wampus

Strange question perhaps – but is open source/linux supported tax filing software available where you are?

I haven’t found any that run reliably outside of Microsoft so far in Canada – tend to use a windows vm specifically for it, but it’s an example of software outside of gaming that’s pretty handy, and not typically easy to get / trust on linux yet as far as I’m aware.

Yes, you should communicate before, etc.

The point is more that if men were viewing themselves as “most likely victims” because they’ve been told repeatedly that men get raped a bunch, and that acts such as wakeup BJs count as rape in the eyes of the narrative, then they’d be mass reporting themselves as being raped for an act that, at present, most guys shrug at. It’s the societal ‘norm’ that says “all men should always want sex” that underpins it in a way, in that men almost never consider themselves victims in this regard – that, paired with the norm that men’s bodies are completely disposable. And it’s partially the societal norm that women’s bodies are inherently desired/wanted/to be protected, that makes them view a lot more scenarios as ‘rape’ – and allows them to decide if its rape years after the event even, if they later realise they felt some sort of pressure to go through with it. Much different measurement methods for the same concept, so it seems really disingenuous to compare them directly.

Similarly, women have been told repeatedly that they’re discriminated against at work. If they see a group of guys going out after work to a pub, and they don’t get invited, they’d likely report that as gender discrimination – it’s networking opportunities that they’re being denied. I’ve even heard COO women on Freakonomics before commenting about how the choice of activities/conversation topics, being not the ones that women typically do/talk about, isolates/discriminates against them. Meanwhile guys, seeing a group of girls going to the girl only gym, are not meant to see that as gender discrimination / not ‘trained’ to view it as gender discrimination. When a group of women is discussing women-centric topics, men aren’t trained to see that as isolating. So when you later ask both groups if they’ve been discriminated against, “Surrpise!” the women will claim it more regularly, while the guys will be oblivious / nonchalant about it.

Meh, I admit I shrug more and more when I see these sorts of pieces with these gender nagging titles. It doesn’t feel like you’re comparing apples to apples when we talk about things like gender discrimination / issues, in many cases, and the article doesn’t really address the potential bias in the data.

eg. Ask men if they’ve ever been woken up by a BJ from a partner. You’ll likely find it a very common experience most have likely had, if they’re sexually active. Then ask them if they’ve ever been raped. Remind them that if they had a partner initiate sex while they were sleeping, they couldn’t consent, so it’d be rape. Few will actually register it, and fewer still would bother reporting it. Or take something like workplace inappropriate touching. I’ve known women in every office I’ve worked in over the past ~15 years, who were “huggers”, or who felt it perfectly fine to touch guys biceps etc. Men shrug and don’t report it, but swap the genders and it gets reported to HR pretty quick.

For another easy example of workplace discrimination targeting men/benefiting women – it’s incredibly common for women in an office to have things like women-only chat groups, and women-only networking outside of work. Fit bit groups, yoga/after work exercise, etc. Men aren’t invited/included, nor given that opportunity to network. Any man who’s worked in such an office, and has been excluded/overlooked for those groups, has been the victim of workplace gender discrimination.

Women are often in victim bubbles, that train them continuously to find fault with men’s actions, and to credit it as gender discrimination, and that most of their faults/mistakes are the result of biased systems which everyone else needs to fix. Men are in bubbles that say they’re lucky/doin good if they have any neutral/positive interaction with other people, and that all the man’s faults/mistakes are their own doing, that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And we see articles/studies like this one, feeding into that pattern.

Yeah, but you see, they’re using the new “Rich Data” time messaging blocks, which include recordings of nearby audio. They need that data so that they can train their AI models on what a normal kitchen sounds like – so that the AI coffee maker can then alert you or the proper authorities to things like break-ins, and mice, and spouses sneaking midnight snacks, and political wrongspeak, and fires, and earthquakes. That sort of thing.

I imagine one feature they could claim, would be pre-set coffee brew times that are sync’d up with internet time servers to ensure they’re kept in alignment with DST, and so they don’t ‘drift’/need routine adjustments.

I could even imagine coffee machine makers purposely gibbling the clocks, to make them drift more, if they’re not sync’d up. Sorta like removing granular feature-based screenlock times on a smart phone (eg don’t sleep while streaming video), and replacing that functionality with a blanket “click this function to prevent your phone from sleeping while you look at it, don’t worry, we won’t record your face / send any of that data out to third parties, we swear!” to force people to use the face monitoring features.

