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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • T156@lemmy.worldtosolarpunk memes@slrpnk.netfunny how that works
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    4 days ago

    Trains take up a lot of space, and if you want them to be useful, they need to be where the population density is high enough. That means high cost for land, often buying up big amounts of smaller lots where you have to work something out with a multitude of land owners who might not want to part with their - often prime location, because it’s in the city - land. A single land owner not selling their land can grind a project like this to a halt, at least if there is hesitancy using eminent domain, which is a crowbar approach and leads to resistance to your project.

    There’s also interference risks. My city was building out their train network, and had to do extensive testing to make sure that the trains didn’t disturb the university’s experiments. An entire planned hospital was scrapped because it was too close to the tracks, and the trains would interfere with the hospital equipment.

    A data centre or cameras wouldn’t have the same risk, so wouldn’t need to go through the same level of approval/testing.











  • Especially since when you ask it those questions, it’s still massively limited.

    I once tried Apple’s replacement AI Siri thing, and asked it what the date would be next Tuesday. I got “I can’t help with that”.

    Regular old Siri handled that just fine.

    Even then, neither worked with “When’s the last occurrence of this event on my calendar?”. They’d either go “I’m sorry, I don’t understand”, or happily tell me when the next event was.

    Neither of them seem like very difficult questions.


  • Aye. I was being a little facetious, and making a reference to the video game Helldovers in the process, but it does make me wonder what the legal line is when it comes to determining pay by computer.

    If a company implements an AI powered monitoring system that reduces your pay because you spent less time at your computer writing code or more time in the bathroom compared to your coworkers, at what point does it start crossing into illegal/discrimination boundaries? A company usually cannot reduce someone’s pay if they disclose a disability and require accommodation, for example, but it is unclear whether that would let them wash their hands of the issue, since the pay was set by computer.


  • Like do I want to read the Lord of the Rings as imperialist propaganda against orcs and Southrons and wildlings, who actually have valid political objections to the axis of Human-Elf-Dwarf hegemony? Hell yeah I do because I’m a leftist freak, but I recognize that I am fundamentally misreading the moral context the story is presented in–it’s about archetypes, about human values, about that nature of evil, not as an independent entity in itself, but how it can manifests in each one of us.

    Funnily enough, I think Tolkein might have also enjoyed that. He was long-conflicted about the nature of orcs, being that his religious beliefs maintained that evil could not create from nothing, but only twist, and even then, it could not corrupt someone past possibility of redemption.

    So orcs were stuck between being elves corrupted past redemption, or something sauron created.

    Probably the WORST thing a story can do is mix and match “people are only evil because of we misunderstand them” and "people are purely evil.¨ I don´t see it often, but I think How to Train Your Dragon does it.

    Or change it on the fly for the same character.

    Cruella de Ville going from someone so single-mindedly obsessed with the idea of the perfect coat, that she didn’t care for how she got there, even if she had to skin a hundred puppies, to someone who developed a lifelong phobia and hatred of Dalmatians after they scared her mother off a cliff, weakened her character a bit, I feel.

    If she had been one of the other from the get-go, that would have been fine, but it was switching between that wasn’t.