Oh, I 100% understand that. Wanted to try handling a tarantula in a German pet shop, nearly fainted (knees got weak the instant I registered her on my skin, and I could tell she was not in any way aggressive…).
On the other hand, I’ve had one of those massive cockroaches sniffing around on my face, and not even a twitch. I seldom understand my brain.
Oh, wow! I’d probably just die if I ever saw a wolf spider in my tub! Like, complete simultaneous organ failure, the energy which is me would just eject from my body.
Lucky for me, I live in Temperate-Continental, so my biggest threat is seeing a Long-Legs dangling down to check up on me while I’m showering!
And I’m serious about this. Maybe it was just me imagining things, but I swear they started inspecting me every now and again. Like, I’d be at my desk playing, and I’d see one rapelling from the ceiling, like 20-30 cm away from me. Seldom has any descended onto the actual desk, though, they’d just hang for a bit, then climb back up. It was strangely comforting, though, it makes them feel a lot more alive and present than the mind would tend to think about an eight-legged thing right out of my nightmares. They really have become my roommates.
Even though I still have arachnophobia, I’ve intentionally lived with spiders for over a decade and I’ve not had issues with mosquitoes even if I left all of my windows open. And my roommates are thriving!
They’re very chill roommates, too! After about 1-2 months of adjusting to living together in my old apartment, they stopped spinning webs in the areas which I used frequently and focused on the zones which I left out for them - ceiling corners, gaps between walls and furniture, etc. I did occasionally clean up their old webs every now and again (while taking great care not to bother the spiders themselves) because they also gathered a lot of dust. But they’d replace the old webbing in a matter of days.
And they never developed overpopulation issues, even though I did see them producing egg sacks regularly. I was expecting to drown in spiders by the end of the first year of trying this arrangement, but I never counted more than 15-20 spiders apartment-wide.
Oh, no, they’re definitely picky:)) One of my exes had an Amstaff with whom I’d developed a much healthier relationship than with her owner. My ex also dropped off her dog at my place for weeks so she could take some emotional space. I didn’t care, that dog and I got along like two peas in a pod.
Anyway, point is, she was a VERY astute dog and we became fast friends. I’d always let her “inspect” whatever I was feeding myself and I’d usually get a huff and a butt as remarks about my food. She didn’t even want to lick the crap I was eating at the time (lots of take-out, lots of processed foods, etc.) However, she LOVED my potato salad, and a lot of other home-cooked dishes. Seldom the meat, though.
And not all that bad, actually! I’m dead serious, there were times when I caught myself sneaking out a fistful from my cat’s food bag and munching like a rodent. Once you get accustomed to the taste (which, in most cases, tastes like really tough bread flavoured with saltless steak, or saltless boiled carrot, or saltless fish), it makes for a decently filling snack.
Dog kibble has even less flavour than cat kibble, mostly tastes slighly savoury and bland, though. Which I find weird and, like… all dogs I’ve met enjoyed a plethora of flavours, wouldn’t they do the same with their kibble?
“Boost shields! Shut down non-essentials! Ensign, get us out of here!”
“Greeting attempt registered. Reciprocation deployed.”
Agreed, at least around water, my kidneys are hyperactive and need constant lubrication. Food, though… meh…
And I wouldn’t do it for the suffering, I would genuinely do it for relaxation, like a full habitat sensory deprivation chamber.
What I do for suffering is try to face the sun for longer than I feel comfortable, the whole idea of self-immolation being purifying and such. I can see why some would think that, baking in the sun really does a wonderful job at bringing me back to the present through widespread pain.
You’ve highlighted exactly why I also fundamentally disagree with the current trend of all things AI being for-profit. This should be 100% non-profit and driven purely by scientific goals, in which case using copyrighted data wouldn’t even be an issue in the first place… It’d be like literally giving someone access to a public library.
Edit: but to focus on this specific instance, where we have to deal with the here-and-now, I could see them receiving, say, 60-75% of what they have now, hassle-free. At the very least, and uniformly distributed. Again, AI development isn’t what irks most people, it’s calling plagiarism generators and search engine fuck-ups AI and selling them back to the people who generated the databases - or, worse, working toward replacing those people entirely with LLMs! - they used for those abhorrences.
Train the AI to be factually correct instead and sell it as an easy-to-use knowledge base? Aces! Train the AI to write better code and sell it as an on-board stackoverflow Jr.? Amazing! Even having it as a mini-assistant on your phone so that you have someone to pester you to get the damned laundry out of the washing machine before it starts to stink is a neat thing, but that would require less advertising and shoving down our throats, and more accepting the fact that you can still do that with five taps and a couple of alarm entries.
Edit 2: oh, and another thing which would require a buttload of humility, but would alleviate a lot of tension would be getting it to cite and link to its sources every time! Have it be transformative enough to give you the gist without shifting into plagiarism, then send you to the source for the details!
My initial reaction, the socially acceptable one, was akin to “oh, wow, that’s weird.” After I gave it a minute, though… Gotta say, if I could be certain of the fact that I wouldn’t be interrupted in any way and had full control over the situation… yeah, that actually sounds like a nice getaway…
Edit: or in a bunker! I would not mind not seeing the light of day (or anything else, for that matter) for a month! Would be a nice RAM purge at the very least!
Sad to see you leave (not really, tho’), love to watch you go!
Edit: I bet if any AI developing company would stop acting and being so damned shady and would just ASK FOR PERMISSION, they’d receive a huge amount of data from all over. There are a lot of people who would like to see AGI become a real thing, but not if it’s being developed by greedy and unscrupulous shitheads. As it stands now, I think the only ones who are actually doing it for the R&D and not as eye-candy to glitz away people’s money for aesthetically believable nonsense are a handful of start-up-likes with (not in a condescending way) kids who’ve yet to have their dreams and idealism trampled.
I honestly don’t understand how these publishers don’t understand that foregoing their tumorous launchers and trackers would lead to a ridiculous amount of good publicity and a much-needed uptick in everyone’s perception of them…
I had no idea, yet I was correct: this IS hilarious!
Would be hilarious if they recalled them and superglued buttons over the touchscreen interface.
Why fix the actual socio-economic and political issues which lead to school shootings when you can pull a Big Brother with barely functional AI models!
I’m just hittin’em right outta the park, should’ve worked in Marketing!
Yes, that was their incoming shriek, you’d hear a Doppler of the Nokia ringtone, then it started raining bricks!
We got really lucky the RAZRs were personable and took pity on us, the data plan was a reasonable compromise at the time… It was either that, or those barely functional Sony nav nubs for everyone, and that would’ve been assured extinction!
Generally, yes, even during winter for the most part.