Plumber by training, but these days I work as a self-employed general contractor / handyman.

My thinking is that companies looking for employees get flooded with nearly identical applications, so it’s hard to stand out. I’d rather just email, call, or even show up in person and ask for work - whether they’re actively hiring or not. It shows initiative.

Honestly, I didn’t even want the position - I only applied to keep my unemployment payments going. I spent maybe five minutes writing the application and still got the interview.

Last time I was looking for job I just looked up companies from my field and sent them an email. I sent two emails and got 1 interview. Didn’t get the place though, so I just employed myself then.

I’ve only broken up with my ex-partners.

I don’t feel like their wealth changes the equation that much. I don’t expect them to just hand me money just because I’m their biological child - and since I’m doing fine on my own anyway, I wouldn’t really need them to.

No, it generates natural sounding language. That’s all it does.

The models definitely have some level of consciousness.

Depends on what one means by consciousness. The way I hear the term used most often - and how I use it myself - is to describe the fact of subjective experience. That it feels like something to be.

While I can’t definitively argue that none of our current AI systems are conscious to any degree, I’d still say that’s the case with extremely high probability. There’s just no reason to assume it feels like anything to be one of these systems, based on what we know about how they function under the hood.

LLM “hallucinations” are only errors from a user expectations perspective. The actual purpose of these models is to generate natural-sounding language, not to provide factual answers. We often forget that - they were never designed as knowledge engines or reasoning tools.

The fact that they often get things right isn’t because they “know” anything - it’s a side effect of being trained on data that contains a lot of correct information. So when they get things wrong, it’s not a bug in the traditional sense - it’s just the model doing what it was designed to do: predict likely word sequences, not truth. Calling that a “hallucination” isn’t marketing spin - it’s a useful way to describe confident output that isn’t grounded in reality.

LLMs have more in common with humans than we tend to admit. In split-brain studies, humans have been shown to invent plausible-sounding explanations for their behavior - even when scientists know those explanations aren’t the real reason they acted a certain way. It’s not that these people are lying per se - they genuinely believe the explanations they’re coming up with. Lying implies they know what they’re saying is false.

LLMs are similar in that way. They generate natural-sounding language, but not everything they say is true - just like not everything humans say is true either.

I haven’t revealed the darkest one to anyone for a good reason and I sure aren’t going to do it here.

However, another one came to mind which I’m not sure is dark or just weird but you know that noise a panicing pig makes? I get some weird enjoyment from it. Not when it comes to any other animal but only pigs. In all other situations seeing an animal or human panic that way would make me want to stop what ever is causing it and I do consider myself overall highly empathic person but pigs get none of that. It’s not that I have some urge to hurt them but rather that squeaking just doesn’t get any empathy from me.

Admittedly though, I sometimes want to stomp small yapping dogs as well so there’s that too.

To contrast this: I don’t hurt spiders, I catch flies alive and take them outside, I euthanize silverfish on my glue traps because I don’t want them to suffer more than necessary and I don’t trap mice from my attic because I don’t want to kill them. Go figure.

Well, not quite. I don’t (obviously) charge my customers for learning on the job. If it’s something that takes longer for me to do due to lack of experience then I charge less.

In many cases, yes - but my work also involves a lot of things that I’m doing for the very first time.

I’m a general contractor, and I think a lot of my customers assume I know everything about construction work - that whenever I’m doing something, it’s something I’ve done dozens of times before. But quite often, that’s not the case. Sometimes, all I know about the task at hand comes from a YouTube video I watched the night before, or I’m just following the manufacturer’s instructions step by step.

People don’t realize how often I’m just winging it and hoping it turns out fine. The fact that someone hires me usually means they know even less about the job than I do, which creates the illusion of much greater expertise. But in reality, the main difference between me and them often just boils down to the fact that I’m not afraid to try.

It’s abstract and doesn’t sound like anything. I’m not literally hearing anything just like I’m not literally seeing anything either when I’m visualizing things despite my ability to do so.

And what does that have to do with anything? Sweden’s population has grown from 8 million in the '70s to 10.5 million today. That’s 2.5 million more people - and 1.9 million of them are immigrants. The number of immigrants per capita has increased significantly since the '70s, not decreased. It has gone from 3.7% of the total population to 20.8%.

According to wikipedia their support was at around 4% in the 90’s, 5.7% in 2010, 17.5% in 2018 and 20% in 2022.

There was a peak in immigration in the '70s, but that was still only half of what it was in 2015. I doubt it’s just a coincidence that their support seems to correlate pretty neatly with the number of immigrants. I never claimed that it’s the gang violence driving the increased support - it’s the immigration itself. The rise in violence just makes it easier for them to say “I told you so.”

My parents didn’t talk down to me like that.

What I have been told, however, is that I wont stay lean like this all my life and will start gaining weight as I get older. That I’m still waiting for to happen.

You’re still doing it. I bring up integration challenges - you hear “brown people.” I talk about political backlash - you call it disinformation. At no point have I blamed immigrants for wealth inequality or defended Farage or Trump, yet somehow you’ve lumped me in with all of it.

You asked by who people get shouted down? You’re literally doing it right now. And you don’t even realize it. That’s the whole tragedy. You think you’re punching up - but all you’re doing is making sure no one outside your bubble wants to talk to you, much less vote with you. Keep going. It’s clearly working wonders.

Appreciate the live demo of exactly what I was talking about.

Instead of engaging with the argument, you go straight to branding me a racist. This is why the far-right keeps gaining ground - not because people agree with them, but because they’re sick of being shouted down any time they try to talk about real issues. Apparently things still aren’t bad enough for that lesson to sink in.

EDIT: Ironically this just in: Sweden set to rent cells in Estonian jails as it runs out of room for its prisoners

Sweden is not set up to cope with a rise in the numbers being sentenced to jail time as the government grapples with an unprecedented wave of violence brought about by gang crime.

Finland

Massive amounts of refugees and immigrants since 2015, failure to integrate, gang violence, shootings and bombings among the highest per capita in Europe, and the rise of the right-wing nationalist Sweden Democrats.

Sweden basically became the cautionary tale among the Nordic countries of how not to handle mass immigration.

Edit: Sweden set to rent cells in Estonian jails as it runs out of room for its prisoners