pachrist

As someone who’s had two kids since AI really vaulted onto the scene, I am enormously confused as to why people think AI isn’t or, particularly, can’t be sentient. I hate to be that guy who pretend to be the parenting expert online, but most of the people I know personally who take the non-sentient view on AI don’t have kids. The other side usually does.

When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

People love to tout this as some sort of smoking gun. That feels like a trap. Obviously, we can argue about the age children gain sentience, but my year and a half old daughter is building an LLM with pattern recognition, tests, feedback, hallucinations. My son is almost 5, and he was and is the same. He told me the other day that a petting zoo came to the school. He was adamant it happened that day. I know for a fact it happened the week before, but he insisted. He told me later that day his friend’s dad was in jail for threatening her mom. That was true, but looked to me like another hallucination or more likely a misunderstanding.

And as funny as it would be to argue that they’re both sapient, but not sentient, I don’t think that’s the case. I think you can make the case that without true volition, AI is sentient but not sapient. I’d love to talk to someone in the middle of the computer science and developmental psychology Venn diagram.

And much, much, much more expensive.

Just want to drop this here.

Birth control is great.

Some methods of birth control are bad for you specifically. Not all birth control is equal. You are a complex piece of equipment. Birth control alters the way that equipment works. There are side effects, no matter what, and they are listed because the were well documented in clinical trials.

That does not mean you should not use birth control. It means you should work with your doctor to find the one that works best for you.

My wife tried a birth control medication that had an interaction with another medication and made her very drousy. My sister took one that made her feel suicidal. They shopped around and found something that worked.

I cannot imagine how hard it is to be as kind, loving, and gracious as she is, but to be surrounded by a world with so much willful anger, hate, and misery.

As much as I dislike Steve Jobs personally, Apple needs someone at the helm who is product and customer experience oriented like he was. Obviously, technical know-how is good, but someone exclusively technical would flounder. Tim Cook is a supply chain guy. His replacement would almost certainly be someone marketing oriented, since innovation no longer drives Apple. Sales do.

hey guys! If we stop testing for covid, the number of covid cases will go down!

slowbro.pcx

I mean, I know JK Rowling sucks, and it’s been a long time since the first Harry Potter movie came out, but it was definitely a component and precursor to Hagrid beating the shit out of that door.

Not an expert by any stretch, but I would say it is infinitely more likely Iran deploys a nuke now. The US has spent a lot of time over the past 80 years doing whatever it wants to countries it doesn’t like that don’t have nukes, and it leaves alone countries that have them.

If I’m Iran, and I don’t have a nuke, I would be on the phone 24/7 with Putin and Kim about using something they have to stage a “test” detonation on Iranian soil.

My wife’s family loves The Princess Bride, but I love telling them that Stardust is better. It might not be correct, but it’s a pretty fun hill to die on.

The movies are so overhyped and overrated at this point. But Monty Python’s Flying Circus is not, it’s fantastic.

Bring back this and the throne room decorations.

I think this is a case where the imagination is much, much better than the reality.

For the mobilization of technology, miniaturization has had a lot of benefits, not just in the technology, but in the accessibility. Having a desktop computer instead of a mainframe was huge. It brought the computer to the home. Laptops becoming viable was huge again. It untethered the computer from the wall. For most of the planet, we’re still in the midst of the massive leap that is smart phones. It put a computer in the pocket of billions of people.

Beating that is hard. Smart phones are the most accessible, most powerful devices most end users have ever used. We take that for granted, and we take the time it took to get there for granted. It took 25 years of desktops to get real, decent laptops (personally, I’d say mid 90s). It took 25 of laptops to get real, decent smartphones (again personally, I’d say ~2010ish).

Like it or not, we have another decade to go probably before the technology is there for the next evolution in personal computing. But the problem we have really is that there’s not another leap as far as accessibility is concerned. Smart phones work places where laptops can’t. Laptops work places where desktops can’t. Desktops work places where mainframes can’t. Smart phones can work anywhere. Taking the computer from the datacenter, to the home, to your backpack, to your pocket is huge. Is the next step from the pocket to your wrist? To your face? Is it worth it? Is it really that much better?

Otherwise this reads as if some LLM 4chan came up with the idea

Remember kids, updating to iOS 7 enables your phone to charge wirelessly in the microwave.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

"Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’

Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’ Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

I have always loved how simply Jesus spells it out.

As a kid, I always felt it was so implausible that the Jews would kill Jesus. Yes he claims to be God, which is a no-no, but how can a message of peace and love be so divisive? As an adult, I’ve come to realize that it’s divisive to people who are angry and filled with hate, to people who hate peace and love. The Pharisees of 30CE are the exact same as most Christians today. If you walked in to some Trump country Baptist church today and flipped over the collection plates and told everyone there they were going to hell because the want to deport immigrants instead of help them, you’d be shot for sure.

Same, but when I began really looking at it and trying to overcome it, I found it’s a very universal experience, certainly not divided by gender.

When you look at these odd archetypes of what people want out of the ideal man or woman, they all share the same core. Strong, independent, doesn’t need help, doesn’t want help. The individualistic experience is such a sad, lonely, miserable, experience. They want to be able to go it alone, but in hundreds of thousands of years of truly human existence, going it alone is such an exception. Our weights and burdens and lives are meant to be shared. They always have been and always will be.

For example, I have a 4 year old son who has been infatuated with ballet for a couple months now. There are dads today who are beating their sons for liking ballet. It’s terrible. But it’s not that ballet is “queer” or that men don’t do ballet. There are plenty of men who are queer. There are plenty of men who do ballet. But, I don’t do ballet. If I beat my son, it’s because I am making it about myself. I don’t want a son who does ballet. That is as narcissistic and individualistic as it gets.

That’s not to say that it’s not toxic masculinity, just that the toxic masculinity is narcissism in a trench coat.

I have two.

There is no such thing as toxic masculinity or toxic femininity. There is only toxic individualism.

Sometimes, you shouldn’t be yourself. The person you are might be awful. Bullying and societal pressure correcting you to a norm can be a good thing.

I always weigh my pasta. A really large serving of pasta is ~4oz.

You seem to be mentioning right wing grifters a lot in this thread. What exactly do they do that upsets you so badly?

I think a lot of American breweries confuse “interesting” beer with “good” beer, because in the US, as long as it doesn’t taste like Coors, you’re fine.

It’s the chicken bacon ranch pizza problem. It’s good. I like it. But I don’t want it every time I have pizza. I definitely can’t eat a whole chicken bacon ranch pizza, even if I spread the leftovers over the week. But a slice every now and then is great.

“Good” American beer is generally pretty fatiguing to drink. Good European beer isn’t. That’s how it is for me at least.