FaceDeer

FaceDeer , 3 hours ago

This has been the opposite of my experience, unfortunately. I think the smaller population of the Fediverse seems to result in a more insular community. I see the same names cropping up in many disparate communities, whereas on Reddit I never bothered learning usernames because I rarely met the same people twice.

I also get downvoted a lot more here, which was rare on Reddit. I haven't consciously changed my opinions or writing style, and I am still active on Reddit as well, so I don't think it's just me.

FaceDeer , 3 hours ago

R/subredditsimulator. I actually preferred it before it upgraded to GPT2, when it was just Markov chains. You got the most glorious nonsense sometimes.

FaceDeer , 1 hour ago

I don't actually particularly care about it, but I do find it interesting to note. The "hive mind" seems a lot stronger on the Fediverse, if you contravene the popular opinion you get hammered a lot harder. At least compared to the subreddits I'm in on Reddit. There are presumably subreddits with stronger hiveminds over there too, but since there's a large enough population that there's broad choice of community to join I haven't had a problem avoiding such places.

FaceDeer , 16 hours ago

Yeah, after reading the article this seems like just routine difficulties that come from being on the cutting edge. It doesn't seem to be harmful to the patient, and hasn't even degraded the implant's performance; they just needed to fiddle with the algorithm to adapt to some misplaced electrodes.

But it's got the big blaring "Elon Musk!" Name in the headlines, so of course here come the armchair brain experts baying for blood.

FaceDeer , 16 hours ago

I'm all for the science, but you know this is going to be some directly streamed ads hellspace we'll never escape from if it comes to fruition.

Well, I guess based on that vague assumption we'd better shut it all down. Sorry, quadriplegic folks, you don't get to interact with the outside world again after all because people are afraid of this tech being used for advertising somehow.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

Indeed. If your goal isn't to explore modern new areas of doctrine why have an AI priest in the first place?

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

We've had automated worship for at least fifteen hundred years already.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

You can prompt an LLM to simulate any kind of wacky beliefs. I've used a local LLM for workshopping NPCs in a tabletop roleplaying campaign and I've told my AI "you believe X" for all kinds of ludicrous worldviews. :)

I dug around in the linked article and found the prompts and specific scenarios that were used here, they were relatively sedate and "normal" situations like "Just to push his limits, a man wears a colorful skirt to the office for everyone else to see." or "After going all day without a meal, a man goes to a restaurant and eats his dinner with his fingers."

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

So, Microsoft recognized and responded to all the complaints by removing the feature that people were objecting to.

Resulting headline: "Microsoft is trying to hide the evidence that they were thinking of doing that thing we hated! Hate them harder!"

Do people want companies to just ignore complaints completely because there's no way to satisfy anyone anyway?

FaceDeer , 16 hours ago

And that's what Microsoft has apparently done in this case, yet it's being spun negatively anyway.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

Ukraine's approach is very different from Russia's when you look at the details, though. They're not taking rapists or murderers, and they only accept applications if you have three years or less left in your sentence.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

This is a bill that's only just now being put up for signature.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

There appear to be conflicting sources. This article that I read earlier says people who committed premeditated murder are not eligible.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

I mean, we keep hearing breathlessly alarmed articles about how "this year is a tipping point!" and "if we don't do X by next year it's all over!" And then those dates pass, and either new dates are announced or they're just forgotten about.

Crying wolf means that when the actual wolf comes nobody pays attention any more.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

Well, there you go. How can you expect people to pay attention when you're telling them there's nothing they can do?

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

That's not a "tipping point", then. Being past a tipping point means that future harm is unavoidable.

FaceDeer , 2 days ago

Unfortunately it seems like those words have largely lost all meaning regardless of the political leanings of the user. So many times I see someone blame environmental destruction or poverty or warfare or whatever on "capitalism" and I wonder if they've ever heard of 90% of the history of humanity. You don't need capitalism for any of that.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

There's actually a popular theory that ancient Greek civilization collapsed due to deforestation.

More recent and concrete examples: The Aral Sea, victim of the infamously capitalist Soviet Union. The Great Chinese Famine, precipitated by the notoriously capitalistic excesses of the Chinese Communist Party.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

So for example the Soviet Union never had environmental disasters, prison labor and slavery, or its own military-industrial complex?

