Please see Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Warning to Humanity regarding stupidity at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... :

Stupidity is more dangerous than evil.
Stupidity is a social phenomenon that arises when people surrender independent thinking.
This often results from group pressure and ideologies, specifically authoritarianism.
A stupid person repeats slogans and borrowed ideas (such as labels).
Stupidity is immune to evidence; stupid people react with anger or dismissal.
Stupid people believe that they are righteous, and are therefore more dangerous than deliberately evil people. Note: a sense of violated righteousness is often considered to be a root of anger.
Evil can be exposed, but one cannot argue with stupidity.
Stupidity grows when power concentrates.
Stupid people become passive, seek belonging, and avoid responsibility.
Reason doesn’t work against stupid people; debate reinforces divides and defenses.
Th only remedy for stupidity is to restore independence, reduce fear, and encourage responsibility.
Societies fall not from evil’s strength but from stupidity’s compliance.

Bonhoeffer’s warning to humanity: protect environments that support critical thought.

It's impossible to know what's real vs. staged or AI, and the different devices behave differently, but I saw this one recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I don't see lighting being a factor in this fall. It doesn't seem to walk well. Has everyone seen how the current generations interact with mirrors? Not good.

I can't remember where I heard it or the details, but there was an estimate of how much concrete would need to be delivered per day or hour or something. It was completely insane.

Maybe it's not logical, but I look for OSS when I have a choice because I assume that someone else has already looked at the code. The fact that the code is public seems to imply that it is less likely to do secretive and nefarious things.

I lost my first account somehow and rarely posted (if at all), but have been reading since maybe 1996?

Thanks for your positive perspective. I don’t mean to be negative or sound like an edgelord. I’m just trying to be realistic, and I can only speak from my experience, which seems to indicate a lot of environmental, societal, political, intellectual, and likely other forms of deterioration during my lifetime.

I don’t deny that there is good news – in fact I seek it – but it always seems rather minor in comparison to the bad news (Israel, Ukraine, climate change, increasing wealth disparity, increasing authoritarianism and likely more war coming, and so forth).

I also often find that good news is countered somehow by a greater amount of bad news. For example, I’ve heard that thousands of people come out of extreme poverty every year. My concern is that much of that progress is based on things like increased fossil fuel usage, which is one of my major concerns. That progress is also reversible (for example, what’s happening in China and Africa today?), and I’m honestly not sure about absolute and relative numbers affected. Personally, I think humankind and the planet were better off when we could establish equilibrium with our environments.

Regarding solar installations, I recently also read that fossil fuel consumption is projected to actually increase until at least 2050. Those panels might mitigate that growh just slightly, but we don’t seem to be going in the right direction globally.

I live in Southeast Asia electric cars are everywhere, but so are diesel trucks that owners will keep running for as long as possible, and people burn all types of trash everywhere. Dirty tractors, motorbikes, and other types of vehicles aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Disposable plastic cups for unnecessary coffee drinks come in plastic bags with plastic straws, and yet people still buy plastic bags just to contain garbage. There is no separation of organics, recycleables, landfills, and worse things such as batteries. It’s hard to have any impact in this environment, but I suspect that it would have to start with education, which generally needs to start with English. But school costs money and people need to work to feed their families, so nobody has any money or time for learning.

Regarding diseases, I’m not in favor of prolonged suffering, but I do believe in reasonable human lifespans. I’m not anti-DEI, but my step-sister has an adult child with some kind of brain condition that will never contribute anything to society (emotional and intellectual development stopped at about age 2). He consumes significant resources and is actually a bit of a threat or risk to others. Even his mother doesn’t want to spend time with him. Being a utilitarian, it’s hard for me to justify his existence relative to alternate potential uses of equivalent resources.

I support research and I know that I am not entitled to draw any lines. I have been extremely fortunate throughout my life, and I don’t take that for granted. I just wish that I could actually foresee a future like Star Trek as potentially even possible.

I agree with their conclusions and choices, and appreciate people like you that talk honestly about such topics, especially with children. I honestly don't understand why so many parents encourage their children to have progeny, and I see it as their own personal self-interest as grandparents.

For numerous reasons, I never wanted to have children of my own, but two women convinced me that I was wrong (well, one was more of an accident I guess, but she wouldn't use birth control and then wouldn't abort). Despite their relative advantages, I have significant guilt for leaving my children in current global conditions.

Partly due to media but also my community and education, I grew up with this perspective that humanity was on an upward path globally, and it's been distressing to learn that this may not be the general rule. I see my daughter watching rainbow unicorn videos and I'm so worried about the reality she'll discover when the childhood period ends and she realizes just how unpleasant and cruel people and the world can be.

I can absolutely relate. In general, I find it’s best to keep my mouth shut and my keystrokes out of public view, but sometimes I just can’t resist.

In fact, in the modern world and possibly in the past as well, I think that most of our virtues can work against us. Some see traits such as empathy in others as weaknesses to exploit.

I still do my best not to relinquish my ethics. Despite the fact that humanity seems to have passed the event threshold, I also try to maintain some level of hope for our species.

I’m not actually sure that we can teach honesty. Maybe each person’s individual level of honesty is an inborn characteristic further shaped by general life lessons rather than solely by parenting.

I absolutely try to teach my children to be honest. One is, one isn’t, and about one I’m not sure yet. I’m relatively certain that the dishonest one was born that way. Like his mother, his intelligence is more akin to shrewdness than true intellect. Both of their mouths often seem to release falsehoods reactively. They subsequently try to rationalize such statements, which typically requires additional dishonesty, illogical arguments, or tactics such as changing the subject, projection, and so forth. I think that their environments do not provide sufficient negative consequences for dishonesty, which is more likely to be reinforced than punished.

We're replacing "I was just following orders" with "the algorithm did it."

Agreed. I've come to the conclusion that there is basically no reason to expect any good news ever again. Maybe there never really was? The big problem is growing up. My parents gave me hope and made me an idealist. I wonder if this was a mistake that puts me at a disadvantage and can cause mental health issues due to things like cognitive dissonance. The mind really seems like a computer sometimes, a bit of an LLM with garbage in and garbage out, and a ton of flaws. I consumed less garbage as a child (for example, Star Trek, despite its flaws). Now the news is all garbage and it's hard to maintain a positive outlook.

It will be interesting to watch salesforce's sales and retention rates with this service, and the stated results for customers using it, especially relevant to their competition and their customers' competition, as well as salesforce's overall customer retention rates in the coming years. Personally, I think the quoted number is probably bogus, and their customers are likely to learn pretty quickly.

The Final Virus shall be written in the language of humor.