If this was a factory farm and people were maybe going to eat the animals after the torture, it would still be just as deprived. Remember this next time your order your burger or chicken strips. If you are disgusted by this, as you absolutely should be, then pay the extra 30% for fairly treated animals. If you don’t know where your food is coming from then it is probably from torturous factory farms.

You can do better and the animals deserve better. This isn’t even a call for veganism, just a call for making sure that the animals you eat at least get to live without being tortured like they are at nearly all factory farms. There is plenty of factory farm footage out there for anyone who wants to bury their heads in the sand and pretend like torture isn’t routine for most of the animals raised for meat.

The fact that it’s common doesn’t make it morally justified.

If my comment upsets you, then it is almost certainly your own actions that are actually upsetting you.

İ live in the 2nd world and am often in the third. You must have either been in a pretty unique place, or you are projecting your experience from long ago onto the current state of things. You just need to revisit and update your world view to modern times.

Been using it for decades, never an issue for me. What in the world are you trying to download over there??

Climate change is a separate issue.

It would be fantastic if people being abused by corrupt politicians and currencies was niche! It’s not though, there are hundreds of millions of people struggling with it. Billions depending on how you count it. It is a disease of the 1st world to be unable to accept that not everyone has the same privileges they enjoy. Human beings are literally starving to death and dying decades early due to poverty, Bitcoin is literally keeping them alive. Spoiled brats want them to die because they saw a headline that tells them to parrot that Bitcoin is bad. Where is your outrage over Christmas lights? How about video games? These things don’t save lives and transform existences like safe money does.

Nearly everyone who has bought Bitcoin and held are up, it has outperformed every stock, every currency, every investment on large enough time scales. Give me a volatile currency that goes up in value over volatile currencies that utterly collapse. Where is the outrage over the lira? Or any other currency that is down to 5% of itself that people are “supposed” to hold according to you?

There is a very good reason that you don’t have answers to these. It is because all you know on the issue is that you are not supposed to look to deeply and you’re supposed to mindlessly repeat that Bitcoin is bad without having any idea why. You are allowed to research, you are allowed to make your own decisions, you are allowed to talk to people in the 2nd and 3ed worlds. You are allowed to travel to these places and talk to people. Nobody forces you to repeat their BS, you just have to decide that you want to learn and then put in some effort.

I just looked it up, it looks like it is the a difference of 35% to 80% in the developed world.

Imagine this, you are forced to hold your wealth in corrupt government run banks. They often print tons of it for themselves, criminals are printing it, the government can seize it from anyone they want. You can try to store it at home, yourself, or you can give it to the banks. Now there is a third option, store it as Bitcoin. No need for risking it under your bed or with the corrupt banker politicians, and on top of those be victims to their inflation. Sure, your bank probably doesn’t often seize your money, and your currency probably isn’t rapidly devaluing even compared to the dollar, but if it was then you would probably think the energy is worth it.

That’s why you stick with Bitcoin instead of running after whatever flashy new super duper coin that assholes trick fools into buying.

It takes living with a broken system to understand the fix for it. There are millions of people who have been saved by Bitcoin and the freedom that it brings, they are just mainly in the 2nd and 3rd worlds, so to many people they basically don’t exist.

Im not one of them, but incredibly it is probably about 5,000,000x more people than the ones that give a fuck what the average person on here thinks.

I don’t see why people would use a credit card to pay for a vpn, it seems like it would totally defeat the purpose. I guess if you get ahold of an anonymous card then it would be fine, but using a card in your name to pay for an anonymous service just seems wacky to me.

I’m curious, does anyone here pay for their vpn with something thatvis in their name? If so, why?

What could they even give? They don’t even ask for an email, and they claim to run everything you browse as RAM that never gets held or recorded.

You don’t have to be delusional to self-sacrifice to try to make a difference. I’m so sick of people pretending like there is nothing they could possibly do to help, so they just keep hurting others. It’s just like every discussion on factory farms. At least try to help. It will make you feel better, and you can quit getting all defensive when people point out things that can be done.

I think there may be some confusion about how much energy it takes to respond to a single query or generate boilerplate code. I can run Llama 3 on my computer and it can do those things no problem. My computer would use about 6kWh if I ran it for 24 hours, a person in comparison takes about half of that. If my computer spends 4 hours answering queries and making code then it would take 1kWh, and that would be a whole lot of code and answers. The whole thing about powering a small town is a one-time process when the model is made, so to determine if that it worth it or not it needs to be distributed over everyone who ends up using the model that is produced. The math for that would be a bit trickier.

When compared to the amount of energy it would take to produce a group of people that can do question answering and code writing, I’m very certain that the ai model method is considerably less. Hopefully, we don’t start making our decision about which one to produce based on energy efficiency. We may, though, if the people that choose the fate of the masses sees us like livestock, then we may end up having our numbers reduced in the name of efficiency. When cars were invented, horses didn’t end up all living in paradise. There were just a whole lot less of them around.

