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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Japan is probably the highest trust society in the planet. You regularly walk into Lawson’s or 7-11 in tokyo that have no employees visible and very few cameras if any. You self check out and are on your way.

    Meanwhile in the bay area more and more regular goods in supermarkets and drug stores are locked in boxes you need to find an employee for to unlock.

    Trust in society makes everything more convenient and easier, it’s an invisible tax multiplied into every daily transaction and the US is in the “close to critical failure” state with almost nobody trusting anyone. No experts, no government, just snakecharmers like Don who change trust for blind faith. And make no mistake, people who have to question every interaction every day eventually are so worn down, the snakecharmers can pick them up by selling hope that you only trust them and all will be ok.

    This is no coincidence. Common narratives in the west, through the GDP lens declare Japan a depression ridden shithole doomed by demographic decline - But the GDP lens misses an entire variable.

    Quality.

    In the west, we have sold quality to growth. A phone that breaks every year sells a new phone. A dish made with lower quality ingredients makes more profit. Quality of life and convenience in Japan is incredibly high. Stuff works. Reliably. Your train is never late. Our escalator doesn’t break down. Your power doesn’t go out. Your food is generally high quality. There a small convenience store every 50 meters - no trips to large walmart megastores requires.

    Yes Japan has issues, this isn’t about otaku fawning here - this is about the fact that we sell quality in the west for profit which does not fly in Japan and if you visit Tokyo in 2023 from SF or Seattle, … the contrast is stark. Somehow every car got replaced with electric or hybrid versions. The trains running on Yamanote are new. The connectivity 5G. Shit just works. The food is highly affordable and it’s quality hasn’t declined.

    Of course people visiting from low trust societies without social compact to not fuck shit up are going to behave like barbarians. Especially when this behavior is incentivized by views / engagement or monetisation.

    I’m with Singapore on this one. Someone who uploads a video like that should be caned and their social media accounts force wiped to start over to disincentive any possible gains








  • Game industry professional here: We know Riccitello. He presided over EA at critical transition periods and failed them. Under his tenure, Steam won total supremacy because he was trying to shift people to pay per install / slide your credit card to reload your gun. Yes his predecessor jumped the shark by publishing the Orange Box, but Riccitellos greed sealed the total failure of the largest company to deal with digital distribution by ignoring that gamers loved collecting boxes (something Valve understood and eventually turned into the massive Sale business where people buy many more games than they consume)

    He presided over EA earlier than that too, and failed.

    Both of times, he ended up getting sacked after the stock reached a record low. But personally he made out like a bandit selling EA his own investment in VG Holdings (Bioware/Pandemic) after becoming their CEO.

    He’s the kind of CEO a board of directors would appoint to loot a company.

    At unity, he invested into ads heavily and gambled on being able to become another landlord. He also probably paid good money on reputation management (search for Riccitello or even his full name on google and marvel at the results) after certain accusations were made.





  • That’s what a win win looks like. No need to be quiet around it. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Now everyone gets to replenish and modernize their weapons, test them in real conditions while making sure Russia gets enough of a bloody nose to not fucking try this shit ever again.

    Russia did the ‘fuck around and find out thing’. It was their choice and the only way they can win is by tankies convincing every other country that just saw rape, murder, pillaging and terrorism getting used on another country in Europe by a rabid bear that somehow Russia was justified and should be allowed a free pass. But it’s not working. The rabid bear is rabid, but there’s ways to deal with that.

    Because now they makes sure that every country around them is joining the anti rabid bear alliance.

    The way the OP framed the article is to create the idea that somehow Russia is good because US military is bad. But that’s a fallacy. The US military is perfectly capable of doing bad shit on behalf of the US, but that does not mean everyone else is good. Sometimes clobbering Nazis is win win and Russia should have know that. Their feeble at reframing may work on Fox brainwashed Republicans who are reduced to “Putins kills gays and is strong so Putin is good”, but it turns out Putin is a cuck taking it into the ass by his own chef.


  • Nothing to do with AI, Garbage in, Garbage out.

    LLMs are tools that satisfies requests. The developer decided to allow people to put the ingredients for chlorine Gas into the input - LLM never stood a chance but to comply with the instructions to combine them into the end product.

    Clear indication we are in the magical witch hunt phase of the hype cycle where people expect the technology to have magical induction capabilities.

    We could discuss liability for the developer but somehow I don’t think a judge would react favorably to “So you put razor blades into your bread mixer and want to sue the developer because they allowed you to put razor blades into the bread mixer”