What kind of resources does this guy have? I don’t think governments can even do proportional and instantaneous DDOS responses. I messed with the wrong dude.

I have no idea where that data comes from and that’s exactly the point I’m making. It doesn’t match my personal experience at all.

I build the infrastructure that these data centers need to connect to the internet. Our projected power consumption is at least tripling from last year which was itself double the year before, and that’s only the power draw for the fiber optic infrastructure connecting these data centers together. They’re also building a ridiculous amount of computing power in those data centers which is another massive increase in power consumption.

There are some kind-of green efforts in progress to mitigate a bit of the environmental impacts of that increase in demand but most of what I have seen personally is just more draw from the local utility company. I have serious doubts about any data that indicates that tripling power consumption is not a major environmental problem.

In my experience weed can be a gateway drug when you have to buy it from a drug dealer. As an analogy, lots of people end up buying something other than what they went into Target to buy.

The only thing I’m convinced of is the fact that you’re talking like a Russian psy-ops agent. You may not be one but at minimum you’re doing their work for them.

True but if we suddenly invent an AI that can replace most jobs I think the rich have more to worry about than we do.

In what way is presenting factually incorrect information as if it’s true not a bad thing?

Well they’re violently protecting their illegal mining operations so violence is certainly part of the equation. Violence isn’t usually profitable on its own though. It’s part of a larger plan to exploit some situation or resource.

Why don’t we all help them out? Everyone crank up your AC and open the windows. We’ll kick global warming’s ass in no time.

Clearly we disagree about how to evaluate comedy, which is perfectly fine, but I think we’re running into a wall at this point. I think most of what you’re saying is reasonable, we just have different perspectives. I think this quote highlights that best:

It’s not his lived experience, so what could he possibly have to add as an insightful observation?

I don’t think you need to experience something firsthand to make jokes about it. I also don’t think comedy needs to involve insightful observations. That might be the kind of thing you find to be the most funny but that doesn’t make it a rule that needs to be followed at all times. Something you find unfunny, or even offensive, can be a genuine attempt at making people laugh. The fact that you find it offensive doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve done something wrong. In many cases it just means that you don’t like that style of comedy. A comedian telling a joke during a comedy show is not the same as a politician or other public figure justifying a bigoted statement by calling it a joke. Choosing to interpret comments that are clearly and obviously presented as jokes as some sort of expression of a deeply held belief does not seem like a logical approach to me.

“Kyle does not wish Trump harm” and “Dave is transphobic” are both judgments that you’ve made. You’re entitled to hold those opinions but it is important to recognize that you’ve used the same kind of evidence (jokes they made) to reach opposite conclusions about the two men. You dismissed one as a joke that does not reflect the character of the speaker and used the other as indisputable evidence of a character flaw.

The fact that these conclusions line up with your own political beliefs is absolutely relevant because it helps you understand why you are doing it. It’s probably subconscious but you’re viewing the world through a distorted lens when you make inconsistent value judgments like this. Correcting those distortions and becoming more consistent is part of what it means to mature as a human being.

OK, let’s assume for the sake of the argument that everything you just said is 100% correct. Why aren’t you also saying Dave Chapelle is a pedophile, or a racist, or a homophobe? Children, racial minorities, and gay men are all other groups he made jokes about and they all fit your criteria of “people at danger in our society”.

The fact that transphobic is the only descriptor I hear about that show suggests to me that this is not really the criteria you’re using to evaluate the situation, it’s merely convenient cover to give when pressed that will pacify most people. At minimum it means you’re giving those other comments a pass as jokes and choosing not to do so with his trans jokes and that is absolutely inconsistent no matter how you try and spin it.

You say that like “no punching down” is an unbreakable rule of comedy. Maybe in your opinion it should be but I don’t think that’s ever been true in reality, certainly not for big name comedians as a collective.

Besides, that’s only your interpretation of the situation and it requires that you assume Dave actually believes everything he says in his comedy shows which is demonstrably untrue for other subject matter he covers. You don’t assume he rapes kids even though he made a joke in that same special where that was the premise. Without that assumption there is no controversy so maybe we should stop assuming the worst about people’s intentions. That way we don’t have to concern ourselves with pointless conjecture.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think much of his trans material was very funny, but that doesn’t mean I have to jump to the conclusion that he’s a piece of shit like the internet wants me to. He’s a comedian with an incendiary style which makes it quite literally his job to say stuff like that.

I get what you’re saying. I’ve got a similar background and it sounds like we have a lot in common in terms of perspective as well.