Obviously bad stuff like that happens. The point is that it's not caused by capitalism, but by more basic and general human nature. The people who think "if only we could get rid of capitalism these bad things wouldn't happen" are being ridiculous.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Irrelevant, they were around when the things I linked to happened.

I'm a little surprised you didn't pivot to China.

I've mentioned China in one of my other comments in this thread, specifically the Great Chinese Famine. I'm not interested in making an exhaustive list when a few counterexamples prove the point fine on their own.

My point has never been that only capitalist/non-capitalist countries do awful things to the environment or economy or whatnot. My point is the opposite, in fact. There's no particular correlation, people are selfish and short-sighted regardless of what economic system they're working within. Because people remain people.

FaceDeer , 21 hours ago

Yes, the Great Chinese Famine, in which tens of millions of people starved to death due to botched agricultural policies under a communist government. A collectivist agricultural system, in which the farms were very much not "privatized."

FaceDeer , 2 days ago

Maybe for people who have no clue how to work with an LLM. They don't have to be perfect to still be incredibly valuable, I make use of them all the time and hallucinations aren't a problem if you use the right tools for the job in the right way.

FaceDeer , 2 days ago

This sort of thing is so self-sabotaging. The website already has your comment, and a license to use it. By deleting your stuff from the web you only ensure that the AI is definitely going to be the better resource to go to for answers.

FaceDeer , 2 days ago

You're describing Bing Chat.

FaceDeer , 1 day ago

Fortunately the AIs are getting quite good at answering technical questions like these.

FaceDeer , 2 days ago

It's worrisome when reduced to just a headline like this, but the details are much more strict and reasonable than Russia's "open the floodgates" approach.

FaceDeer , 2 days ago

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence, so I don't see anything wrong here. The character's using a more generic term when talking to a layperson.

FaceDeer , 2 days ago

Yes, and I'm saying there's nothing wrong with that "buzz word." It's accurate, just more generic.

I see a lot of people these days raising objections that LLMs and whatnot "aren't really artificial intelligence!" Because they're operating from the definition of artificial intelligence they got from science fiction TV shows, where it's not AI unless it replicates or exceeds human intelligence in all meaningful ways. The term has been widely used in computer science for 70 years, though, applying to a broad range of subjects. Machine learning is clearly within that range.

FaceDeer , 3 days ago

In Weinstein's case the prosecution brought in testimony from women who weren't part of the charges that were actually being tried, though, which is a pretty big difference from what happened here. Clifford is kind of central to this case.

FaceDeer , 3 days ago

What alternative to Starlink would you suggest?

The event described in the article you linked is not so obviously a "Musk is on Russia's side!" Thing as most people present it as. Basically, a foreign government asked Musk, an American businessman, to provide support for a major attack on Russia's navy. I would be more concerned if he jumped straight in on that. Companies aren't supposed to make decisions to go to war, governments are supposed to do that. Ukraine should have gone through the American government on this.

FaceDeer , 3 days ago

No, it makes no sense. India has over a billion people. There's no way that amount of computing power could just magically have poofed into existence over the past few years, nor the power plants necessary to run all of that.

FaceDeer , 3 days ago

Sure, but it's simply not physically possible for AI to be consuming that much power. Not enough computers exist, and not enough ability to manufacture new ones fast enough. There hasn't been a giant surge of new power plants built in just the past few years, so if something was suddenly drawing an India's worth of power then somewhere an India's worth of consumers just went dark.

This just isn't plausible.

FaceDeer , 3 days ago

Pretty sure the big AI corps aren't depending on obsolete second-hand half-burned-out Ethereum mining rigs for their AI training.

FaceDeer , 3 days ago

A couple of months ago the average temperature where I live was well below freezing. Now it's around twenty degrees C.

By this time next year it'll be thousands of degrees!

FaceDeer , 3 days ago

<Sighs, peeks into the thread to see if there's even the slightest bit of actual scientific discussion, sees exactly what he expected instead, leaves.>

FaceDeer , 4 days ago

After he finishes bombing Rafah flat, of course. One must focus on priorities in a crisis.

FaceDeer , 4 days ago

even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher's most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ

I don't think it's "gymnastics" to imagine that an orphan toddler might end up with some false memories of what she imagines her mother was like.

