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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Deterministic software can’t summarize a long email thread, or that would already exist as a feature.

    We can’t even get deterministic software to ask people what they’re calling their cellphone provider about well enough to route them on anything more than broad keyword matching.

    This anti-ai shit is nauseating. Businesses that rely on it too much are going to fail, but businesses that refuse to use it at all will get out competed over the next decade.

    It’s a tool like any other, use it where it’s strong. Like summarizing a fucking email thread. Modern models and integrations are not just randomly hallucinating topics of conversation in a single email thread at this point, we’re well past that level of incompetence.








  • I don’t think you understand the level of difference in pollution associated with eating meat compared to being a vegetarian. It’s not like it only saves 10% or 20%, even accounting for transportation and the like it’s closer to a 50% reduction.

    Most customers don’t understand, don’t care, or cannot afford your more expensive products, especially in this economy.

    This is why it’s the fault of the customers and not the fault of the companies. That’s my entire argument. The companies didn’t make the alternative more expensive, reality makes the alternative more expensive. The fact that people choose to continue to shop on price is literally the core issue.





  • I’m not getting it backward.

    While you’re right that my example is simplified, it’s not wrong. Shoes are actually like that in real life. A good pair of shoes can last many times as long as the cheap shoes, and pollute the same or even less than cheap ones. There is significant market competition from different companies including small start up brands and long term high quality brands that keep the entire industry quite well balanced.

    If two companies produce high quality expensive shoes, that a customer likes equally, the only thing driving the consumer choice is going to be price. So one company cuts their costs a little bit to compete by dropping the quality ever so slightly. Consumers buy that, and then the other company says “I can do that too” cuts it a little bit more to undercut and it goes back and forth. The expensive shoes didn’t stop existing, customers can still choose them, but they aren’t choosing them. The back and forth only stops when the consumers refuse to buy it any cheaper because the quality is no longer even acceptable to them.

    That is ENTIRELY customer driven. The moment a company releases a product that isn’t sufficient, consumers stop buying it, and the company goes back to the product that does sell and generate profit for them.

    Car companies lobbied to kill emissions standards not because they didn’t want to produce EVs, but because it would cost them profit as fewer people bought cars that were more expensive to meet the standards. Oil companies may have tried to kill EV programs, but that’s not the car companies.

    Upfront price isn’t real, people who are broke finance cars. An non-luxury EV is effectively the same price per month as a gas vehicle unless you don’t drive very much (no commute or very short commute) or happen to live somewhere where electricity rates are extremely high and gas costs are extremely low.

    Your lack of education cannot be blamed on companies. That is YOUR responsibility, not theirs. The information is available for free to everyone at this point, even homeless people have access to the internet at this point. The fact that people choose not to be informed can only be blamed on them.

    You may want to pretend that you’re not responsible because it lets you pick the easier option and not feel like you’re bad, but it’s no more real than crashing into a parked car and getting mad at them for being in your way.




  • You have this backwards. The current is being manufactured by demand, not manufacturing the demand. People WANT cheaper and easier.

    You walk into a shoe store, you want some new everyday shoes, there are cheap and expensive versions. The pricier set has better materials for durability and comfort, and took more R&D to develop. The expensive shoes will last twice as long and be more comfortable, but are twice as expensive as the cheaper option. The pollution from each of the shoes is pretty similar. The company makes a profit of $5 from the cheap shoes, and $10 from the expensive shoe.

    The shoe companies don’t care which one they sell you, they want to make the most profit and both types make them the same amount of profit (you need two pairs of the cheap shoes over the life of an expensive pair)

    The majority of people will buy the cheaper pair.

    Did the company engineer it so that you would buy the cheaper pair and pollute more? Or is the company just forced to produce them because that’s what people are choosing to buy?

    There are situations and products where buying the expensive version is actually significantly CHEAPER long term, and people still choose the worst long-term option. Electric cars for example have had lower TCO (Total cost of ownership) in many areas (not all) and usage cases for a while now, and you still see people buying brand new gas vehicles. They also have a much lower lifetime environmental impact.

    Again, the car company doesn’t give a crap. They get their profit on every unit sold regardless. They just make what people want to buy.

    You are giving companies far too much credit for how much power they have. There are exceptions of course (Cough Cigarettes Cough) where companies are being blatantly evil by doing things like manufacturing demand through addiction, but the vast majority of companies have no such capability and the most “engineering” you’re going to get from them is an advertising campaign.



  • Forcing companies to not use plastic packaging will not somehow make the same product available at the same price. They will raise prices because the alternative is going to cost them more or again… they would already be doing it. Those people would then “die” anyways as the prices rise.

    Your logic is shit.

    People can definitely continue to stay alive with less polluting personal choices, but choose not to every single day., I rarely see broke vegetarians for example, despite a true vegetarian diet (meat replacement products are expensive and do not count) being significantly cheaper than a meat based one and MASSIVELY more environmentally friendly.