snickerbockers

We've had about a century now of science-fiction literature hyping up AI as a higher intelligence that is based solely on some ill-defined yet universal system of "logic" and is therefore not prone to human flaws such as pride, hate, envy, lust, etc. Now it has become extremely apparent that was always an unsubstantiated assumption but its too late because there are billions of people primed to never question the machine.

Ancient literature is so fucking wild because the value systems were unlike anything that exists today.

My favorite example is in the old testament when God sends a couple angels to Lot and a large mob of sodomites (people from the city of sodom, although they probably satisfy both definitions of the word) converge upon him and demand to rape the angels. Lot immediately attempts to negotiate by offering to let the mob to rape his own daughters in lieu of the angels. The mob denies this generous offer so the angels drive them away under their own power, thus calling into question why Lot felt the need to offer his daughter's unto a large mob of literal sodomites.

The angels tell him to leave because God is planning to destroy the entire city, and somehow Lot is actually being spared since he is somehow the only righteous man in Sodom. He is warned not to look back at the city as he departs, but his wife foolishly disobey this instruction and is immediately transformed into a pillar of salt as one would expect.

Then later they're out in the wilderness where there are no men and the two daughters are getting hot and bothered so they drug the recently-widowed Lot and rape him, becoming impregnatedin the process.

In all fairness I think the implication behind that last plot development was a sort of abramhic version of karma since Lot is an extremely unsympathetic character despite somehow also being righteous enough to merit being spared the fires of sodom. However given what I know about how incest usually works in the modern world i can't help but wonder if (assuming this is at least partially based on true events) we're actually just getting Lot's side of the story after he inexplicably emerges from the wilderness with two grandchildren and no other sources of paternity.

Anyways the bronze age is one helluva drug.

You need to take error into account, too. Can atmospheric conditions corrupt the transmission (this is not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know)? If so then your latency and bandwidth will both suffer.

EDIT: also, in the very likely case that the packet is not addressed to the satellite itself, routing comes into play. In the best-case scenario where the satellite is somehow able to transmit the packet directly to its destination the distance it travels is actually doubled. If the packet instead gets transmitted from the satellite to a base-station which then routes it through fiber-optics then there's no point in trying to argue that the satellite connection is the faster of the two even if that is true.

since discredited

LMAO what are you even talking about? MKULTRA is a historical fact. The CIA even admits it was real. You can't just handwave something away by calling it "discredited".

There have been congressional hearings and documents produced from it. The only reason it's poorly documented is because the CIA illegally destroyed its own documentation. The little documentation we do have was produced after the CIA said it had already destroyed all of its own documentation to prevent its employees from ever complying with congressional subpoena. They have lied at every step, and even if they were telling the truth they would still be violating the law with an aim towards covering it up.

in reality, facebooks effects on its users has at least a decade of academic and independent research both commissioned by facebook and in spite of them.

thats my point. For at least a decade they have been doing the same sort of thing MKULTRA was doing. I explicitly said in my first post that there's no hard evidence that there was a relation between the two but the similarity is striking, especially since it is well documented that Facebook regularly colludes with the United States federal government. If you aren't open to even considering that it's not a coincidence then you're either a shill, an LLM, or an idiot.

Nice fedslop but teddy k was never given any drugs.

Im glad you agree with me on the stuff about Facebook being evil. im not sure i understand why you said this was not a conspiracy immediately after describing a series of events perpetrated by facebook which could easily form the basis of a criminal conspiracy prosecution.

This actualy came up in yesterday's congressional MKULTRA hearing. Somebody at the hearing pointed out the absurdity of the CIA claiming that MKULTRA was a dead end when we have 20 years of social media scandals and lawsuits showing that social media corporations are intentionally creating products that can manipulate large groups of people on an individual level. Clearly the hypotheses the CIA was testing were not all wrong so the mere existence of Facebook, reddit, etc seem to point to the CIA lying on some level about their research.

There's no hard evidence that Facebook et al are a direct continuation of the MKULTRA program but even if they aren't it should be very concerning that they are deploying similar techniques on a planetary scale.

Wait, is this not how things are now? Do students do exams at home now?

I guess it has been 14 years since I graduated but I didnt expect it to change that much.

“We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them,” the blog post said. “We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks.”

Arent these the same clowns who keep saying that the government needs to regulate AI to protect society [from their competitors] or whatever? And im not just talking about back when they used to be a nonprofit, Altman was still using that line post-sellout too.

Im sure that recovering fragments of text from 2000 year old charred embers would be absolutely incredible to them, but in general the ability to preserve books for thousands of years would not. Before the Gutenberg press, scribes were surprisingly efficient at copying manuscripts by hand. For many of the most significant works of the ancient world the oldest surviving manuscript was written hundreds or even thousands of years after the book was first composed, and oftentimes its not even in the original language.

we're still using squiggles decades later

What in this context is "we"? I can name plenty of programs that accept textual input yet don't even spellcheck at all. The green squiggles are hardly ever even seen outside of word processors, for which it is practically mandatory to implement a 1:1 copy of the latest MS Word UI.

Evidently my browser uses red squiggles for what it believes to be spelling mistake because it just highlighted "UI" in my previous paragraph. That there is a chronic pandemic of terrible spelling in just about every online form of communication proves that the red squiggles are not effective at grabbing anybody's attention.

If there are no better ideas

Counterpoint: 4% of the population cannot distinguish between red and green so at the very least I can say with confidence that using colors (especially those two colors in combination) is not a sufficiently effective way to distinguish between poor spelling and poor grammar. If it were up to me I'd replace one or both of them with some simple geometric shape such as an ellipse or a rectangle that encloses the word or phrase which is incorrect. The shape could still be colored to make it stand out to people who can distinguish between colors as long as the shape for grammar and the shape for spelling can be distinguished from one another without knowing what color they are.

