If you just want it for emergency purposes or irrigation, rain water harvesting can be fairly cheap and easy. Even a proper cistern, with a pump, and plumbed into your house is probably cheaper than whole-house off-grid solar. Probably want good filters for PFAS though.

Lol, good catch.

Wary of the bill. Seems like every bill involving stuff like this is either designed to erode privacy or for regulatory capture.

Edit: spelling

Here are some that I’ve liked (haven’t played them in years though):

• Warsow
• Red Eclipse
• Speed Dreams
• OpenTTD
• LinCity
• FreeOrion
• Oolite

Those type of bags are usually used to hold illicit substances, and typically only bought by small-time drug dealers.

Stuff that is used and immediately disposed of like trash bags, paper towels, and toilet paper. You need to be a little more careful with the cheapest trash bags and toilet paper, but it will still get the job done.

The difference between soda is very noticeable to me. Some store-brand sodas taste almost flat.

I can’t tell much a difference between wines of the same type. They taste slightly different, but I can’t say which taste “better.”

Cheap liquor seems “harsher” than more expensive liquor; even with vodka, which doesn’t really have a taste. The difference in taste of say, the regular Jim Beam and a barrel-proof bourbon is pretty noticeable.

I’ve noticed no difference in 100% fruit juice by brand. Well, except for orange juice.

Tea quality is very noticeable to me, but I’m a heavy tea drinker.

Even different water brands have different tastes. But, as long as it’s not my tap water (which is very hard and smells like a swimming pool), I don’t really care.

Traded-in vehicles don’t go to waste. Vehicle life cycles are actually pretty efficient. If a car runs, and is street legal, it will likely be bought and used by someone. Once a vehicle does not run, it will go to a salvage yard and used for parts. After a while, whatever metals are left will be recycled.

Edit: Yes, I don’t think everyone should just ditch their ICE cars to “help the environment.” I don’t know if anyone is arguing for that. And, all new cars are bought by wealthier people because all new cars are way too expensive and have all kinds of “features” with dubious utility. I do think this is a problem. Until a couple years ago, I’ve never bought a new car. The only reason I bought a new car is because I couldn’t find a used car that was worth the price (used car market was pretty fucked up back then). Coincidentally, I ended buying an EV, lol (a Leaf).

Using the Serenity Prayer as inspiration (though I’m an atheist and not an addict), I try to accept what I cannot change, and change the things I can.

I also try to keep busy with hobbies such as gardening and woodworking.

I suppose I should probably try to get into some type of activism or community type stuff, but I’m not at all an outgoing type of person.

Nah, they’re an incremental improvement. EVs are more efficient at turning energy into locomotion. They get >100 mpge. The increase in tire wear isn’t nearly as significant the CO2 emissions. I’m pretty sure there are studies that show EVs are better for the environment as a whole than ICE vehicles (even accounting for things like lithium mining and fossil fuel powered grids).

Tesla is a horrible, anti-consumer company. A lot of companies make EVs now (but a lot of those companies are pretty horrible too, I guess).

Hmm, I guess your right. I guess what I was vaguely thinking of was that we don’t have as much (conscious) control over ourselves as people seem to believe. E.g. we often react to things before we consciousnessly perceive them, if we ever do perceive them. Was probably thinking about expirements I’ve heard of involving Benjamin Libet’s work, and my own experiences of questioning why I’ve made some decisions, where at the time I made the decision, I rationalized the reason for doing so in one way, but in retrospect, the reason for making such decisions were probably different than what I was consciously aware of at the time. I think a lot of consciousness is just post-hoc rationalization, while the subconscious does a lot of the work. I guess this still means that consciousness is not an illusion, but that there are different “levels” of consciousness, and the highest level is mostly retrospective. I guess this all isn’t really relevant to AI though, lol.

I think the human brain works kind of the opposite of that. Babies are born with a shitload of neural connections, then the connections decrease over a person’s lifetime. ANNs typically do something similar to that while training (many connection weights will be pushed toward zero, having little or no effect).

But yeah, these LLMs are typically trained once, and frozen during use. “Online learning” is a type of training that continually learns, but current online methods typically lead to worse models (ANNs “forget” old things they’ve “learned” when learning new things).

Idk. Business leadership typically does take actions its employees don’t like if it helps the owners/shareholders. I often hear politicians/policymakers argue for things that will “hurt” (austerity, increasing unemployment to lower inflation, phasing out social security, war, opposing UBI, opposing universal healthcare, etc). I guess not all of those are extremely unpopular, but that’s mostly because people have been convinced they’re needed. The right, in particular, seems focused on things like sacrifice and punishment.

Young people will typically just vote how their parents tell them to. They typically just repeat what their parents say without critically thinking about things. They typically haven’t fully developed the mental capacity for things like empathy. They haven’t experienced what it’s like to work or struggle to survive.

I don’t think not caring about climate change is a hereditary condition.

AIXI is a (good, in my opinion) short mathematical definition of intelligence. Intelligence != consciousness or anything like that though.

Also, how do you know we aren’t faking consciousness? I sometimes wonder if things like “free will” and consciousness are just illusions and tricks our brains play on us.

Agree. Ever since they started lobbying politicians it’s been clear that “safety” is a just a pretext for regulatory capture.

Large “activist” shareholders (usually fund managers, I believe) often step-in and make demands when the stock isn’t performing as they would like. Gabe could be CEO, but shareholders could threaten to dump stock to get the company to act in a certain way. I believe that was behind all the tech layoffs. My conspiracy-biased mind believes these shareholders sometimes push for things that aren’t exactly in the company’s best interest, but are in the investor’s best interest. E.g. if the fund management company is also heavily in commercial real-estate, they may try to get other companies they are invested in to institute return-to-office mandates. My guess is these big players do all kinds of shady shit (use their influence to control media narratives, politicians, etc).

I really liked Speed Dreams when I played it years ago. Never heard anyone else talk about it. Warsow and Red Eclipse were also good.

I don’t really pirate much anymore, because I don’t consume much paid media anymore. Occasionally, if I really, really want to watch something on a platform that I don’t have a free subscription to (through a phone plan or isp), I will find a stream of it, but that is rare.

I justify it by generally not being on favor of modern IP laws. On a less ideological basis, fuck’em for making their content inaccessible. And from the current strikes, it looks like most of their talent doesn’t get much of a cut anyways.

I haven’t pirated a game in years, just because Steam is so convenient, and I can pay for more games than I have time to play. In the past, when I couldn’t afford all the games I had time to play, I would pirate them. I couldn’t afford them, so it was no “potential loss” for them anyways.

For software other than games, there is usually an adequate Free Software alternative, so I just use those. I am a developer, so sometimes I make small contributions on software I use a lot, and have a good understanding of.

Haven’t pirated music since big streaming services became available (first, Play Music, now Spotify). I do kinda feel bad that Spotify pays shit though. I would happily pay the artists directly if it was convenient.