AFaithfulNihilist

joined 2 years ago
[–] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Some will show up and do things only because they feel the support is out there to act and be seen.

I might make different efforts were I them, but they are at least paddling in the same direction I want to go. I just don't have the energy to resent how they choose to spend their outrage.

I had a civics teacher that used to say, "You want everyone around you to have rights just like you because when they take away your neighbor's rights they've taken away your neighborhood."

I don't think I fully understood that until the ICE thugs started masking up and the world got lonelier.

[–] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 16 points 6 hours ago (4 children)

Without even knowing what he spoke about yet, which I don't, I can respect the conviction of a person who uses their platform to speak when they have rare access to that platform and there's plenty to talk about.

Plenty of us are going on marathon posting sessions on social media and it's to a much smaller audience. I have to empathize a little bit with anybody who feels exhausted or overwhelmed by the absurdity of everything but then gets up to speak for a whole damn day on one of the largest stages in the world

Even if the room is empty the audience is global. It may be grandstanding, but that's part of the job. Getting attention to things you care about is part of the job. People put you there to bring attention to things that they hope that you care about.

If government's going to work at all people have to give a shit about it and whatever this dude was talking about it's clear he gives a shit about it.

[–] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Imagine trying to walk on that path.

The weddings and the first responders who showed up to help. We tried to terrorize them out of trying to help each other.

We are a monstrous country.

[–] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I went to 15+ schools before I graduated highschool, and depending on where I was I was either put into "gifted and talented", the "extended learning program", "fast path", or "Accelerated Track". Every place had a different philosophy of how to deal with kids who already knew how to read and do math.

Sometimes I would end up in a class with a bunch of quiet bookworms who wore church clothes every day and other times I would be surrounded by rambunctious and highly enthusiastic nerds.

Usually we would play computer games or play games designed to make us engage socially, but sometimes we would actually study interesting stuff in a deep way.

Every one of these programs seems to be a totally improvised and locally unique program. Nothing from the words they used for things to the books, brands, or activities seemed to have any consistency. Since I usually moved in the middle of the school year I would often see multiple versions of each grade's program.

It made me really glad I didn't grow up in a small town. Those people are getting screwed.

[–] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world -2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Mere accusations of being left-leaning and mysterious anonymous money were enough to insert an entire editorial board to filter the news.

They don't report things that should be important if they are offensive to right-wing politics.

They don't report on wage theft. They don't report on health care abuses. They don't report on lies or incompetence in the Trump administration.

They lick boots and rationalize genocide. They've always been a little right leaning in that reporting reality as it is is extremely hostile to right-wing politics so they have to protect people from the truth.

NPR has not been left-wing or even vaguely left of center for a while. They are rapidly homophobic or racist, but they are islamophobic and they will indulge whatever is the right-wing rumor or paranoia of the day.

[–] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A lot of people want a good tool that works.

This is not a good tool and it does not work.

Most of them don't understand that yet.

I am optimistic to think that they will have the opportunity find that out in time to not be walked off a cliff.

I'm optimistically predicting that when people find out how much it actually costs and how shit it is that they will redirect their energies to alternatives if there are still any alternatives left.

A better tool may come along, but it's not this stuff. Sometimes the future of a solution doesn't just look like more of the previous solution.

[–] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

These kinds of questions are strange to me.

A great many people are using them voluntarily, a lot of people are using them because they don't know how to avoid using them and feel that they have no alternative.

But the implication of the question seems to be that people wouldn't choose to use something that is worse.

In order to make that assumption you have to first assume that they know qualitatively what is better and what is worse, that they have the appropriate skills or opportunity necessary to choose to opt in or opt out, and that they are making their decision on what tools to use based on which one is better or worse.

I don't think you can make any of those assumptions. In fact I think you can assume the opposite.

The average person doesn't know how to evaluate the quality of research information they receive on topics outside of their expertise.

The average person does not have the technical skills necessary to engage with non-AI augmented systems presuming they want to.

The average person does not choose their tools based on what is the most effective at producing the correct truth but instead on which one is the most usable, user friendly, convenient, generally accepted, and relatively inexpensive.

50 million cigarette smokers can't be wrong!

[–] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (7 children)

A lot of those things have a business model that relies on putting the competition out of business so you can jack up the price.

Uber broke taxis in a lot of places. It completely broke that industry by simply ignoring the laws. Uber had a thing that it could actually sell that people would buy.

It took years before it started making money, in an industry that already made money.

LLMs Don't even have a path to profitability unless they can either functionally replace a human job or at least reliably perform a useful task without human intervention.

They've burned all these billions and they still don't even have something that can function as well as the search engines that proceeded them no matter how much they want to force you to use it.

[–] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 32 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Every particle accelerator that has been built has paid for itself in research value. There's basically nothing that comes out of AI research except the need for a bigger model.

The comparison is poor. Particle accelerators are science, LLMs do not produce science.

That's not to say that we couldn't build LLMS that would be useful for scientific purposes but we're not. That is not the function or the goal of the people building these things.

I got these for about $200 each

 

In anticipation of the coming wave of censorship, I'd like to develop a list of subversive content that might disappear off of streaming services.

As these services and broadcast networks are removing content from their catalogs, what kinds of things do you think might disappear?

I wonder how granular the censorship will be too, for example, will they start censoring individual episodes of Star Trek?

At what point do you think they're going to come for Mr Rogers neighborhood or Sesame Street?

 
 

 

this kitty is just comfortably bouncing

 

She lives forever there in the text, but she can visit you for a time.

 
 
 

They seem to spin some kind of silk everywhere they go. They seem to be no longer than about 4 mm. I noticed them crawling up things and then dropping down on a line of silk. I've started catching them by putting little sticks up in the air attached everywhere that I find them. They tend to gather at the top of the stick for easy rapture by vacuum.

 

I feel like they probably have something to do with light level detection or infrared signal receiving but I genuinely have no idea. They could just as likely be part of the sound system for all I know.

 
 

I will try not to over explain the life out of it

 
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