You’re right, consistency is clearly not important to the more conservative among us. That ship sailed long ago. However, that’s one of the things that I strive to be as much as possible. If one of my beliefs can’t be defended in all circumstances then I do my best to let it go, or at least recognize the fact that it’s situational and therefore not deserving of being presented as unassailable. The subject at hand is pretty inconsequential, all things considered, but I feel pretty confident in making the blanket statement that all jokes should be interpreted as such and not subject to the same scrutiny that the same statement would warrant in a different context.

Of course there are still such things as jokes in poor taste, racist jokes, mean jokes, etc. but at the end of the day a joke is what they are. It’s not a life motto or a campaign slogan it’s just something that’s supposed to make people laugh. Whether or not they accomplish that goal is largely irrelevant as long as that was the primary intent of the person who said it.

I think your interpretation of the two situations has more to do with your political leanings than the content itself. At a basic level they are both comments made by people who get paid to make others laugh. You can assign motives to either of them that would make them more or less palatable to specific people, and it seems like you’ve chosen your path in that regard, but I don’t think it makes sense to spin one in a negative way and dismiss the other as a harmless joke. In my opinion they’re either both harmless or both intolerable. Anything less is just projection in one form or another.

Is this the same angle you took when reacting to Dave Chapelle’s recent controversies? For the record, I agree with you, I just don’t see a lot of consistency on either side when it comes to stuff like this. Jokes are one issue where “both sides are the same” isn’t too far off. People in general pick and choose what they’re offended by and can’t easily follow their own advice to let it go when the subject matter touches one of their pet issues.

Space elevator. Trash go up, gentle push towards your favorite star (except the sun), bye forever.

By the way, I know this isn’t practical so a detailed response outlining the challenges is unnecessary.

I don’t disagree with you that it’s bad but I don’t think changing the fashion industry is going to solve those problems either. People are selfish and exploitation is in our nature. We will simply invent new ways to steal from and oppress others unless the whole world suddenly decides they don’t like money. The people making cheap shirts in Malaysia still need to make a living if we shut down the sweat shops. Unless the root problem is solved they’ll just be out of work until Apple or whoever else comes in to exploit the cheap labor market and the cycle starts over again.

I don’t think you need to deface it. You could even display it if you’re so inclined. Just make it clear to people who see it that you aren’t a Nazi sympathizer in the same way you’ve done here and you’ll be fine.

Current gen AI is pretty mediocre. It’s not much more than the bastard child of a search engine and every voice assistant that has been around for the last ten years. It has the potential to be a stepping stone to fantastic future tech, but that’s been true of tons of different technologies for basically as long as we’ve been inventing things.

AI is not good enough to replace the majority of workers yet. It summarizes information pretty well and can be helpful with drafting any sort of document, but so was Clippy. When it doesn’t know something it can lie confidently. Lie isn’t really the right word but I’ll come back to that concept in a second. Incorrect information is frustrating in most cases but it can be deadly when presented by a source that is viewed as trustworthy, and what could be more trustworthy than an AI with access to the collective knowledge of mankind? Well, unfortunately for us AI as we know it isn’t really intelligent and the databases they’re trained on also contain the collective stupidity of mankind.

That brings us back to the concept of lying and what I view as the fundamental flaw of current AI; namely that any sort of data interpretation can only be as good as the data it describes. ChatGPT isn’t lying to you when it says you can put glue on your cheese pizza, it’s just pointing out that someone who said that got a lot of attention. Unfortunately it leaves out all the context which could have told you that pizza would not be fit to consume and presents the fact that it was a popular answer as if that is the only thing that defines the best answer. There’s so much more that needs to be taken into account, so much unconscious human experience being drawn from when an actual human looks at something and tries to categorize or describe it. All of that necessary context is really difficult to impart to a computer and right now we’re not very good at that essential piece of the puzzle.

If we could assume that all datasets analyzed by AI were free from human error, AI would be taking over the world right now. However, that’s not the world we live in. All data has errors. Some are easy to spot but many are not. AI firms are getting companies to salivate at the idea of easy manipulation of data in one form or another. They aren’t worried about the errors in the data because they view that as someone else’s problem and the companies all think their data is good enough that it won’t be an issue. Both are wrong. That’s exactly why you hear a lot of talk about AI right now and not all that much practical application beyond replacing customer service reps, especially in the business world. Companies are finding out that years of bad practices have left them with a dataset full of errors. Can they find a way to get AI to correct those errors? In some cases yes, in others no. In either case the missing piece preventing a full scale AI takeover is all that human background context necessary for relevant data interpretation. If we find a way to teach that to an AI then the world is going to look vastly different than it does today, but we’re not there yet.