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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Because it’s clearly the best for numerous reasons.

    • when the 4 digit year is first, it’s obvious month is second. So 2024-01-02, for example, is definitely jan second and not Feb first (unless you’re insane)
    • you can name things with the date first and an alphabetical sort will automatically sort the files by date (you can’t always sort by date and sometimes you actually want a mixed sort like this

  • It has nothing to do with real estate. This is often echoed on social media but is baseless.

    Companies typically chase quarterly growth over all else. Working from home benefits that while trying to fix real estate values is a long term thing, only offering a payout if they sell the building, which most companies aren’t worried about. Companies tend to be very hesitant to hurt quarterly growth in favor of long term, iffy investments.

    Even if they did care about real estate value, they’d rather all other companies return to office, boosting those values, while they could then remain remote and take advantage of both the higher real estate values and also the numerous advantages of remote work.

    Boosting real estate values in this way is a collective action problem where most companies would need to work together for the greater good (as they see it). But if you hold this world view, that CEOs will screw over their employees for their bottom line, why wouldn’t they also screw over other companies? They would. They would want other companies to work together to fix the real estate values while also benefitting from remote work. So it would all fall apart.

    Here are more likely scenarios:

    • SHAREHOLDERS. Shareholders don’t like unused assets. “Use it or lose it”. So, CEOs force return to office because they think it’ll help the stock price. Shareholders are also likely to blame as evidenced by publicly traded companies being more likely to mandate a return to office.
    • Personal preference. CEOs, and other executives who make this decision, simply prefer to work in the office and they prefer a full office to an empty one. Either cause: they have a very extroverted personality (likely how they got the job in the first place), they feel more powerful with all their underlings around, or they have a harder time working from home and can’t fathom anyone being different.

  • Well no one can prove they have a mind to anyone other than themselves.

    And to extend that, there’s obviously a way for electrical information processing to give rise to consciousness. And no one knows how that could be possible.

    Meaning something like a true, alien AI would probably conclude that we are not conscious and instead are just very intelligent meat computers.

    So, while there’s no reason to believe that current AI models could result in consciousness, no one can prove the opposite either.

    I think the argument currently boils down to, “we understand how AI models work, but we don’t understand how our minds work. Therefore, ???, and so no consciousness for AI”


  • Everyone can only do the best they can. Anyone who expects everyone to have zero impact is an idiot. Even a salad involved death and cruelty somewhere (animals caught in farm equipment, underpaid immigrant farmers who get abandoned if injured, etc).

    So really, all you can do in your life if you care about these things is minimize your impact as much as you can based on what you know.

    Similar to people who value giving to charity. Do they give all of their spare money to charity? No and no one should expect them to. Just giving anything to charity regularly has a positive impact and the whole “you’re not doing enough” does much more damage than good.

    Reminds me of vegetarians/vegans. I’m not really either, but I don’t eat meat. And I’m just happy when I hear people say they want to eat less meat. Whereas most people who are against meat are only happy if someone else is also against it completely.