They’ll also prolly build in AI, so that you can speak to your coffee machine to operate it, and remove most of the buttons at some point. Then they’ll need to constantly update the AI, because “Hackers have figured out how to make our coffee machines turn into super intelligent skynet terminators! OH NO!! Update immediately and buy our stock!!! DOOOM!!”.

Hosted – so from a company perspective, still Cloud. Still subject to similar potential risks.

Non profits likely can’t afford a team of tech workers to maintain opensource infrastructure. Avg tech worker salary in the states is $100k, you’d need two or three staff for coverage/to avoid key-person risks, so you’re looking at $200-300k to retain internal teams to use opensource tech, in salaries alone. Opensource doesn’t mean ‘free’ too, as many businesses will generally require some sort of support/enterprise agreement for risk management/audit reasons – so they’ll pay lic fees on top of the salaries.

The technology supports the business, but it isn’t the business – sorta like a pizza shop may need a brochure-website to advertise their services/take orders, but their actual business is pizza. Someone who’s specialising in pizzas, shouldn’t need to learn how to maintain an opensource server stack. If you get a ‘golden goose’ staff member, who’s some university student genius that loves pizza and will happily maintain opensource infrastructure on the side, then your business is totally fucked if that person leaves because finding a replacement with similar skills is nearly impossible / very expensive.

They can outsource it to a third party, as most businesses do. And then that third party goes through the same general calcs, and settles on big box tech solutions for similar reasons.

I don’t think its as clear cut as you seem to imply.

Can’t Locate Our User Data. Cloud.

Not sure how that matters specifically. Boomers are just now approaching 80 – 80 year olds today, are still part of “The Silent Generation” which came before the boomers.

Boomers are 1946-1964, so they’re 62 - 80. They likely won’t start encountering mobility issues until their mid 70s/early 80s if they’ve remained “reasonably” active and healthy. So, I don’t think my comment’s out of line in that sense. The earliest of the boomers are approaching that age / have reached that age – and now we’re seeing more products/solutions brought forward to assist, just in time for the rest of the boomer cohort to buy it / use it.

Further, the wealth disparity between the older generation and the younger is significant, and worth highlighting. My retired parent earns more money than I do per year. Here in Canada, their stocks, retirement investments, and govt pension plans earn them more annual income than I earn from working full time in a relatively decent job in the private sector – well above the national averages in both cases. My parents weren’t particularly wealthy growing up, just regular middle class. I have no particular reason to think my parent’s situation unique, but rather to think it more the norm for that age range, especially as all their peers are in seemingly similar situations (if they’re still alive, admittedly).

The media focuses on stories of old people who are destitute and need help for social services narratives. But remember, Trump’s 80. Bill Gates is 70. A ton of senators, judges, and so on are WELL past the age you’d think they’d retire, and they’re still earning like 100s of thousands/millions of dollars per year. The Kochs in the states are well into their 80s, still throwing hundreds of millions at politicians to control how the country’s run. In Canada, this demographic also contains the ‘snow birds’, a large enough demographic slice to have its own colloquial nickname, they’re the people who have vacation homes in florida that they go to for months out of the year because… they’re so economically strapped! They can only afford their regular home, their vacation home in florida, and a cabin for weekend get-aways! How will they ever afford something like a mobility device! Oh, wait, you’re right, they can drag out the same old narrative to push the cost onto younger generations! They’re too house-poor to afford it, so they’ll get the government/insurance programs to cover the cost!

Being old doesn’t mean you’re poor and hard done by, except when the government wants tax payers to pay more to senior care programs, at which point they churn out the marketing message that all old people need to be protected. Are there old people who are poor and destitute? Yes. But it’d be absurd to type cast them as such.

Mobility type tech will likely see a boom in the next few years, is my guess. Same with any other tech that helps/benefits the Boomer generation as they enter retirement/old age.

Tons of business trends and even political trends have followed the boomers life cycles due to the disproportionate chunk of the market they represent. Eg. When boomers were in their late teens/early twenties, it was the 1960s, and it was all psychedelics, free-er sexuality stuff, peace and love. As they got older and started having children, suddenly it shifted to “protect the kids from drugs, lets declare war on our old pass-times!” while also having an undercurrent of cocaine for big business career sorts. As they’ve gotten older, more programs and initiatives have focused increasingly on seniors and senior supports.

