mountainriver

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I was going to write that it was good that you didn't say "um" all the time. (Being silent in pauses is in my experience a learned skill for most people and one that comes once one has heard oneself say "um" too many times.)

The sound was fine. I think your (Jabra?) headset did its job unless that was also the result of editing.

The imagery got a bit distracting because you look to the side of the camera. No problem for podcasts, but for video it's better to look straight at the camera to look at the audience so to speak. (Also a learnt skill.) So maybe a webcam you can place in front of the screen you are presumably reading of?

No idea about marketing a YouTube, but you got in the "like and subscribe", so that is probably good.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm thinking stupid and frustrating AI will become a plot device.

"But if I don't get the supplies I can't save the town!"

"Yeah, sorry, the AI still says no"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.

"Keep wearing", so is he saying that Musk et al "keep doing" "stiff-armed salutes" (that anyone with eyes can see are Nazi salutes) in public?

I know one shouldn't expect logic from a Nazi, but claiming that the fog horn is actually a dog whistle is really ridiculous. "You heard nothing!"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Not only that, calling the field "AI" is built in hype.

  • I work in the field of intelligent machines.

  • Oh cool, so you can build intelligent machines?

  • Hell no. We just call the field that. For reasons.

Edit: my dialogue dashes became blocks. Must be an intelligent machine changing them or something.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

In one corner: cheating US AI that needs prompting to cheat.

In the other: finger breaking Russian chess robot.

Let's get ready to rumble!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

That is cool.

I am not a geneticist, but I have had reasons to talk to geneticists. And they do a lot of cool stuff. For example, I talked with geneticists who researched the genom of a hard to treat patient group to find genetic clusters to yield clues of potential treatments.

You have patient group A that has a cluster of genes B which we know codes for function C which can go haywire in way D which already has a treatment E. Then E becomes a potential treatment for A. You still have to run trials to see if it actually has effect, but it opens up new venues with existing treatments. This in particular has potential for small patient groups that are unlikely to receive much funding and research on its own.

But this also highlights how very far we are from understanding the genetic code as code that can be reprogrammed for intelligence or longevity. And how much more likely experiments are to mess things up in ways we can not predict beforehand, and which doesn't have a treatment.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)

We do not understand genetic code as code. We merely have developed some statistical relations between some part of the genetic code and some outcomes, but nobody understands the genetic code good enough to write even the equivalent of "Hello World!".

Gene modification consists of grabbing a slice of genetic code and splicing it into another. Impressive! Means we can edit the code. Doesn't mean we understand the code. If you grab the code for Donkey Kong and put it into the code of Microsoft Excel, does it mean you can throw barrels at your numbers? Or will you simply break the whole thing? Genetic code is very robust and has a lot of redundancies (that we don't understand) so it won't crash like Excel. Something will likely grow. But tumors are also growth.

Remember Thalidomide? They had at the time better reason to think it was safe then we today have thinking gene editing babies is safe.

The tech bros who are gene editing babies (assuming that they are, because they are stupid, egotistical and wealthy enough to bend most laws) are not creating super babies, they are creating new and exciting genetic disorders. Poor babies.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

all people contain exactly two personality cores corresponding to the two hemispheres of their brains, that every personality core is either intrinsically good or intrinsically evil and less than 5% are good

If you have one of each, does that make you neutral? Now how is the Lawful-Chaotic alignment constructed? Does it reside in the kidneys?

I want to roll up a Chaotic Neutral Rogue Halfling.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Some years ago I read the memoirs of a railroad union boss. Interesting book in many aspects, but what I thought of here was a time before he became a union boss. He was working at the railroad, was trusted in the union and got the mission to make store keeping of supplies and spare parts more efficient.

This wasn't the first time the railroad company had tried to make it more efficient. Due to earlier mergers there was lots of local supplies and a confusing system for which part of the company was supplied from where. In short, it was inefficient and everyone knew that. Enter our protagonist who travels around and talks to people. Finally he arrives back to HQ and reports that it can't be done. Unless HQ wants to enact a program where everyone who is made redundant gets a better job, with the company footing the bill for any extra training or education needed. Then it could be done, because then it would be in the interest of the people whose knowledge and skills they needed.

This being in the post war era with full employment policies, labour was a scare resource so the company did as they were told and the system got more efficient.

It's all about who benefits from the automation. The original Luddites targeted employers who automated, fired skilled workers and decreased wages. They were not opposed to automation, they were opposed to automation at their expense.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

Economic Shock Doctrine works great for the oligarchs. Less well for everyone else. So it's not strange that Milei wants to scam his supporters and hand oligarchs a direct way to show their gratitude.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

It's scamming the true believers and creates an obfuscated channel for the oligarchs to deliver the carrots / bribes. When Trump launched his memecoin and got a question he waved at the tech billionaires and said "it's peanuts for these guys". Unfortunately nobody followed up with asking if that meant those guys were the ones transferring money to Trump through the memecoin.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

I have been looking into Fairphone for work. My focus for that is mostly long lasting, repairable, hardware. I want a minimum of friction with switching the users, so it would be Android for us, but I think there are open non-Google options.

 

This isn't a sneer, more of a meta take. Written because I sit in a waiting room and is a bit bored, so I'm writing from memory, no exact quotes will be had.

A recent thread mentioning "No Logo" in combination with a comment in one of the mega-threads that pleaded for us to be more positive about AI got me thinking. I think that in our late stage capitalism it's the consumer's duty to be relentlessly negative, until proven otherwise.

"No Logo" contained a history of capitalism and how we got from a goods based industrial capitalism to a brand based one. I would argue that "No Logo" was written in the end of a longer period that contained both of these, the period of profit driven capital allocation. Profit, as everyone remembers from basic marxism, is the surplus value the capitalist acquire through paying less for labour and resources then the goods (or services, but Marx focused on goods) are sold for. Profits build capital, allowing the capitalist to accrue more and more capital and power.

Even in Marx times, it was not only profits that built capital, but new capital could be had from banks, jump-starting the business in exchange for future profits. Thus capital was still allocated in the 1990s when "No Logo" was written, even if the profits had shifted from the good to the brand. In this model, one could argue about ethical consumption, but that is no longer the world we live in, so I am just gonna leave it there.

In the 1990s there was also a tech bubble were capital allocation was following a different logic. The bubble logic is that capital formation is founded on hype, were capital is allocated to increase hype in hopes of selling to a bigger fool before it all collapses. The bigger the bubble grows, the more institutions are dragged in (by the greed and FOMO of their managers), like banks and pension funds. The bigger the bubble, the more it distorts the surrounding businesses and legislation. Notice how now that the crypto bubble has burst, the obvious crimes of the perpetrators can be prosecuted.

In short, the bigger the bubble, the bigger the damage.

If in a profit driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations profit, in the hype driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations hype. To point and laugh is damage minimisation.

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