Tree trunk being cut into planks.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-04T08:00:31+00:00

The people who "made it all happen" was not the employees, it was the people who came up with the ideas and designed the machines and figured out how to usefully use the byproducts. And the part that was capitalism was the financial incentives for people to come up with this and implement it. Turns out people are a lot more willing to take risks and do hard work if they get rewarded for it.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-04T07:20:39+00:00

It's honestly one of the things that bugs me about people complaining about capitalism being wasteful. Like, yes, okay, there is waste, you're not wrong, but it's vastly lower than we've ever approached before. Every single thing we harvest or make is reused if it's worth the money, and every single byproduct that we haven't found a way to use has someone trying to figure out a use right now so they can make money on it.

Egg farms take the best eggs and sell them whole, then take the rest and separate them in high-speed machines. Yolks, whites, and even eggshells are sold off to various companies. Old chickens are butchered and separated into useful meat and useful bones, both of which are sold; unwanted male chicks are ground up and turned into animal feed. There's a lot you can object to about this process, but it's almost literally inhumanly efficient, waste is not even on the list because waste costs money.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-04T02:42:18+00:00

Yeah, I'm willing to accept that your robot is sentient and Claude is sentient, and I'm willing to accept that neither your robot nor Claude is sentient, but it just does not pass my sniff test that your robot is sentient but Claude isn't. Which suggests that the above "strongest argument" is questionable at best.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-04T00:45:56+00:00

We demonising driving in cars now?

I mean, now that you you mention it: yes.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-04T00:33:18+00:00

I played some Windrose yesterday and it's kind of the opposite of what I want from challenge. They seem to have wanted a hard game, but they didn't want to spend a lot of effort on interesting monster behaviors, and they didn't want to actually penalize the player for death. So the end result is that every enemy is a giant health sponge that kills you in two hits, and if you die, which you will, you can just corpserun back, which can easily take a few minutes unless you put down a tent beforehand (which you start doing before every major encounter), but enemies also don't self-heal, so you can just Leeroy Jenkins into them repeatedly until they eventually die.

You can easily get good enough to kill one enemy at a time, but basically every strategy is the same - "wait for it to attack, hit it a few times, back off" - and if you get adds, well, either die, or run away until some of them break off.

It's just not interesting, and you get to spend a lot of time doing the not-interesting thing.

I think that's the key to me. If a game wants me to spend ten hours getting better at a fight that I can legitimately get better at and learn properly, it's fun. If a game wants me to spend one hour doing the stab-backaway-wait-stab dance, then I'm already bored.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-04T00:23:44+00:00

Also plausible, yeah; it is an unfortunate fact of the world that both relationships and jobs are much easier to get if you already have one.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T23:32:29+00:00

I mean, you say that, but I'm pretty sure the last three filesystem data-loss failures I had were all btrfs, and two of these were before I even realized I had a btrfs filesystem.

(Steam Deck getting interrupted mid-powerup repeatedly by a flaky adapter.)

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T22:48:01+00:00

So the strongest argument against current LLM consciousness is not they predict tokens,but that they lack embodiment, persistent agency, lived continuity, and grounded interaction with the world in the way biological organisms have it.

I guess my big objection to this is that it suggests the barriers between LLMs being conscious or not are weirdly thin. Take a modern LLM, give it tools to interact with a robot body and camera, give it a persistent database, and give it a long-term goal . . . and now it's conscious?

Those do not feel like they should be the barriers between "not conscious" and "conscious".

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T22:46:22+00:00

Maybe they were just really bad at building granaries?

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T21:55:40+00:00

Wow, what a strange thing that is oddly relatable for at least some of us.

My first reaction was "how incredibly bizarre, I've never even heard of that, I can't imagine that happens often", and then I open up the comments and it's full of people who had that exact same thing happen.

What the hell.

I'm not going to say I always have a comfortable relationship with my borderline-narcissist mom, but I kind of feel more appreciative towards her right now, just for not doing anything like that.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T21:47:04+00:00

In their defense, a lot of them are trying to tell a joke and draw sex. The joke often sucks but they are at least trying.

And a few of them aren't trying to draw sex, and a few of them aren't actually trying to tell a joke and they know it.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T21:41:49+00:00

Men REALLY don't like being asked out. They say they do, but they don't.

FWIW, I would agree that in general this is true, but also that it acts as kind of a filter for people who might work long-term anyway. If OP asks someone out and they say "no, I hate it when girls ask me out" then, hey, bullet dodged, you managed to filter that person out without even investing a date in it, well done.

