Kwakigra @ Kwakigra @beehaw.org

Posts

32

Comments

537

Joined

2 yr. ago

The soldiers are killing them in either case. Basically I'm being asked to choose whether they kill one or all of them, and they'll make me shoot someone if I choose to spare most of them. Considering the situation, I'm not sure these soldiers won't just kill me with everyone else anyway since I'm a witness after yhey've had their fun.

The only thing crazier than this idiot inventing a master race of republican-aligned tech bros whose destiny is to conquer Silicon Valley through police banquets is that an entire audience of people took it seriously. The article promised a crackpot's raving and Balaji sure delivered.

Agreed, but Capitalism is only the most recent iteration of an issue we've been dealing with since we agriculture went mainstream, which is the idea of social class. "Socialism" with an established ruling and working class has been demonstrated to be as destructive if you look at a list of top greenhouse gas producers. Stateless, classless, true ownership of the means of production by workers is the only way to prevent the perverse incentives which happen when we treat a few people as above the rest of humanity when they are not only no better but socially stunted by privelege.

Oh, it's unacceptable. We must do everything we possibly can to prevent environmental catastrophe and a potential mass extinction event. It's probably better not to even accept the possibility we may fail. For my mind though, the stakes are too severe for me not to consider how thinks could still be ok long-term (centuries to millenia) we could recover from it. This is what I would be thinking about while I'm dying from exposure. I would much rather not have anyone go through it.

This is a living nightmare. There's not much more I can say about this.

So many times I wanted to know the name of an actor who played a character after the first episode and the top result was something like "[Character Name] (deceased)" or " Villain: [Character Name]."

Some of my common uses are:

1. Asking extremely niche scientific questions: I don't depend on these answers but in the answer is usually the specific terminology I can then search and find the answers I was looking for. I have learned a lot about the properties of metals and alloys this way and what the planet could look like with different compositions.
2. Re-phrasing things: At work when I'm drained and out of patience I can tell that what I'm writing in my emails is not really appropriate, so I have GPT re-phrase it. GPT's version is typically unusable of course but it kicks my brain in the direction of re-phrasing my email myself.
3. Brainstorming: The program has endless patience for my random story-related questions and gives me instant stupid or cliche answers. This is great for me because part of my creative process since I was a kid has been seeing in media something that was less than satisfying and my brain flying into all the ways I could have done it better. I ask the program for its opinion on my story question, say "no idiot, instead:" and what comes after is the idea I was looking for from my own mind. Sometimes by total chance it has a good suggestion, and I can work with that too.

Fun uses which are less common:

1. Comedy use: I once had it generating tweets from Karl Marx about smoking weed every day. The program mixed marxist philosophy and language with contemporary party music to endlessly amusing results. Having historical figures with plenty of reference material from their writings opining on various silly things is very funny to me, especially when the program makes obvious mistakes.
2. Language Manipulation: If some philosophical text which was written to be deliberately impenetrable is getting too annoying to read, the program is decent at translating. If I plug in a block of text written by Immanual Kant and have the program re-write it in the style of Mark Twain, the material instantly becomes significantly easier to understand. Re-writing it in the style of stereotypical gen-z is hilarious.

The majority of Zionists are not Jewish, and the majority of Jewish people aren't Zionists. These protestors are the latest in a long tradition of Jewish activists opposing oppression and genocide. To take police action against Jewish people protesting genocide, something Jewish people tend to know something about, exposes this imperialist fascist-aligned grift for what it is: anti-semitism.

This could actually happen soon. Outside of office use most casual users in younger generations are using laptops. Desktops are getting to be more niche and associated with computer builders and power users. As Windows gets shittier, Linux gets easier to use and customize, and desktop use shrinks to just enthusiasts, we could very well see Linux on the majority of desktops.

Data is a concept the markets still haven't figured out. When something can be copied infinitely at no additional production cost it defies the economic nature of physical goods. Ten years ago in a business class the suggested adaption was providing data as a service through subscriptions and a lot of the market has moved in that direction. We absolutely hate that, though.

Art as a market commodity is also an interesting thing since we can't define art. The best we can do is create art for the purpose of motivating purchasing behavior. Some great art has been made like this, but most art industries are horrendously abusive to the producers of art who often have to rely on outside forces to market their work who also happen to have a much easier time making much more money than the artists themselves will ever see.

All this to say that the systems we have in place are inadequete to support artists appropriately to the value they contribute to society. I don't have a solution for anyone who wants to create art as their job. My personal solution is to make my work something else and produce my art only on my own terms. Supporting oneself as an artist in the market is a nightmare.

Fortunately not even we have the combination of ability and stupidity to wipe out all life on earth. The worst we can do is wipe out most life on earth, and hopefully the survivors learn something from that. If we don't we'll just have to wipe out most life on earth over and over until we can figure out how not to structure societies so that they go in that direction.