Mobility tech like this, is following the same trend.

I’d guess that GCP, AWS, Azure have infrastructure in Australia and many other western nations, and the AI companies would use that as a proxy.

You could potentially block those IP ranges. But then you’re also likely going to be blocking Windows updates, and basic Windows functionality. So you’d first have had to, idk, focus on sovereign tech chains / OS’s. Not to mention, the Aus government is likely hosted inside the sane cloud ecosystems that AI companies are using to launch their attacks from.

The city likely provided the same funding for marketing / outreach as was provided to all the other people who got that contract – and those other places generally performed a lot better than talkspace. If the one variable that changes is the third party contractor, it’s difficult to see how it’s the city’s fault on that front, other than buying in to talkspace’s claims that virtual therapy was a thing kids were clamoring for.

And outrage is still a weird bar to me. Not all news needs to generate outrage. It can be a mundane groan of “ffs, the city’s wasting a bunch of tax payer dollars again on a third party partner that already failed to deliver results… maybe we should vote in new people next time around”.

*edit to note: from a ‘technology’ perspective, it’s also a somewhat interesting article, as it highlights the disconnect between some tech company claims, and reality. Especially in regards to the tech companies claims, and the reality of what the intended users actually want/need.

Well, hopefully you have more emotional options than “confused” and “outraged”, and can manage something sorta in between, or off on a tangent from either of those?

I think the main point the article is highlighting, is that there was a gross miss-spend by the city on this service, based on the data that came out about it. The city bought the company’s marketing pitch that students didn’t want in person services, and that students would greatly prefer to get therapy online / virtually. Data came out showing that to be very inaccurate, and interviews with actual students highlight the point – might’ve been an idea to ask them before hand, but whatever. The more “Eh???” point that the article raises, albeit buried near the end, is that even after such a horribly wasteful investment, the govt is doubling down with this company and offering them more money/contracts.

Like change some company names / products to simplify it – the government paid $1m to a private company to supply burgers to students, believing the company’s claim that thousands of students would eat their burgers. Almost no students went for the burgers, and the few that did generally said the burgers sucked balls. As a result, the government is now giving that same company another pile of money to provide burgers to everyone else, because the company claimed that everyone else will eat their burgers.

Meh, I was having an argument with a coworker recently about AI’s evils, and all the doomsayers and apoca-hype profiteering that the big AI companies do. I think this article lays out more plainly what the risks of AI are in terms of ending the human race, than any of the claude-cult stock pumpers that come forward.

It won’t be some AGI super intelligence that ascends and then does away with humanity. It’ll be some random military sorts who get a prompt, and trigger a huge conflict / disaster based on bullshit fed to them from an AI. The AI won’t even do it ‘intentionally’, it’ll just be a convincing enough marionette’s lie, fed to a low enough IQ, to open fire.

I think to understand my position a bit more, it’s worth considering how the US has approached international politics recently.

They knew they were going to bomb the shit out of Iran and cause massive oil price shocks. So a few months prior, they abducted the president of Venezuela, and declared Venezuela’s oil their own via military force – and an ongoing campaign of war crimes against fishermen in the region. They no longer see the point in ‘trading’, or the veneer of polite international politics, and are content to use military force to acquire assets for businesses. They have even threatened military force in the taking of Greenland, a region that’s part of a NATO partners traditional territory.

Seeing as they are prepared to use their massively lopsided military force in conflicts explicitly in the interests of American businesses, such as AI companies, I don’t think ‘money’ is the only metric at play in whether these companies stay around. Musk was literally pillaging America’s data systems under the guise of Doge, and the tech-fascists are very much integrated into the republican administration.

And yeah, these are the same people who partied with Epstein. They likely view the worst thing about the Epstein files situation, as being the audacity of the poors to think they have the right to hold their betters to any sort of accountability based on poor people morality. One reason they likely want their own regulation / law independent “freedom” cities, is so that they can have Epstein parties out in the open with zero risk, aside from STDs. So far, America’s shielded most of their rich pedophiles from any real fallout, but why should they even have to bother with such a nuissance, when they’re busy “earning” their billions by having bitchy low brow word fights on X.

OpenAI is considered of critical importance to the USA government, so much so that they’re saying it’s ok for AI companies like openAI to use whatever copyrighted material they want to train their LLMs.

OpenAI will survive, as long as the US govt survives and is its backer.