rumschlumpel @ rumschlumpel @feddit.org

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1 yr. ago

That's not how science fiction works.

Just because they don't treat it like it's advanced, doesn't mean it isn't advanced from our, the audience's, perspective. Most tech in most sci-fi works is treated as a fact of life, no one goes "holy shit, they just invented hovercars!".

I don't think sci-fi and fantasy are that clear-cut. A lot of fantasy is quite hopeful (the bad guys pretty much always lose at the end of the story), and it's kind of 50:50 whether it depicts the past as better or worse than it was. e.g. the shire in Lord of the Rings is practically a utopia, despite not being completely unrealistic for a pre-industrial society (it probably looks a lot more utopian than it is because most of the hobbit characters we know are aristocrats).

Literature is, generally, definitely not about happy feelings, though.

Weird how soap never got it included in the supernatural remedy arsenal. Maybe too mundane in a 'I'm always using soap anyway'-way ...

IIRC rabies has quite a few similarities to various vampire myths (e.g. aversion to water, aversion to strong smells, aggression).

A lot of cyberpunk tech is vastly beyond our current abilities, though. They treat getting a new fully functional cybernetic arm like we treat getting silicone tits.

It's still high tech if it's vastly beyond our current technological ability.

I mean, 17 years seems like a pretty long time to live for an insect, larval stage or no ...

I thought crab-like animals were all actually pretty closely related to each other, i.e. all crab-like animals are arthropods, which is a less broad category (despite the incredibly huge amount of species in it) than 'all plants that can form a wooden trunk'. Any taxonomists here to confirm/deny?

Why wouldn't it work? Stories usually fail because the plot is bad or because they're badly told, and it's not that hard to maintain verisimilitude just because seemingly opposite ideas like magic and advanced technology are combined - just communicate what your magic and technology can and cannot do in broad strokes and stick to it, and avoid asspulls that make no sense and/or undermine the character beats you're showing. But you get exactly the same issues in a story with only magic or only advanced technology.

I suppose the issue is whether you want to see training an AI as equivalent to practicing as a human artist. Considering that AIs are generally made specifically as commercial products, I don't think that's really true, but this is definitely something that can be argued one way or the other.

I don't think it would be considered fine under current laws if an AI-free Adobe Photoshop was shipped with tons of copyrighted art that was scraped off the internet without the artists' approval, even if the users aren't allowed to use it to make commercial works that reproduce Super Mario or w/e 1:1.

so in this case AI would take work opportunities away from people, that’s bad, but that’s not copyright infringement nor theft.

I think it's quite literally copyright infringement, assuming the models are fed with work from actual artists who typically don't agree to it. Whether copyright should work this way is another matter.

It's basically for-profit piracy. Which is still kind of a shitty term because actual pirates weren't copying any of the goods they were taking.

The most neutral term might be copyright infringement, though that carries all the baggage of the 'should copyright even exist'-discussion.

Alternatively, you could shout 'they took our jobs' to complain that they are letting algorithms and engineers do the work that artists want to do. IDK what to call this, but 'theft' or 'robbery' doesn't sound right.

It would help to at least try doing that, but in practice this would probably be very difficult - it's likely not possible to always drink boiled water and well-cooked food, and given the possibility of contaminating food and drink after boiling, you might effectively have to prepare all your drink and food yourself, which is logistically difficult given the length of the work days. Diseases also spread in other ways, like smear infections (e.g. on toilets, doorhandles, tools) and airborne infections.

I can see why male doctors would be ignorant, but wtf is the excuse of female doctors here?

Last time I enjoyed myself doing exercise, I probably played table tennis with a tennis ball and hands as paddles. The hard part is finding people who have time when you do, and who are on a similar skill+fitness level as you (picking silly games like the one I described helps).

So yeah, I'm not getting much exercise, either.

Yeah IDK about peace, but in terms of tolerance in 'the west' it was a huge step up over 1955, and rave culture in particular (where it was a thing anyway; might have been focused on european countries like UK and Germany?) was probably more tolerant and friendly than a lot of popular 'party' scenes today.

Well damn.

1990-1995 were definitely a nicer place to be than 1955-1960, though, so we got that going for us as far as the 35yo past is concerned.

While it's true that races aren't defined by borders (if we even want to entertain the notion of races actually existing), the wrong meaning might absolutely be the intended one.

I don't think that can accurately be described as "racism" though, if even the "racists" won't say that the ethnicity they're hating is a different race. More general terms like 'chauvinism' would fit better.