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2 yr. ago

  • I haven’t read the graphic novel of the Handmaid’s tale, but I don’t know if I would read the book to 14 year olds.

    This reads like the ugly kind of censorship. Where: 1) without knowledge of the graphic book, calling for its universal removal from school libraries. 2) not knowing if 14 year-olds should read it, ban it (i.e. ban all books that can't be read by the youngest library patron; a notion few books could survive). And 3) belittling people (calling those who disagree with uninformed censorship "ass-mad up the wazoo").

    Now there is a little nuance to the post, but it's outweighed by crude assessments.

  • Or as Dijkstra puts it: “asking whether a machine can think is as dumb as asking if a submarine can swim”.

    Alan Turing puts it similarly, the question is nonsense. However, if you define "machine" and "thinking", and redefine the question to mean: is machine thinking differentiable from human thinking; you can answer affirmatively, theoretically (rough paraphrasing). Though the current evidence suggests otherwise (e.g. AI learning from other AI drifts toward nonsense).

    For more, see: Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and Turing's original paper (which goes into the Imitation Game).

  • It's tricky to talk about hardly anything in a forum where you can't say "it's more than that."

    When it comes to food, a growing portion of humans are hungry or headed toward hunger. It's not the only concern, water, food, shelter, all the basic Maslow's necessities are getting harder to come by. Harder each month. There's plenty of other concerns: corporate, government, education, and even scientific corruption, greedy billionaires; which are each and together still only part of the problem. The problems are systemic, and that right there is why you can't talk about any one thing without recognizing there's so much more. Calling it "tinfoily" is dismissing how immediately vital food prices and availability are, even while there are many other important issues. And the way the media selects and times articles is another one of those.

  • Used to know someone who looked for cars around a restaurant, or long lines waiting to get into a tiny cafe, asked wait staff for interesting places they liked to go; went into non-chain stores where locals shopped (off the main streets); asked walkers and service station workers for directions. Always had wild stories about what happened, if you could get past their private nature. Weird fucker, unpredictable, never could get used to'm. Likeable enough, though.

  • Let's extend this thought experiment a little. Consider just forum posts; the numbers will be somewhat similar for articles and other writings, as well as photos and videos.

    A bot creates how many more posts than a human? Being (ridiculously) conservative, we'll say 10x more.

    On day one: 10 humans are posting (for simplicity's sake) 10 times a day, totaling 100 posts. Bot is posting 100 a day. For a total of 200 human and bot posts; 50% of which are the bot.

    In your (extended) example, at the end of a year: 10 humans are still posting 100 times a day. The 10 bots are posting a total of 1000 times a day. Bots are at 90%, humans 10%.

    This statistic can lead you to think human participation in the Internet is difficult to find.

    Returning to reality, consider how inhuman AI bots are, with each probably able to outpost humans by millions or billions of times under millions of aliases each. If you find search engines, articles, forums, reviews, and such are bonkers now, just wait a few years. Predicting general chaotic nonsense for the Internet is a rational conclusion, with very few islands of humanity. Unless bots are stopped.

    Right now though, bots are increasing.

  • The reactions follow a KFF Health News article published by NPR outlining how licensed brokers' easy access to policyholder information on HealthCare.gov has led unscrupulous agents to switch people's policies without express permission. Those agents can then take the commission that comes with signing a new customer.

    The original NPR and also the linked KFF articles are worth reading.

  • The judge leaned back in a squeaky chair, self-righteously satisfied that the letter of the law had been followed.

    The spirit of the law lay trampled on the ground, unable to get up or even breathe. Until the public, individuals carrying the breath of actual humanity, walked into the judge's chambers, giving the spirit mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Offering a mirror to the judge, who didn't know how reflection works.

  • While the article discusses antibiotic resistant gonorrhea in China, the US, and Canada, the problem is not about one country, or one country versus another; but rather...

    ... this is not just an alarming finding for China but also a "pressing public health concern" for the entire world.

  • Here's a non-recommended, non-standard, bad practice work-around:

    • After a bullet list,
    • put a hash tag ("#", the code for header) on its own line.

    This looks somewhat like a blank line in a browser, but who knows what'll happen in other apps. (Click the "view source" icon for this example.)