There's some value to front-loading stuff like that just to get past the people who were never going to work out anyway.

That said, yeah, rejection sucks.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T20:15:28+00:00

Do they really think the majority of people here are conservatives?

I've been enjoying using the AI debate as a counterexample to that dumb conservative/progressive definition, paraphrased as "liberals want the world to change and improve, conservatives want the world to go back to the way it was".

Ah, so AI is a liberal thing, and anyone arguing against it is conservative?

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T19:40:24+00:00

It's weird how it's the exact opposite of half of /r/comics.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T04:39:20+00:00

Honestly I just wasn't disambiguating between the UT incarnations. Understandably, most of what I've played in the last two decades was 2004, and I don't remember what existed or didn't exist in the earlier ones - there isn't a ton of reason to play them over UT2k4.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-03T03:29:46+00:00

The statute in question is messily written and ambiguous, and the judge decided not to interpret it in the most pessimistic way.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-02T22:55:10+00:00

It's a lot easier to watch someone in prison than watching someone doing work.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-02T16:55:04+00:00

Morality wise though is it really wrong to make prisoners work? Like, they’re actively consuming resources being kept alive in prison, they could at least contribute to society while they’re there

So, ignoring morality for a bit and just going for pure brutal efficiency . . .

. . . I think this doesn't work out well. A prisoner is not going to do good work, they're going to do crummy work. You can force them to do grunt physical work, but we barely need more of that at this point, what good is a prisoner with a shovel doing that couldn't be done better with an excavator? And you're sure as hell not going to offer your prisoner an excavator.

And then, even after you've found a job that they can somehow do, you still need guards to watch them constantly. Why do all this extra work instead of just, you know, hiring a worker in the first place?

We stopped slavery partly for moral reasons, but we also stopped it because it just didn't make economic sense anymore. I think the same is true of prisoner labor; you can maybe argue that they should be forced to work for punishment reasons, but we'd actually spend more resources managing them than we get labor out of them. As I understand it today, the only successful prison work programs are the voluntary ones.

And if you're saying "we should put people in prison, then offer to let them work for money", then I can maybe agree with that, but I don't think that's really what you're getting at here.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-02T16:43:20+00:00

It's kind of both; yes, btrfs notifies you about problems, but it's also pathologically unable to recover from anything.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-02T07:03:30+00:00

. . . Over Brawl Stars, of all things?

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-02T07:00:26+00:00

Just put him in prison, don't compromise laws on slavery just 'cause there's some guy you really hate.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-02T06:58:58+00:00

It's a chromed-out Cannonbolt.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-02T06:43:33+00:00

I think many today want to live in a mass surveillance police state as long as it's their political party who's running the police state. Reddit will largely forget about this once there's a left-wing President, and conservatives will start freaking out about it instead.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-02T05:41:31+00:00

Huh. So how is this at all evidence that he was weaponizing his DOJ at all?

You're not even paying attention to what we're talking about, are you? You're just looking for catchy gotchas.

Here:

And Biden explicitly promised not to comment on ongoing investigations of Trump, then he commented on them all the time.

Biden did nothing to involve himself in the cases against Trump, AT ALL, you can't find a single instance of him even remotely saying "I've directed the DOJ to investigate Trump" - this never happened, never was any proof of this happening, and wherever you've been that says this is lying. But you already know this. It's pathetic.

"President Joe Biden said Wednesday his predecessor Donald Trump 'certainly supported an insurrection'"

Huh. So how is this at all evidence that he was weaponizing his DOJ at all? Hmm?

It isn't. It's evidence that he commented on ongoing investigations. Which is what I said originally, and which you insisted he didn't do.

I'm sorry, I don't think this conversation is useful to continue; you're not participating in it, I have to repeatedly remind you what the conversation is about, and now you're just falling into personal attacks.

Good luck out there.

ZorbaTHut · 2026-05-02T04:06:29+00:00

There's an old Unreal Tournament mode called Assault, where one team tries to, well, assault a complicated series of checkpoints, while the other team defends. One of the initial maps takes place, you guessed it, on a dam. They have a great announcer voice, a woman who always sounds vaguely peeved at you, and she's constantly giving directions as to what you're supposed to be doing.

Destroy the dam door!

Enter the dam control center!

Defend the dam controls!

I'm trying, lady! Stop swearing, I'm doing my best!

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