CarbonIceDragon @ CarbonIceDragon @pawb.social

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1,285

Joined

2 yr. ago

To be fair, the vast, vast majority were never really in the running. Were the chances anything close to even, would you expect to have so many at least somewhat well known politicians with his last name?

As someone who doesn't play magic, I had no idea it had a racism card.

Theyve looked a bit daunting to set up, so not just yet. But isnt that effectively the same thing, still running windows for those programs just without having to actually sign out of the linux partition to do it?

I have some software that doesnt work with wine or anything else the like Ive tried, and doesnt seem to have a linux equivalent that I can find. Ive only been using linux a few months now, so maybe theres some other options that Im missing, but how else does one deal with that apart from booting back into the old windows install whenever I need that specific software?

When I was a kid, a sibling and some friends of mine would occasionally play "jelly bean Russian roulette", wherein we would get a number of jelly beans equal to the number of us playing, with one of them a black licorice, have one non-playing kid scramble them and "randomly" give one to each player, and then eat them eyes closed without seeing what the flavor was. Whoever got the licorice was the loser.

For how long though? The issue with detecting AI generated stuff, Id imagine, is that a picture contains a finite amount of information, especially a digital one. These things have been improving relatively quickly, and I cant think of any fundamental reason why one could not eventually create images where every pixel is as it would be if that image were real, or at least close enough that detection is not even theoretically possible if you dont have some actual proof that the event depicted couldnt have happened. We may not be there yet, but the closer we get to it, the more prone to error and therefore less useful any detection algorithm must be.

I think I've encountered one person that could reasonably be said to be using AI generators to make art, in that a discord server I'm in used to have a guy that made something of a hobby out of trying to get chatbots and coding AIs to make "shaders" (I don't know exactly what this implies, since what he posted weren't recognizable as shaded images but some kind of abstract patterns or shapes). He was always talking about tweaking some technical aspects of various models, that I didn't really get the terminology of to understand, and seemed to spend a lot of time messing around with them to only occasionally get something he found interesting enough to share. It wasn't how people typically use "AI art" generators though, for sure.

Quite the exaggerated headline from the look of it.

I mean, might it not be so much the actual conditions themselves so much as the perception of the future state of those conditions? I imagine bad conditions that one is already used to, that one perceives as potentially getting somewhat better or at least not that much different, feel different than relatively good but tenuous conditions that one expects to lose with time. Losing things often feels worse than simply not having them in the first place after all.

It'll take the magical powers of an archmage to solve this dispute.

That's not how field sobriety tests work, because they don't actually work at all, they're just a way to give cops a justification for their suspicions without conducting an actually functional test.

I've heard of some bakery somewhere doing "recycled bread", where they supposedly take the leftover bread that didn't sell that day, dry it out, grind it up, and mix it with fresh flour to make new bread, but I don't know for sure if the story is real.

I work in a factory in the US, and the vast majority of my coworkers at least don't appear overweight. Granted, a pretty big percentage of them are immigrants, so maybe that skews the numbers compared to the general population.

I mean, a few million nationwide is high numbers to get for a protest, but not for a presidential election, with the size of the US anyway. I'd bet most of them probably voted. It's the more politically engaged segment of a population that one would expect to show up to a protest, after all.

I dont think that you can design a constitution capable of this, because at the end of the day, a constitution is just words on paper, so if you can get enough people capable of violence to follow you, you can simply directly violate the thing and declare yourself dictator, and an elected executive must by being elected have a significant group that at least somewhat approves of them, and by being an executive have some ability to ensure the law is carried out implying the capacity for violence. You can try to weaken the executive to make this more difficult I suppose, but you probably cant make it impossible without breaking the functioning of the executive completely, and you also need to avoid a case where one of the other two branches seizes control from the rest as well.

Ultimately what you need for a healthy democracy is two things: an election system that actually represents the wishes and interests of the people, which is anywhere from very difficult to not technically truly possible, and a populace that cares enough about their system to not use their electoral power to elect someone (or pass laws in the case of a direct democracy) that demolish or usurp that system. The US fails at both of those at the moment, the latter possibly in part due to a long time deficiency in the former.

The first one would be meaningless without an actual change to the election system. There are more than five parties in the US after all, technically speaking, the ones outside the other two simply arent viable because first past the post voting trends towards two dominant parties.

I mean, has the system ever not eventually stabilized in another state? The fact that we have had extinctions, quite a lot of them even involving most species that have ever existed, and yet complex life and ecosystems still exist, would suggest that life will find a way to adapt around such a loss given time.

I've answered responses along those lines a couple times at this point. My position is that pain is a bit like mind control; you probably could get me to change my mind that way, but the reason for doing so wouldn't be anything to do with the reasons why I think this stuff unethical and everything to do with the way sufficient pain overrides one's normal thinking and forces you to pay attention to it.

"Someone/something could torture you into changing your mind" doesn't say anything about how right or wrong the original position is, you could probably torture someone into believing the earth is flat if you kept at it long enough and the victim wasn't unusually strong willed, but that doesn't make it so.

How many species of birds and bats eat just mosquitoes though, or a high enough percentage that they would go extinct rather than shift to rely more on their other prey species, even if at a smaller population? And are those particular species of birds and bats worth the consequences of having mosquitoes?

I would consider brain death to be death, if thats what you mean, I had thought that was a common enough position that I didnt need to state it. I guess I should clarify that I meant mental function there rather that just one's bodily functions. If you irreparably lose all brain functions, your mind is gone, so "you" are dead even if some of your body's cells can be kept alive.