These rules seem arbitrary and capricious. If the dog is well-trained, the owner is able to meet its needs on the go, and nobody else is explicitly being bothered, there’s no compelling reason to block it from any of these establishments.

All of the above hold true for therapy animals, for instance. This isn’t about the animal being well-trained, it is about both the pet and the person to be comfortable and happy, without impinging on the comfort and happiness of others. Locking well-behaved pets out of all of the above establishments does nothing to improve your comfort or happiness. It only serves to inconvenience others.

Several of the apps traced back to Qihoo 360, a firm declared by the Defense Department to be a “Chinese Military Company." Qihoo did not respond to questions about its app-related holdings.

I have to wonder if this headline would be received the same way if it was “US State Department Accuses Chinese Internet Security Company of Conspiring With Chinese Government”, as all this seems to go back to a claim by Trump’s 2020 department that Qihoo leaked info to the Hong Kong police during the protests five years ago.

Still… Qihoo 360 appears to have been an active investor and developer in Silicon Valley since 2014. Chinese investment in the US isn’t new or even undesireable, as of a decade ago.

But consider how the US has also recently attempted to seize the US branch of TikTok and block domestic sale of Huawei phones. Add in the domestic freak out over Chinese AI companies outperforming their US peers. This could easily be American tech companies trying to freeze out their competition on national security grounds rather than Chinese tech companies posing a military threat to US domestic interests.

A Beautiful Mind - Bar Scene John Nash’s Equilibrium Game Theory

As the Buddha said in the Vasala Sutta, “Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a brahman. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a brahman.”

Why did the noble Japanese Buddhists boil Portuguese Christians alive? Was this one of those Brahman Deeds?

The Buddha goes on to criticize the various things that brahmins do

Much as Jesus critiqued the Pharasises. And yet modern Christian Dominionists have far more in common with Pharasises - even Roman Pagans - than the fishermen and slaves and prostitutes that were it’s original disciples.

When was the last time a Buddhist knocked on your door and asked you to find Buddha?

Buddhism (and the Hinduism it is rooted in) isn’t intended to accrued disciples as part of an elaborate religiously flavored MLM. It is intended to justify existing, generational, disparities in wealth, power, and property.

You won’t find one knocking on your door. You knock on their doors, and hope to ingratiate yourself to their superiors by adopting their customs in exchange for status and business relations.

It’s not even about banning people, it’s about the fact that Reddit was never a sustainable business model from the start, at least not in the traditional capitalist sense where you’re actively trying to make a profit to please shareholders

If they’d been stalwart about banning automation and keeping original, legit human content pure, they probably could have used it as a fountain of fresh data for AI, for polling, for engagement farming, and for promotion.

The site was still growing even despite the admin induced atrophy. But they just couldn’t resist killing the Golden Goose.

Honestly most recent movies and tv shows look like scenarios were generated by AI or some barbie sweet happy life generator so there is nothing entertaining.

A lot of slop has wide appeal. And let’s not pretend soap operas and sitcoms and trope genre fiction don’t routinely have wide appeal. The theory that AI can seamlessly replicate pulp fiction / scripted reality TV seems to have held up for the most part, because so much of this content is a canned and formulaic to begin with.

What AIs lack, more than anything, is a face and personality that is distinct to the line of work. There is no real AI “House Style” that gets adhered to. I can pick up a dozen Brian Sanderson novels and get roughly the same experience. But if I ask a Chatbot to “write me a chapter of a Brian Sanderson novel”, what I’m really going to get is a generic jumble of Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Marvel with a few Brian Sanderson tropes thrown in.

I think people feel more connected because they feel something when watching person talking on the screen whatever they want to talk about instead of person reading from script.

So much of the “spontaneous” content is still heavily scripted and acted on delivery. What makes professional acting impressive is the range - a single person embodying a wide range of personalities and mannerisms. I don’t watch Gary Oldman or Daniel Day-Lewis because I’m looking for unpolished delivery.

But the Auteur experience is what draws people in and makes certain works rise above their peer materials. AI has no real artistry. All it does is cut, copy, and paste from a grab bag of established popular materials, hoping it’ll trigger enough nostalgia to be recognized as good.

As styles and tastes shift, I have to wonder what AI is going to look like, given how rooted it is in the moment of instantiation. The long tail will drag, while younger and historically unburdened artists will be out experimenting.

The hilarious thing about Stonetoss is that the artist clearly has a finger on the pulse and keys in on some really gnarly American impulses to be horrible. But then he throws on a smirk and says “This is good, aktuly” in the last panel, just to remind you that he’s an absolute piece of shit.