This is like early CGI effects in film. Some of those effects are the worst in film history (see Reptile from Mortal Kombat), and some were so good that we don’t even know CGI was used (See helicopters in Black Hawk Down). This is a new technology which is going to be abused majorly in tons of notable cases and we probably won’t notice the instances where it was used successfully.

The tech is clearly not sophisticated enough at this point to reliably enhance film images realistically. However, this technology at this stage of development would probably be excellent for old animation or films whose originals have been severely deteriorated.

If Southern governments didn't do things like this to their populations this country would look much different. This is why Southern governments want as few white people voting as possible and do everything they can to ensure that. Restricting public services so that only the voting class has access to basic accommodations through private means is another way of keeping oppressed people away from the political process.

No civilization has ever been capable of solving the problems of civilization. This is why history hasn't ended yet. We hope that eventually we may discover how to address the problems of civilization. We weren't built for any of this. We have to use non-intuitive methodology because the intuitions we evolved have equipped us for a totally different lifestyle. We have not figured out how to get humanity to function peacefully and productively in these massive systems. We're the first animals to even try to do what we're doing.

"I'm an ally" is the US way of saying "I'm part of the oppressor class but have exempted myself from criticism for my participation in the oppression."

Welcome to the field of Economics

I have so many memories with this game but I had to quit because of the notorious headaches. There were plenty of flashing lights in arcade games in those days but the way they flashed in Polybius was part of the challenge. I guess having to focus on the lights to play the game caused the headaches but I don't know. It was always the busiest cabinet at my arcade so at least I saved myself a lot of time. It wasn't around for long but I can't really remember much about my life other than this game from back then so I couldn't say even how old I was when it was out. The friends I would take turns with back then don't even know what I'm talking about when I bring this game up. It was a long time ago I guess.

L-theanine stops the conversion of dopamine into adrenaline. This is why green tea isn't as stressful an experience as black tea or coffee. You can buy l-theanine tablets all over the place. I take one with coffee every time and that has resovled the issue of coffee stressing me out.

1. Forget about everything regarding the word "should." In your opinion whatever "should" be happening, whatever you "should" be doing, and whatever you "should" be able to do are all not only irrelevant but directly counterproductive. The disparity of how things are, how you think they should be, and how you lack the ability to reconcile these things however hard you tried is why you're in this mess. Those expectations were probably unfair to you anyway.
2. Understand that your thoughts are not necessarily true. It's natural to assume the things you are thinking are true because you're thinking them. You actually don't know if your conclusions are correct just because you intuited them. Especially the thoughts generated by a depressed mind should be put to scrutiny. You don't have to lie to yourself and tell yourself things aren't as bad as they are and you absolutely shouldn't even try to do this. The thoughts to challenge are the ones saying it will always be this way no matter what you do or knowing what you know or experiencing what you experienced has made this kind of depression your fate. Your depressed brain doesn't know this for sure however sure it feels. I used to believe these thoughts and I haven't had reason to for a long time.
3. Starting over sounds way worse than it is. The way you were approaching things until this point put you on the path which lead you into this depressive episode. Whatever brought you to this point is clearly not serving you or anyone else and can't continue. This may take some therapy, acid, or mind-journeys to figure out, but you may be able to cease or greatly mitigate the situation by making major life changes. Whatever you're afraid of by making these significant changes, your present situation (bedridden with depression) is worse than anything that can happen when you start fresh doing things differently. Nothing could be worse then being unable to move and wanting nothing more than death to free you. Nothing about this state is natural, and although aggravated by the outside world, is also majorly influenced by your interaction with the world. It's fully possible to get different results by doing different things or even dropping worthless self-destructive thought cycles.
4. Put yourself under the sun. Advising any kind of physical activity to someone whose depression is so severe they can barely move is silly. That kind of thing is further down the line. For now, you just need sunlight. It helps. Everything above is much easier to do laying motionless on the ground under the sun than it is in your dark bedroom.

This kind of depression sucks hard, I'm sorry you're having to go through it right now.

Unfortunately we can't assume that everyone knows this, even the executives actively replacing their workers with LLMs which in no way are prepared to replace any human worker.

This chatbot is being presented by the City of New York on an official channel. It would be reasonable that someone desiring to learn the legality of their plan to make a request for clarification to this official-looking service as they might have if a phone representative was available who would have directed them to someone who would actually know. This LLM might have been planned to replace that representative who is still clearly necessary. With authority, the text generated by the LLM from the City of New York advised the requester to break the law.

You and I know that it's foolish to trust an LLM to provide correct information, but there is such a marketing push for these things that they can replace workers that many may actually act according to the marketing rather than test the technology for themselves, especially if they are a tech-illiterate manager of some kind responsible for cutting costs. I don't think the person that put the LLM on the City of New York website thought it would be a threat to the rule of law, and now everyone with the ability to do this in every city needs to know that the tech isn't there yet and it's a very bad idea.