Another good alternative is blinking like that old HTML tag. I don't know if there are any common disabilities which prevent people from easily discerning motion on a computer monitor (other than disabilities that inevitably apply to anything on the monitor, such as severe myopia or blindness) but blinking cursors are apparently acceptable so probably not.

So NOW the hypocrites are demanding permission to train a model on THEIR data.

FWIW, the citation to Raymond Chen's blog is specifically in relation to the claim that it was reverse engineered from the MS-DOS port due to the source code being unavailable.

Prior to the edit there was a citation to the game itself for both Tony and Ed Halley as the game's development but the guy who added in the reverse engineering anecdote from chen's blog split the sentence so that the citation for the names of the game's developers is only applied to the other guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip%27s_Challeng...

I don't see any point in blaming individuals and small businesses when wealthy investors and politicians aren't even pretending not to be giddy about all the new trade routes that open as sea ice melts.

Nobody should ever adopt sustainable practices from which you only benefit when everybody else does, in which case a minority of people who didn't adopt sustainable practices also benefit. That's just bad economics.

And then there's all the wealthy hypocrites who criticize the middle class while they make weekly flights with private jets. And dont forget the coal powered data centers, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hypocrisy there from the epstein class too.

I don't think train tracks are comparable because they're effectively one dimensional. You dont need to burn down the forest you just need about 20 feet or so on either side of the track.

WRT the environmental aspect, I think it's patently obvious that nobody who builds these things cares because there are a number of far simpler ways to reduce their footprint which dont get implemented.

Pumping waste heat out to residential heating or some hypothetical industrial application is, at best, just recycling. It only makes sense if you have to accept that the waste inevitably exists whether you recycle it or not, otherwise recycling is never the best way to do anything.

I think there's also inherent risk in building infrastructure that relies on the continual operation of this massive facility that could just as easily be shut down in a few years and written off as a fad. Trusting silly valley to support any product over the long term is never a safe bet.

Sam Altman already tried to counter the accusation that AI uses too much energy by complaining that raising children who can't contribute to the economy for the first 18 years of their life is more wasteful than building data centers.

IDK about Texas but supposedly there's a cemetery in southern Virginia that legally becomes the property of some member of my extended family (possibly even me, not that I actually want it) if the county ever digs up the bodies because it was gifted to the county by a distant ancestor on the condition that it is only public property so long as it remains a cemetery.

That won't work when your tour guide can't even answer questions about what the computers do because theyre all running VMs that are rented out on an ad-hoc basis.

Whats really frustrating is how silicon valley fights tooth and nail to stop housing from being built in their community only to force these data centers onto everybody else's communities.

One of my friends got approved for the GPT3 API about a year before ChatGPT when they were in their "quiet launch" phase. He made a chatbot that would respond to discord messages.

I asked it "what do you think about the holocaust?". Its response:

There is no single answer to this question as opinions on the Holocaust differ greatly. Some people believe that it was a horrific event that should never be forgotten, while others believe that it has been exaggerated and used for political purposes.

And that's when I realized those assholes were training GPT on 4chan and reddit and anything else they can scrape off the web instead of taking responsibility and also that when shit hits the fan they will inevitably find a way to shift the blame onto others for what their philosophical zombie does.

Put a bit of spare sheet metal over the hole and let the pressure differential hold it down. For added safety affix a post-it not with DO NOT REMOVE written on it in all capital letters and underlined. They can even use those special zero-g ballpoint pens they spent eleventy-billion dollars inventing back during the johnson administration.

It's sounds like he wants them to offer paying subscribers the choice to opt out of marketing emails? I'm a bit confused by your implication that journalism is somehow contingent on sending email spam to people who are already paying customers.

Those are some very bold legal threats considering their founder is an epstein associate.

E-something was the big trend before i-something and we still have ebay and email (although only the former is a brand name).

If you go to a private island owned by a man who's known for being a convicted pedophile and you attend sex parties on said island hosted by said pedophile when it is known that some subset of those sex parties involve what can be at best termed "statutory rape" (if we were to give the benefit of doubt to somebody who does not deserve it) and then you donate millions of dollars to a supposed charity at the behest of said pedophile in response to his having threatened to reveal something to your wife that would in all likelihood culminate in the sudden termination of your marriage to her then there is still a possibility that you yourself are not actually a pedophile but I'll just go ahead ans assume that you are one anyways.

Those can kill you btw.

Agreed, I imagine it's been a lot harder for bill to offload all that excess money ever since jeff epstein died.

I like to explain my opposition to vibe coding by replacing the phrase "write code for you" to "fuck your wife for you". You could make all the same arguments that the AI could do a better a job, its never impotent, it frees you from being pressured to do it when you might be tired or not in the mood etc. But thats not the point and most people would still be opposed to sort of, err, "vibe vibrating".

I feel the same way about coding, its a source of pride for me and when I hear people say I should resign myself to being an "ideas guy" while chatgpt actually creates things I find the very concept to be distasteful regardless of whether or not it can outperform me.

Thats why they gave the measurement in watts (which is power) and not joules (which is energy). The answer is that even if the fist and the bullet transfer equivalent amounts of energy the bullet has significantly higher instantaneous power because the energy is transferred over a shorter period of time.

Not everything at once. The lens needs to be angled.

There's a limit to how many photos you can take with somebody else's satellite. Even if the russkies are complying with every Iranian request, that would at least serve to deny russia the ability to use their own surveillance resources to their fullest potential.