cause I saw ‘power tools’ and I had a panic over the glass’ safety.

I call her the bottlebrush9000

The contrast between the US and Canada is quite stark considering how similar countries they are on the surface.

And I don’t mean that as an insult to the Canadians!

I think I’ll try a new approach from now on. I had this sit in a bucket of hot soapy water for a day first and that got rid of 90% of it with very little effort. If I just repeat that around once a month instead of letting it get as bad again then I hopefully don’t need to chisel out the tar buildup again in the future.

300k mortage, car payment, two kids, a dog, job that they hate, week long vacation abroad once a year etc.

At some point I realized that when I look at the life of an average person, it’s not something I want for myself. So I probably shouldn’t model my life after theirs and then expect different results.

They’re definitely risking other surrounding nations jumping in on the side of the US and Israel. Nobody wants to be the first one to do so, but who’s to say that when one of them has had enough and starts acting, it won’t greenlight the others to do the same? There’s no upper limit to how messy this can get.

seeing downvotes on what was simply a friendly introduction post is a bit disheartening.

If it’s any comfort, they didn’t even read your introduction. They saw “AI” in the title and that instantly made you the “other.”

A major chunk of users here are highly ideological and always on the hunt for the enemy. Saying non-critical things of AI is more than enough evidence for them to back up their assumptions about you.

I don’t see any reason to assume that, given enough time, our VR and AI systems wouldn’t get advanced enough that a VR world becomes indistinguishable from reality - and the AI avatars in it impossible to tell from real humans. Hell, they could even be consciouss. While I don’t think we’re there yet, it’s still conceivable that you could be living in exactly that kind of simulation right now and have no idea. We’re already completely fooled by imaginary worlds every single night when we fall asleep.

GenAI doesn’t generate anything on its own either - it too needs the intentional minuscule effort of a human being in its foundation. I don’t think the “effort” argument holds up here anyway. People happily accept as art a photograph that took me 30 minutes to capture and edit, but they reject a GenAI piece I spent 3 hours tweaking until I got exactly what I wanted.

I don’t need to tell an AI to scout the location, travel there, wait for optimal lighting, nail the composition, dial in the settings, etc. I don’t need to tell a sculptor to do that either - it’s a completely different artistic field. Nobody here is claiming AI-generated pictures are photography - they’re not. Photography is done with a camera. The discussion is whether generating pictures with AI counts as art or not - not whether it’s photography.

I’m using photography as the example because people dismiss AI art on the grounds that “it doesn’t require any skill or effort,” but the exact same argument has been thrown at photography forever. There was a time when purists said the same thing about digital photography, and they were equally saying it about film photography back when it was new and painting was still “the” way to make pictures.

A camera can’t comprehend art either - it’s just a tool a human uses to create it. AI doesn’t generate anything on its own either; it needs a human to operate it too. The camera isn’t the artist, Photoshop isn’t, a canvas and brush aren’t, Illustrator isn’t. They’re just tools. The artist is the human behind them.

The discussion is whether it is art or not. It doesn’t matter how bad someone is at it - people still accept it as art. You’d be a massive dick telling a beginner that their photography is so terrible it doesn’t even qualify as art. You can also take a great picture completely by accident, just like you can put a ton of effort into one and still end up with garbage.

Not negotiating with kidnappers is a game-theory decision. It’s not about whether the ransom is a lot of money or not - it’s about what it incentivizes. If you pay, you’re sending a clear signal that there’s money to be made from kidnappings, and you’re going to see more of them. If you refuse to pay, yeah, you risk the current hostages dying, but you’re way less likely to face the same situation again - because anyone thinking about grabbing someone for ransom knows you didn’t pay the last guy who tried it either.

Nobody looks at AI products and goes, wow, this is art.

I’ve came across plenty of AI pieces that I genuinely like.

As a hobbyist photographer, I find it pretty amusing that when I use a device I just point at a target and press a button, it counts as art - but when I spend 3 hours tweaking a prompt to get exactly the image I want, suddenly it doesn’t. Seems way more like an ideological stance than a logical one.

I disagree with the premise and find it borderline offensive to call Lego builds “minimal value”.

Video of the impact for anyone interested.

Nah, not him. It was in the recommendations - not someone I’ve subscribed to

fuels battery fires

Not true. They put out burning electric cars with water all the time. The issue is that it usually won’t stop the thermal runaway reaction - it just pauses it. The car might re-ignite on its own later. That’s why my local fire station has a container full of water that they submerge the car in to cool the battery pack down and actually stop the reaction.

According to various tests, water has been found to have the most effective cooling effect. On the other hand, different reports have stated that extinguishing battery packs has in the worst cases taken several hours and required several cubic meters of extinguishing/cooling water.

Especially in Central Europe, in certain areas, so-called extinguishing platforms are commonly used for extinguishing and cooling electric vehicle battery fires. In the extinguishing platform method, the car is submerged in water. The advantage of this method is that it effectively prevents the fire from spreading, and the contaminated extinguishing water can also be collected. In the method, all battery cells - including undamaged ones - go into short circuit, and as a result, no combustion energy remains in the battery pack.

In practice, this means at least several days of submersion to ensure that all battery cells have short-circuited and that the battery’s charge has been completely discharged. As the fleet of electric vehicles becomes more widespread, it is worth considering whether submerging the vehicle is an efficient and appropriate method.

Source (in Finnish)

My comment isn’t off topic. It’s an issue I care about so I speak up. I do not self-censor because the room is primed to turn against me. Not a single thing I’ve said here in any shape or form is defending the extremists of the NoFap community.