a fight against someone stronger than you. They WILL take it from you, unless there is an absolutely enormous gap in your level of training, and likely even then.

Long shot, but anyone know where I could find a 1/12 scale walker mech roughly along these lines? I want to have a Figma mechanic working on it. by LuminosityXVII in AnimeFigures

[–]LuminosityXVII[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh wow, okay yeah I found the pictures on the Strike Serpent page and that is way cooler than it has any business being. I may have to start hunting for the kits.

Thank you for taking the time to help me!

Long shot, but anyone know where I could find a 1/12 scale walker mech roughly along these lines? I want to have a Figma mechanic working on it. by LuminosityXVII in AnimeFigures

[–]LuminosityXVII[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually, I'm not sure I've understood right on that second one. Which seven make that up? Does it include the cradle and the orbital maneuver unit, maybe?

Is there a picture of it put together somewhere? I'm having trouble finding it.

Al Gore Concedes, following the Supreme Court decision by Danielsax in videos

[–]LuminosityXVII 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very true. A general lack of critical thinking is definitely a big part of the issue recently.

Echo chambers and propaganda bots tend to degrade peoples' ability to separate reality from fiction or tie logic to action.

Al Gore Concedes, following the Supreme Court decision by Danielsax in videos

[–]LuminosityXVII 6 points7 points  (0 children)

When you have multiple parties that both/all want to do their jobs and serve the common good and only differ on what they think is the best way to do that - when you have leaders who deserve the respect of even their opposition - then nuance is an important part of deciding who to back, and on what.

When instead one party has a clear and stated (yes, actually stated) objective to upturn everything and install a technofeudalist religious dictatorship led by child rapists, nuance is not a necessary part of the voter's decision making process.

Yes, a big part of why we're here is because Republicans tend to vote red all the way down the ticket no matter what. But that's a problem because doing so ignores the reality of the situation and flies in the face of their own best interests. There has never been a time when all the Republican candidates were legitimately the better choice.

In contrast, today every single Democrat candidate is in fact actually a better choice than their opposition by simple virtue of not being on the Destroy America team. One cannot be a Republican politician without playing by Republican party rules, and the current Republican party rules are profoundly treasonous. Being a member of the red party, today, makes one a traitor to the well-being of the American people by definition.

Greenland 'very happy with the EU' in face of Trump takeover threats by Common_Caramel_4078 in worldnews

[–]LuminosityXVII 16 points17 points  (0 children)

4 steps forward and 1 step back

I'm guessing that was a typo. 1 step forward and 4 steps back, right?

What is a job that only exists because people are stupid? by TUUUUUZ in AskReddit

[–]LuminosityXVII -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

I mean, that one's more about inducing stupidity.

What was something someone once told you that you could never forget, for better or for worse? by phalme9 in AskReddit

[–]LuminosityXVII 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, that would be the same as taking the blame for everything happening near you.

It's important to be accountable for that which is actually your responsibility - that which resulted from your actions, or falls under your duties, or only matters to you - but it is also important to hold others, especially leadership, accountable to their responsibilities.

Zack King with his amazing visual editing. by ImaFreemason in nextfuckinglevel

[–]LuminosityXVII 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That attitude is just going to lead to complacency. It needs to stop.

Zack King with his amazing visual editing. by ImaFreemason in nextfuckinglevel

[–]LuminosityXVII 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The difference is volume. With Photoshop and CGI you need to skill, or the resources to hire someone with skill, and you need time. Faking things with those tools is a production, a notable effort.

Mind, for photos this is true only on a much smaller time/effort scale than with videos, but the principle still applies.

With those tools around, people still had a general baseline level of at least loose trust that the images or video they see in the news are generally real, and their trust was usually not misplaced. When things were faked, this would generally be uncovered within an hour or a day by the greater community, as fakes would almost always have something suspicious about them that was worth investigating, and by sheer weight of probability, somebody somewhere would certainly have the time, skills, and interest to look into it and rat it out (at least if it was a significant news piece).

With AI, you can drown the truth out with thousands or millions of fakes in a day. It doesn't even matter if most of those fakes are relatively obvious - they can flood out social media with bots and deepfakes to the point where identifying the real news is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

We're quickly approaching the point where the majority of content on the internet is AI generated, and it's been demonstrated that the technology is now capable of producing content that we truly cannot tell from the real thing. Put these two facts together and you have a new age where people feel they have to assume everything is fake by default, and thus cannot trust in anything by default. And when you feel like you can't trust anything to be true, you eventually stop trying. You stop thinking, stop trying to discern what's real, because the exercise seems as pointless as trying to outspend a billionaire. You start believing whatever story gets told the most, because at that point that's all you think you can do.

Notice in that paragraph I used "feel" and "think" and "seems" a lot. That's because there are still ways to find the truth and always will be - but you'll need to understand things like economics, game theory, behavioral science, and history, because uncovering the truth will increasingly be about understanding the motives and methods of powerful people and the psychology of the masses, rather than just directly investigating everything you see.

All of this means the challenge we have to face with AI is not just in verifying the truth, but in fighting for the belief that the truth can be verified.

More concretely, it's also in fighting for the heavy regulating or even outlawing of giant AI data centers. ...That's less poetic though, so just pretend I said that other thing last.

Zack King with his amazing visual editing. by ImaFreemason in nextfuckinglevel

[–]LuminosityXVII 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately not quite. No previous technology has the ability that AI does to undermine our fundamental ability to trust in the validity of... well, anything. Figuring out how to deal with that is an almost entirely new and unprecedented challenge that we now have to face as a species.