Awhile back a non tech person at work got hoodwinked into a sales pitch by a no name “AI” vendor. They, of course, invited a distribution list of all the IT and IT adjacent people to this pitch, thinking their ingenuity was going to transform our workplace and they were going to get accolades.

During the pitch, the sales guy (or CEO?) talked about Google getting surprised by Open AI, and that they rushed to build Bard, so they “could have their own ‘Me Too’ moment.” (With an inflection to indicate the Me Too comment was a reference.)

While I was watching people unmute, stay silent, then mute again, multiple group chats lit up at once.

(And the guy either didn’t understand LLM’s, or was hoping we really didn’t. It was peak marketing speak. He got crushed in the Q&A, ultimately revealing that the extent of his offering was to resell access to an established LLM vendor.)

It’s pretty good.

Your credit rating isn’t really about not carrying debts, it’s about showing you can pay off debt you incur, and you utilize credit in ways that lenders can generally exploit to make money off you.

The second one is a little counter-intuitive, but I’ve been dinged on my credit score over the years for both not utilizing enough of my available credit and not having open loans after paying off my last car (before buying a house).

If you’d like to build your credit, my suggestion is to get a card that offers cash back from one of the major card companies, and put your static expenses on that card. (Utilities, streaming services, car payment, rent(?) - whatever you pay every month.)
Don’t use it for anything else unless you already have cash earmarked for that purchase. Pay it down to 0 every month. That way you don’t get sucked into paying interest, and you’re building credit while accruing rewards for stuff you were going to spend cash on anyway.

I just had to replace my garage roof. It sucked. It cost about $4600. I had the money already saved up, though, because I knew this expense was coming. I had planned to write a check to cover it, but they sent me a digital invoice. Many cards offer cash back, but usually it’s 1%. I noticed their payment site had an Apple Pay logo, and I have an Apple Card, which offers 2% on sites that use Apple Pay. (I am certain other cards have just as good of rewards, but that’s the card I have.)
So I paid with the card, and then paid the card off the day the transaction cleared. I received $92 cash back and no interest charge.
It isn’t much compared to the cost of the roof, but for 30 seconds extra of my time, ‘saving’ almost $100 on the roof isn’t bad. And the credit reporting agencies see I can take a $4600 hit like a champ (they don’t need to know how long I was saving up).

I guess that cinches it. If I ever want to sign up for an adult site, they’re going to know me as “Seymour Butts.”

Nah. I picked that up about 20 years ago, but the comic is a great one.
I haven’t read The Oatmeal in a while. I guess I know what I’ll be doing later tonight!

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Another commenter on this post suggested my belief on it was from an Oatmeal comic. That prompted me to search it out, and seeing it spelled out again sort of opened up the memory for me.

The class was a sociology class about 20 years ago, and the professor was talking about cognitive dissonance as it relates to folks choosing whether or not they wanted to adopt the beliefs of another group. I don’t think he got into how to actually challenge beliefs in a constructive way, since he was discussing how seemingly small rifts can turn into big disagreements between social groups, but subsequent life experience and a lot of good articles about folks working with radicals to reform their beliefs confirm exactly what you commented.

I’ve long held this hunch that when people’s beliefs are challenged, they tend to ‘dig in’ and wind up more resolute. (I think it’s actual science and I learned that in a sociology class many years ago but it’s been so long I can’t say with confidence if that’s the case.)

Assuming my hunch is right (or at least right enough), I think that side of social media - driving up engagement by increasing discord also winds up radicalizing people as a side effect of chasing profits.

It’s one of the things I appreciate about Lemmy. Not everyone here seems to just be looking for a fight all the time.

Interesting.

I signed up for GD with a semi-throwaway email account - not an actual throwaway, but it’s not tied to my real identity, not used for anything but spammy sites where I didn’t want to give them my info. Every site got a made up name.
Wonder what name they’ll slap on the account when they try to farm “my” data from a broker.

My local farmers market is only open seasonally and consists of about 1/3 of their booths selling banking services or squishmallows, 1/3 of the booths selling (delicious, but not very storable) ethnic foods, a bread stand, a honey stand that also sells mail order animals by the quarter (butchered, I think), and 3 booths selling scraggly renditions of whatever they’re currently harvesting.

I wish I lived in the same sorts of community conditions where you live, or had the connections to local food producers that you do, but the reality is that I takes whats I can get.
And what I can get is from mega corps that care more about profits than starving a few people.

It’s because CMB stopped for coffee, obviously.

(That was a great explanation, btw.)