We've Lost A Lot To The Onslaught Of Enshittification But I Can Think Of None More Brazen Than Discord

If you struggle with pullups (or any exercise) because of grip strength - here are some things you can try!

Essentially the idea is:

1.) Find a way to still train the exercise. You can use gloves or wraps to assist your grip OR you can do easier variations.

2.) Do grip exercises afterwards. The simplest one I can think of is a passive bar hang. Both active and passive ones work (that means essentially means shoulders down or shoulders up, respectively), and you can use any angle you want.

Weight lifting or rock climbing chalk can also help!

there needs to be so much more legislation when it comes to advertising, especially mobile adverts which are 99% lies and often predatory.

The Hybrid Fitness Routine is now a book!

If you or someone you know could use it, I really hope it can help.

I tried to keep this video relatively concise - more info is available here: hybridcalisthenics.com/book

We've shipped over 20,000 books so far, and the feedback has been great. We've used your ideas to improve the book. Thank you so much.

Members outside of the U.S. might have expensive shipping, so we set up an Amazon listing to help you save money on shipping (it costs us a lot too, so we also wish it were $0). International Amazon links are all different, so going to your country's Amazon page and searching "Hybrid Calisthenics" is probably the simplest way to find the link. Some countries unfortunately don't have it, but a lot do.

We also have an eBook if you want it. And the information and app is available for free on the Hybrid Fitness Routine website as usual!

Thank you all!

How to Ditch Amazon

Support your local libraries and the small businesses that are actually making the products you want.  Fuck Jeff Bezos and the systemic, universal worker abuse, gaslighting, and brutality they live off of.

In their defence, a lot of it is sand.

I’m seeing a bunch of posts that make me think most USAmericans don’t know about The No Surprises Act.

It was passed in 2021 (thank you Biden) and essentially states that if you don’t have insurance or your insurance doesn’t cover a service you need (or want) you are entitled to a Good Faith Estimate of the cost of care. (If your insurance does cover the service, you should be able to estimate the cost of care based on your deductible and co-pay.)

As a healthcare provider who does not accept any insurance, I am very careful to not violate The No Surprises Act. Why? Because for every penny more than $400 that the Good Faith Estimate was “off” (or if it wasn’t provided), you are entitled to a refund for that amount.

Y’all. Ask for a Good Faith Estimate. Get it in writing. Compare it to what you are paying. If you are not provided an estimate or if it’s wrong by more than $400, demand a refund.

one of my friends found radiooooo which is a site that streams music from any country from any decade (well, most countries/decade combos work) and we’ve been digging going on a quest to find what is rad

so far the following is good

50s/60s/70s/80s russia

70s cambodia

20s japan

80s ethiopia

80s india

AI hasn't improved in 18 months. It's likely that this is it. There is currently no evidence the capabilities of ChatGPT will ever improve. It's time for AI companies to put up or shut up.

I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:

We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.

Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.

Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.

For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.

Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?

Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?

As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)

There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.

In summary:

Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.

There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.

Don't believe AI companies when they say things are going to improve from where they are now before they provide evidence. It's time for the AI shills to put up, or shut up.

Hold their feet to the fire