There it is. When Russia does it, it’s helping, but when Western countries do it, it’s colonialism. God I hope you’re at least being well paid for your doublethink

And nooticing is nooice

And the tree in the top right is the exact same color as the clouds, and she only has 4 fingers on her left hand, and the reflection patterns in her eyes are suspiciously distinct from each other. I’m definitely leaning towards this being generated

Maybe it has something to do with also needing international support in order to defend itself from its neighbor… talk all the shit you want about the US’s stance on Israel, but shifting that to Taiwan is on par with claiming Ukraine deserved to get invaded.

Which I now realize is probably your next line. Anyway, oh well

Midwest.social admins takes a lot of their cues from .ml, lemmygrad, and hexbear

It can be if you run the campaign right

AI is a flawless technology and they’ll have fixed it by next month for sure this time

Same with people who blast music in public. There’s a bike/pedestrian trail near me I use a lot and people are constantly riding or running while blasting the worst music imaginable to everyone nearby. Maybe someday I’ll build up the courage to tell them to shut the fuck up… or at least teach them what headphones are. Maybe I could buy a bunch of cheap ones and just chuck them at the heads of anyone who apparently needs them.

They also care about ruining trans people’s lives in any way possible. I’m sure there are plenty of transphobes who simply haven’t thought the bathroom thing through, but don’t forget the other reason they’d be happy to put passing trans men in women’s bathrooms: it forces them into an impossible decision. When an angry mob drags a trans man out of the women’s toilet, you think they’re going to listen to protestations of being AFAB? If anything, that’d just rile them up further. So a when someone is faced with the decision of choosing either the room they’re least likely to be noticed in, or the one the law technically assigned to them, they may instead choose to stay home. They may even start considering detransitioning. This is a feature, not a bug.

Gonna have to double check the next phone I buy has a screen first

At the point where we’re making lab-grown dinosaur meat, I suspect the cool factor is way more important than silly things like efficiency. T-Rex meat all the way babyyy

I did not but I’ll give you an upvote anyway

I recently read a neat little book called “Rethinking Consciousness” by SA Graziano. It has nothing to do with AI, but is an attempt to describe the way our myriad neural systems come together to produce our experience, how that might differ between animals with various types of brains, and how our experience might change if some systems aren’t present. It sounds obvious, but the simpler the brain, the simpler the experience. For example, organisms like frogs probably don’t experience fear. Both frogs and humans have a set of survival instincts that help us detect movement, classify it as either threat or food or whatever, and immediately respond, but the emotional part of your brain that makes your stomach plummet just doesn’t exist in them.

Humans automatically respond to a perceived threat in the same way a frog does–in fact, according to the book, the structures in our brains that dictate our initial actions in those instinctive moments are remarkably similar. You know how your eyes will automatically shift to follow a movement you see in the corner of your vision? A frog responds in much the same way. It’s not something you have to think about–often your eye will have darted over to the point of interest even before you realize you’ve noticed something. But your experience of that reaction is also much richer than it is possible for a frog’s to be, because we have far more layers of systems that all interact to produce what we call consciousness. We have a much deeper level of thought that goes into deciding whether that movement was actually important to us.

It’s possible for us to continue to live even if we lose some parts of the brain–our personalities will change, our memory may get worse, or we may even lose things like our internal monologue, but we still manage to persist as conscious beings until our brains lose a large number of the overlying systems, or some very critical systems. Like the one that regulates breathing–though even that single function is somewhat shared between multiple systems, allowing you to breathe manually (have fun with that).

All that to say the things we’re currently calling AI just don’t have that complexity. At best, these generative models could fill out a fraction of the layers that would be useful for a conscious mind. We have developed very powerful language processing systems, at least in terms of averaging out a vast quantity of data. Very powerful image processing. Audio processing. What we don’t have–what, near as I can tell, we haven’t made any meaningful progress on at all–is a system to coalesce all these processing systems into a whole. These systems always rely on a human to tell them what to process, for how long, and ultimately to check whether the result of a process is reasonable. Being able to process all of those types of input simultaneously, choosing which ones to focus on in the moment, and continuously choosing an appropriate response? Barely even a pipe dream. And even all of that would be distinct from a system to form anything like conscious thought.

Right now, when marketing departments say “AI,” what they’re describing is like that automatic response to movement. Movement detected, eye focuses. Input goes in, output comes out. It’s one small piece of the whole that’s required when science fiction writers say “AI.”

TL;DR no, the current generative model race is just tech stock market hype. The absolute best it can hope for is to reproduce a small piece of the conscious mind. It might be able to approximate the processing we’re capable of more quickly, but at a massively inflated energy expenditure, not to mention the research costs. And in the end it still needs a human double checking its work. We will need to develop a vast number of other increasingly complex systems before we even begin to approach a true AI.

I’m probably just old but it’s always faster to type :) than it is to find the 🙂, same goes for every emoji really.

Also they convey slightly different emotions

You’re responding to a Nazi. Reread their comment, they’re saying all the people being illegally arrested are rapists and murderers

Uhh I guess it’s kinda like that, minus you knowing you farted. Imagine the dog barked and ran but you genuinely had no idea why that happened. As a joke you go “dang that was like I farted so bad even the dog couldn’t stand it!” But now everyone heard you say you farted, so any time a dog barks and runs away they call it “Rowbot’s fart.”

Dark matter may not literally be matter of any kind at all. All we know for sure is that objects with a certain amount of observable matter are, for some reason, behaving like they have much, much more. But also not with any consistency; some of them act like they have 30% more, others like they’re twice their size. We just call it dark matter because “dang it’s like there’s a bunch of matter we can’t see.” But we don’t really know what’s causing the discrepancy.

To be fair, it’s not like we’re totally clueless about it, but as of yet no single hypothesis has any concrete proof.

Like I said, watch her video. She goes into lots of detail and gives a much better explanation than I could ever hope to. But here I go anyway:

The gist of it is that “dark matter” isn’t really an attempt to explain anything. Like, theory of gravity, we have some good rules, things accelerate depending on mass and proximity to other things. Theory of dark matter? Not so much.

Dark matter is a problem in the sense that it’s an observable phenomenon we can’t really explain. When we observe really far away stars and galaxies, they interact in ways that imply far larger amount of matter than what we are actually observing. So where’s that matter? We don’t know! Dark matter! But unfortunately that nomenclature and the many ideas surrounding what does cause the dark matter phenomenon have deeply clouded the conversation.

Dark matter is not a theory of how things work. It’s a problem to be solved.

Watch her dark matter video. And the follow up. But for the love of God, dodge the comments. SO MANY people read the title of the video and then went to make comments calling her wrong, even though she spent like an hour specifically addressing the arguments they make.

Dark matter is not a theory. It’s a problem. Fuck!

Evil Villains In Love

I feel like that last panel should be “stop hitting yourself,” just to make it even more clear that it’s the bullies running the school.

The conservative manifesto is basically “it’s a person’s own fault if they’re having a bad time, but also let’s remove every available resource, oh and if they still manage to stay out of trouble let’s throw some extra roadblocks in the way.” From making marijuana illegal, to making it more difficult to legally immigrate, polluting the air and water, and now we’re even throwing pointless tariffs around and dropping vaccinations. It’s not enough to be careful and live well–if God didn’t designate you as one of the lucky few to survive hell on Earth, fuck you!