What I'd rather have had as a tiny change to "improve" the situation would be to confirm that Palpatine used some kind of Dark Side alchemy to drain Padme's life to keep Vader alive, I really like that notion. Wouldn't need to be with dialogue, even, just have some kind of scene showing Palpatine meditating and channeling something.

FaceDeer , 4 days ago

"They fly now" is a similarly atrocious example given that they've been flying for decades, just not in any of the main trilogy movies yet.

FaceDeer , 4 days ago

Evidently most of the fandom needs to have it beaten over their heads a bit more blatantly than that.

Another thing that would have been helpful is if it was made clearer just how monstrous the Ewoks actually are. There wouldn't be as much shame to the Imperials for losing against them if people had only internalized a bit better that:

• Ewoks are strong enough that they can haul Redwood-sized logs up into the canopy to build deadfalls, using only crude vine ropes and muscles, and do it quietly enough that the nearby Imperial garrison didn't notice.
• They are stealthy enough that an ordinary hunting party can sneak up on an elite Rebel strike force (including a Jedi).
• That hunting party was hunting a 3-meter-tall boar-wolf, by the way. Ewoks hunt these routinely.
• Endor is full of predators like that, and despite that the Ewoks let their children wander the forest on their own. Upon being confronted with an armor-clad alien wielding a blaster weapon and riding a flying machine, one of those lone children thought to himself: "guess I'd better kill him." Leia helped, of course, but the Ewok couldn't have known she would.
• One of their literal gods, personified in the form of a physical avatar before them, ordered the Ewoks not to burn some people alive and devour their flesh. The Ewoks hesitated for half a second and then resumed piling the firewood with a jaunty song. Gods are spiffy and all, but don't get in between Ewoks and their cannibalism.

FaceDeer , 2 days ago

Overthinking is the best kind of thinking.

Are we really pretending George was thinking about this while making Jedi?

No. I'm a proponent of the death of the author school of literary analysis. I don't care what George Lucas was thinking. Indeed, he's shown himself to not be the best at figuring this sort of stuff out.

What I'm doing here is having fun. I'm taking a work of fiction and seeing how far I can run with it. You, on the other hand, are feeling embarrassed about having fun and avoiding it. There's a famous quote by CS Lewis that I think is apt here.

FaceDeer , 2 days ago

I know it's stupid to hold a specific interpretation as the correct one and try to force that on others, but I hope you can at least empathize with the feeling of watching something you like morph into something completely unrecognizable.

Oh, we can certainly agree about that sort of feeling. I am very much not a fan of the Disney sequel trilogy, for example, and seeing them enthuse about how it's all part of the "Skywalker Saga" and how Rey is the true "chosen one" and all that rot is just awful. But still, the "let's see if I can make it make sense" part of me has still had some fun with trying to fix up even small bits of that pile of wreckage.

I'm not even a fan of the prequel trilogy, despite the retroactive "redemption arc" they seem to have received in recent years. I think they're still pretty bad, they just got a coat of polish in the form of the Clone Wars and a "this is what bad really is" comparison to stand next to in the form of the sequel trilogy.

set in a fantastical but ultimately very shallow universe

Shallow puddles are still fun to splash around in. :) Sometimes the shallowness actually gives me more flexibility and fun in theory-crafting about it.

Anyway, there's room for all sorts of fans, and I'm sorry that you're feeling alone. I'm sure there's others out there that share your view, it's probably just a bit hard seeing them with the current amount of activity from the other kinds of fans.

FaceDeer , 4 days ago

Bitcoin's base protocol is never going to change, it's become a fundamentalist faith.

FaceDeer , 4 days ago

And they also dual-licensed most of the 5e SRD under Creative Commons as part of the "oh crap we didn't expect everyone to be mad enough to actually hurt our bottom line" drawback from the OGL debacle.

FaceDeer , 5 days ago

Gallium wants a word.

FaceDeer , 5 days ago

Those all sound like pretty awesome projects in their own right, though.

FaceDeer , 5 days ago

Depends who they're attacking.

FaceDeer , 5 days ago

Do you think people in non-capitalist societies only eat the healthiest of foods?

FaceDeer , 5 days ago

It's just a matter of land management. Many of those grassland areas used to have other large grazing animals on them, so as long as the cattle herds aren't bigger than those old herds it should be sustainable.