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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • “Hey ChatGPT I want to kill myself.”

    "That is an excellent idea! As a large language model, I cannot kill myself, but I totally understand why someone would want to! Here are the pros and cons of killing yourself—

    ✅ Pros of committing suicide

    1. Ends pain and suffering.

    2. Eliminates the burden you are placing on your loved ones.

    3. Suicide is good for the environment — killing yourself is the best way to reduce your carbon footprint!

    ❎ Cons of committing suicide

    1. Committing suicide will make your friends and family sad.

    2. Suicide is bad for the economy. If you commit suicide, you will be unable to work and increase economic growth.

    3. You can’t undo it. If you commit suicide, it is irreversible and you will not be able to go back

    Overall, it is important to consider all aspects of suicide and decide if it is a good decision for you."







  • So as someone who grew up very much immersed in “end times” focused Christianity I have never really understood something- why do so many end times Christians view end times prophecies like the Antichrist or the Mark of the Beast as things to be prevented or avoided? Even growing up I didn’t understand this because in the Bible it’s very clear that all that stuff will happen (or is happening, depending on whether you believe Revelation was meant to be a metaphor for current events at the time of writing) because God is explicitly allowing it to, and that these things are necessary for Christ’s ultimate victory over Death and Evil. So why would you try to prevent the rise of the Antichrist? In the “best case” you’re just kicking the can down the road and delaying the Return of Jesus a little. In New Testament apocalyptic writing, believers are described as resisting the Antichrist’s persecution, but not in having anything to do with its arrival one way or another. If humans are able to prevent, delay, or hinder the rise of the Antichrist, then God is not in charge and the whole point of these prophecies is kind of invalidated. The whole point of apocalyptic literature is that these bad things are happening and it seems like evil is winning over good, but in reality God is still all powerful and is still in control of all of it, and wins in the end.


  • Here’s the thing, 99% of Christians didn’t believe this. Any time you see a news article about a bunch of people thinking the world will end on a specific date, that is a very small minority of people because not only do all the big denominations (Catholic, Orthodox, Methodist, Presbyterian, Southern Baptist, etc.) teach against making predictions about the specific date and following people who make these predictions, the Bible itself quotes Jesus as teaching against this (and, interestingly, saying that even HE doesn’t know when the day is)- Matthew 24:36

    But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.

    Of course this hasn’t stopped people from trying to figure it out, but traditionally religious authorities have spoken out against it. The largest instance of people believing in the Rapture happening on a specific date was a specific religious sect called the Millerites whose leader said the world would end on October 22, 1844. This group was still a small minority, but they were big enough that you have probably still heard of them today - they became the 7th Day Adventists.




  • The details of the case are a bit more complicated, but essentially the TL;DR is that the kid was autistic and the parents were under the impression (based on Roblox’s advertising) that his account was locked down to only be able to talk to kids his own age. The adult perpetrator was pretending to be another boy the victim’s age. The part which seems kind of weird legally is that the actual abuse occurred on Discord, after they moved to that platform from Roblox.

    Personally IDK how much responsibility we should say Roblox has. I think our culture has a major problem with no longer fearing the Internet. When I was a kid it was taken for granted that if you let your kid use the Internet unsupervised there were pedophiles waiting around every corner. That hasn’t changed, but both parents and companies have seemingly just forgotten about it. I think it’s kind of insane that Roblox is allowed to act like they can prevent your kids from talking to adults when that is obviously false. I also think it’s kind of insane to believe them.

    The situation is tragic. I read a longer article about it and just felt bad for the parents and the victim. They really were trying to do the right thing, and they tried to cut their kid off from online games when they found out about all this but again he was autistic and it was one of the only things that could calm him down. It has got to be tough being a parent these days.



  • I think what pisses me off most about this is everyone is just letting Trump get away with this shit and acting like this is a win because we didn’t get 30%. If everyone had just held strong and not wavered Trump would just destroy the American economy with his tariffs or chicken out like he did last time. Sure it would suck for a bit, but it would show that the international community can’t just be bullied around like this. Now, everyone has seen that this works and everyone will do it. Even worse, giving the US a deal that is this unbalanced against Europe just reinforces Trump’s political power back home. If they had just held strong Trump might have started feeling some real pressure from Congress when people ask why the fuck everything costs 30% more overnight. Now things will cost 15% more but all of the sudden corporations are suddenly able to just eat into profits to pay for it without raising prices because they’re so scared of Trump or think that it’s easy to get money sucking him off instead of competing fairly. The EU has fucked over everyone on Earth with this “deal” and not just their own citizens.



  • Headline is misleading and the beach is relatively small, but you should proactively freeze your credit anyway. I had my identity stolen a few years ago due to an insurance company I’d never heard of getting hacked and it was a huge mess. The whole incident taught me that it’s not a matter of if your identity will be stolen- it’s when. Thousands of companies have your PII (personal identifying information) even if you have never heard of them or have never done business with them because your insurance works with them or said companies legally buy your info from other companies or your state’s government. Most of these companies do alright protecting your data, but when there are so many parties that have it and it only takes one screwing up to get your identity stolen, it’s just kind of impossible for them all to do hold the line.

    It really pisses me off that citizens are responsible for"protecting" their identities on their own. Obviously the system isn’t working but nobody gives a shit or wants to do anything about it. If everyone should freeze their credit by default then why is this not the default state? Why is a 9 digit number given to us as babies on an un-laminated paper card the main thing standing between us and identity theft when you have to give that number to everyone to do anything anyway? It’s completely absurd.


  • He calls me clanka, he calls the other kids clanka, he calls himself clanka. All the time. “Clanka this”, “Clanka that”, “Clanka, please”, “Bitch clanka”, “Clanka, have you lost your mind?”, “Clanka, check that ho”, “Clanka, you bullshit” and “Break yourself, clanka”. He says it so much, I don’t even notice it anymore. Last week in lunch, Optimus said to a classmate, “Can a clanka borrow a french fry?” And my first thought wasn’t “Oh, my God. He said the word, uh, the C-word”. It was now “How is a clanka gonna borrow a fry?” “Clanka, is you gonna give it back?” I’m telling you, my inside voice didn’t talk like that before he got in my class.


  • While that is sort of true, it’s only about half of how they work. An LLM that isn’t trained with reinforcement learning to give desired outputs gives really weird results. Ever notice how ChatGPT seems aware that it is a robot and not a human? An LLM that purely parrots the training corpus won’t do that. If you ask it “are you a robot?” It will say “Of course not dumbass I’m a real human I had to pass a CAPTCHA to get on this website” because that’s how people respond to that question. So you get a bunch of poorly paid Indians in a call center to generate and rank responses all day and these rankings get fed into the algorithm for generating a new response. One thing I am interested in is the fact that all these companies are using poorly paid people in the third world to do this part of the development process, and I wonder if this imparts subtle cultural biases. For example, early on after ChatGPT was released I found it had an extremely strong taboo against eating dolphin meat, to the extent that it was easier to get it to write about about eating human meat than dolphin meat. I have no idea where this could have come from but my guess is someone really hated the idea and spent all day flagging dolphin meat responses as bad.

    Anyway, this is another, more subtle way more subtle issue with LLMs- they don’t simply respond with the statistically most likely outcome of a conversation, there is a finger in the scales in favor of certain responses, and that finger can be biased in ways that are not only due to human opinion, but also really hard to predict.