I’m sorry you’ve been so hurt, I hope you get better.

Standing up for what you believe isn’t sanctimonious. I hope you eventually learn to quit caring so much what others think about you and that you can start to express your true opinions. Sure, some people will be offended and walk away, but those aren’t the best types of people anyway. Quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to who you spend your time with.

Yeah, I would be unable to respond in any meaningful way if I were trying to argue your side as well. I know why I’m downvoted. I’m downvoted because I point out a disgusting habit that many people have and they hate to think about. That’s fine though, if I can get through to a single person, it is worth it. Think hard about which side you are on here, it’s not a good side at all. Deep down you know that. Sometimes anger is the appropriate response. You’d be angry too if you developed a moral compass.

Yeah, I’m the one without regard for others here. The whole side you are arguing for is not having regard for others. That’s literally what this discussion is about. I say “have regard for others”, and you say “no, lol”.

I’m sorry it is so hard for you to make the connection between one abused animal and many abused animals. I don’t know what else to say. This is text book cognitive dissonance. Two things couldn’t be more related.

When people show outrage about the abuse of a single animal, it is in no way “shoe horning” or a “non-sequitor” to point out the massive animal abuse that many people are supporting. I understand that people hate hearing about, but it’s still true.

This is an issue with many humans I’ve hired, though. Maybe they try to cut corners and do a shitty job, but I occasionally check, if they are bad at their job, I warn them, correct them, maybe eventually fire them. For lots of stuff, AI can be interacted with in a very similar way.

This is so similar to many people’s complaints with self driving cars. Sure, accidents will still be had, they are not perfect, but neither are human drivers. If we hold AI to some standard that is way beyond people then yes, it’s not there, but if we say it just needs to be better than people, then it is there for many applications, but more importantly, it is rapidly improving. Even if it was only as good as people at something, it is still way cheaper and faster. For some things, it’s worth it if it isn’t even as good as people yet.

I have very little issues with hallucinations anymore, when I use an LLM to get anything involving facts, I always tell it to give sources for everything, and i can have another agent independently verify the sources before i see them. Often times I provide the books or papers that I want it to specifically source from. Even if I am going to check all the sources myself after that, it is still way more efficient then if I did the whole thing myself. The thing is, with the setups I use, I literally never have it make up sources anymore. I remember that kind of thing happening back in the days when AI didn’t have internet access, and there really weren’t agents yet. I realize some people are still back there, but in the future(that many of us are in) its basically solved. There is still logic mistakes and such, that stuff can’t be 100% depended on, but if you have a team of agents going back and forth to find an answer, then you pass it to another team of agents to independently verify the answer, and have it cycle back if a flaw is found, many issues just go away. Maybe some mistakes make it through this whole process, but the same thing happens sometimes with people.

I don’t have the link on hand, but there have been studies done that show gpt3.5 working in agentic cycles perform as good or better than gpt4 out of the box. The article I saw that in was saying that basically there are already people using what gpt5 will most likely be just by using teams of agents with the latest models.

This is an issue with many humans I’ve hired, though. Maybe they try to cut corners and do a shitty job, but I occasionally check, if they are bad at their job, I warn them, correct them, maybe eventually fire them. For lots of stuff, AI can be interacted with in a very similar way.

This is so similar to many people’s complaints with self driving cars. Sure, accidents will still be had, they are not perfect, but neither are human drivers. If we hold AI to some standard that is way beyond people then yes, it’s not there, but if we say it just needs to be better than people, then it is there for many applications, but more importantly, it is rapidly improving. Even if it was only as good as people at something, it is still way cheaper and faster. For some things, it’s worth it if it isn’t even as good as people yet.

I have very little issues with hallucinations anymore, when I use an LLM to get anything involving facts, I always tell it to give sources for everything, and i can have another agent independently verify the sources before i see them. Often times I provide the books or papers that I want it to specifically source from. Even if I am going to check all the sources myself after that, it is still way more efficient then if I did the whole thing myself. The thing is, with the setups I use, I literally never have it make up sources anymore. I remember that kind of thing happening back in the days when AI didn’t have internet access, and there really weren’t agents yet. I realize some people are still back there, but in the future(that many of us are in) its basically solved. There is still logic mistakes and such, that stuff can’t be 100% depended on, but if you have a team of agents going back and forth to find an answer, then you pass it to another team of agents to independently verify the answer, and have it cycle back if a flaw is found, many issues just go away. Maybe some mistakes make it through this whole process, but the same thing happens sometimes with people.

I don’t have the link on hand, but there have been studies done that show gpt3.5 working in agentic cycles perform as good or better than gpt4 out of the box. The article I saw that in was saying that basically there are already people using what gpt5 will most likely be just by using teams of agents with the latest models.