If, like me, you were curious about what “disaster” is referring to, it’s basically this:

The flight attendants are told to prioritize guard orders over prisoner safety (aka keep them in chains). And they have no evacuation protocols. If the plane crashes or people need to parachute out, the prisoners will be left for dead.

There’s no way this happened after the year 2000.

I haven’t seen horseshoe used as a verb in… ever, but that still made sense.

There was another post about this a while ago. It depends on what app you use.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/27339160

Does that mean that people who lose their ability to reliably form new memories (like anterograde amnesia or Alzheimer’s) experience reality like a dream?

Clickbait. They basically say replacing contractors with AI is business as usual for Duolingo and that the real crisis is DOGE.

Here’s the article:

Duolingo announced plans this week to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-first” company — a move that journalist Brian Merchant pointed to as a sign that the AI jobs crisis “is here, now.”

In fact, Merchant spoke to a former Duolingo contractor who said this isn’t even a new policy. The company cut around 10% of its contractor workforce at the end of 2023, and Merchant said there was another round of cuts in October 2024. In both cases, contractors (first translators, then writers) were replaced with AI.

Merchant also noted reporting in The Atlantic around the unusually high unemployment rate for recent college graduates. One explanation? Companies might be replacing entry-level white collar jobs with AI, or their spending on AI might simply be “crowding out” the spending for new hires.

This crisis, Merchant wrote, is really “a series of management decisions being made by executives seeking to cut labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations,” and it’s manifesting as “attrition in creative industries, the declining income of freelance artists, writers, and illustrators, and in corporations’ inclination to simply hire fewer human workers.”

“The AI jobs crisis is not any sort of SkyNet-esque robot jobs apocalypse — it’s DOGE firing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the banner of ‘an AI-first strategy,’” he added.

There’s a DreamWorks logo in the bottom left.

I remember a Freakonomics episode that described an experimental alternative to traffic cops: a “good driver” lottery.

If you’re “caught” driving the speed limit, you get entered into a lottery. Less adversarial relationship with traffic cops and more drivers would be incentivized to drive safe more often.

Edit: It was apparently an article, not a podcast.

I see a lot of well-meaning support for this. I can’t help but think there has to be a way to implement these kinds of controls without taking power away from the user.

Like the Fediverse implementing better mod tools rather than expecting Twitter to effectively moderate the internet.

What movie is this from?

In our world.

I would consider Wheel of Time as an example of fantasy with reskinned real world cultures.

Andor is essentially a landlocked version of England, having a “Lion Throne” and ruled by a queen. Cairhien and Mayene bear similarities to France (Cairhien has the Sun Throne; Mayener names are reminiscent of French). Arad Doman resembles Arabic countries and Iran. (source: TV Tropes)

It’s well-written, but by nature of being fantasy, it sidesteps the challenge of writing meaningful interactions between real world communities.

To who?

Why would you torrent Wikipedia?

A beta build of Android 16 contains an early version of Google’s new Android Desktop Mode that, in the future, could let users simply plug their smartphone into a monitor and use it like a laptop or desktop computer.

!savedyouaclick@lemmy.world

I don’t know about distinct voices. The sample didn’t cover dialogue. It’s possible with AI, but I wouldn’t expect it from low-effort AI-generation.

I listened to one of the Audible samples, labeled Virtual Voice. Apple had one labeled as “Madison,” so who knows whether they’re all going to be labeled so clearly.

It sounded like a TikTok narrator, passable but at the quality level I would expect from a Netflix second-screen show. The book was at the same quality level, too. (The author does “life and business coaching with innovative and adaptable strategies, transcending traditional boundaries.”)

I consider these kinds of books and narration to be slop, so I’m definitely not the target market. My worry is that publishers will use AI narrators as virtual scabs to lowball actual creators.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness. (Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)

Fair enough. I get overwhelmed by all the ethical questions that come with being in the real world.

My partner outsourced most of that mental work and focused on trying to be a good person from moment to moment. I think she would’ve broadly agreed with you from a karma standpoint.

It looks you’re coming at this in bad faith, so I’ll ignore you.

For anyone else reading, the CIA version basically revises “brutal dictator” to “brutal ‘captain of a team’.”