It’s clearly a butterfly with a massive dong

Actually, they are really good.

That’s barely above the Treasury rate.

Talk to me when they’re north of 7%, a la 2008

Writing “Read Settlers” on the opposite roof.

Going to be hell on your teeth.

I am not going on a hiking trip or mailing myself anywhere

Ah, damn. That was my bet.

Not suggesting this will actually happen, but if the current trend continues at the same rate

It never does. Markets move periodically - early slow change, mid-point rapid change, tail slow change - for the most part. Nevermind that a 62% sell-off raises the question of “Who is selling?” versus “Who is buying?” Dollars are still far too cheap for a plunge that steep.

A short period of time before the Iran war started, I pulled all my money out of the market and am 100% in CDs now.

CD rates are shit right now, thanks to low interest rates.

You’d be better off in utilities or REITs. US energy companies have done very well in the wake of the Hormuz straight closure. I dropped a bunch into United Healthcare recently, thanks to their bargain basement price. Doubt it’ll pay off soon. But I see a healthy upside long term.

Fair enough. Hope you made some money on the plunge. I would not have guessed an 8% drop, given the weirdly stubborn endless equities enthusiasm, but here we are.

Tears In Heaven

The Iranian government is a bunch of evil assholes, just like the Israeli and US governments.

The need to paint everything in broad brush “Good v Evil” is what legitimizes these wars to begin with. The idea that you’re doing anyone a favor by bombing them should be ridiculous on its face. But we consistently build up this narrative of the Just War, we declare everyone we don’t like is Hitler, and then we throw more and more of the planet into the “Hitler” bucket when they aren’t along for the ride once the bombs land.

It’s just that they have been attacked by equally evil cunts.

When you kill off all the nice guys, what you’re left with are the assholes. The Iranian government is the end result of this multi-generational culling process. The American and Israeli governments are, too.

I still find it hard to understand the emotional attachment to LLMs and why people believe their ideas

It’s a conversation you’re having on the internet with an agent that sounds like a human. People get invested for the same reason they get catfished.

It sounds like she is too overworked and stressed to make decisions or even think for herself, so she lets GPT do it for her.

That’s the nut of it. And ChatGPT tends to mix the pastiche of a well-researched argument with the kind of feel-good self-affirmations that win over their audience. So you’re getting what looks - at first glance - to be good advice. And then you’re getting glazed on top of it. And then it’s designed to tell you what you want to hear, so you’re getting affirmation bias.

I hope she gets better soon, and I hope you do too, being overworked and stressed really destroys you and the people around you in many ways.

I mean, that’s why human-to-human interactions are valuable. But it’s also why they’re difficult. Like any good medicine, it can taste bitter up front even if its what you need in the long run.

He’s running for campaign donations.

He’s going to be out in front with every national media apparatus screaming “Electable” and “Do you want another four years of Trump?”

No idea if he can win, but he’s got all the right friends to make it happen. A real Hillary Campaign for 2028.

deleted by creator

the theocratic authoritarian government of Iran is looking like the good guys

It’s almost as though Americans have been brainwashed to believe brown people with the wrong religion are inherently evil. And, as a consequence, they find themselves on the side of a genocidal regime that venerates child murder.

It’s an authoritarian theocracy.

Americans have been posting those “Before the Shah” photos of women in bikinis for so long. I gotta wonder how they’re going to respond to a bunch of dead little gi-

Oh, nope. It’s racist slurs. They’re just screaming slurs.

Me, staring at a guy in a Star Wars shirt: “Bet he thinks he’s the center of the universe.”

Me, staring at a guy in a Redshirt: “This is the kind of person that’ll catch a phaser for me.”

What kind of person do you have to be to become addicted like them?

Human cognition degrades with stress, exhaustion, and trauma. If you’re in a position where turning to an AI for relationship advice seems like a good idea, you’re probably already suffering from one or more of the above.

Also doesn’t help that AIs are sycophantic precisely because sycophancy is addictive. This isn’t a “type of person” so much as a “tool engineered towards chronic use”. It’s like asking “What kind of person regularly smokes crack?”

Do you need to be very empathetic towards objects? Like seeing faces in everything and get emotionally attached?

I’ll give you a personal example. I have a friend who is currently pregnant and going through a bad breakup with her baby-daddy. She’s a trial lawyer by trade - very smart, very motivated, very well-to-do, but also horribly overworked, living by herself, and suffering from all the biochemical consequences of turning a single celled organism into a human being.

As a result of some poorly conceived remarks, she’s alienated herself from a number of close friends to the point where we doubt there’s going to be a baby shower. Part of the impulse to say these things came from her own drama. But part if it came from her discovering ChatGPT as a tool to analyze other people’s statements. This has created a vicious behavioral spiral, during which she says something regrettable and gets a regrettable response in turn. She plugs the conversation into ChatGPT, because she has nobody else to talk to. And ChatGPT feeds her some self-affirming bullshit that inflates her ego far enough to say another stupid thing.

To complicate matters, her baby daddy is also using ChatGPT to analyze her conversations. And he’s decided she’s cheated on him, the baby isn’t his, and she’s plotting to scam him.

So now you’ve got two people - already stressed and exhausted - getting fed a series of toxic delusions by a machine that is constantly reaffirming in the way none of your friends or family are. It’s compounding your misery, which drives anxiety and sends you back to the machine that offers temporary relief. But the advice from the machine yields more misery down the line, raising your anxiety, and sending you back to the machine.

What’s producing this feedback loop? You could argue it is the individual, foolish enough to engage with the machine to begin with. But that’s far more circumstantial than personality driven. If my friend didn’t have a cell phone, she wouldn’t be reaching for ChatGPT. If she wasn’t pregnant, she wouldn’t be so stressed and anxious. If she wasn’t in a fight with her boyfriend, she wouldn’t be feeding conversations into the prompt engine.

ID-10T

Buuuuulshit

I mean, what are the odds that the statement was composed by an AI?

Kanye No: Red Hat

Kanye Yes: Red Hat Linux