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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Yup. That’s kind of the rub. It’s not a pay gap on paper anywhere in the sense of pay scales, it’s a bunch of societal biases that lead to overwhelmingly common “emergent” systemic behavior that skews women towards the lower end of the pay bands they coexist with men in while also often denying them promotions into higher positions and pay bands that are more frequently given to equal or lesser skilled men.

    Very few of the individual cogs in the system are intentionally aiming for this outcome, but it’s the combination of a shit ton of biases built up over generations about women and how they are expected to behave that all smashes together into the shitty end result of pay discrepancy along gender lines.


  • Only thing that stands out to me is the percentages you’ve listed. I was always taught (and most of my peers seem to have been as well) that the normal tip for average service was 15%. Poor service (that is in the waiter’s control) gets 10%, and good/great is 18-22% (but usually 20%).

    I was born in the early 90s if it makes a difference.


  • They could, or they might not. The biggest thing is that we already have been through 4 years of Trump. We have some idea of what that will look like, we aren’t going in completely blind.

    As far as this “being the last election”, there’s too many safeguards in our governmental system and too many armed people (in both the civilian and military population) with deep vested interests to ensure real elections still happen for that to change.

    There’s a hell of a lot of posturing and hot air going on and that has gone on from Trumps camp that has absolutely no true way to get force behind it.

    Things will be bad, but panicking will just make it thay much harder to distinguish true threats and problems from what isn’t.

    Think of it like this: Your car is stalled on a train track, and there’s a train coming a few minutes away. There’s also someone with a gun in your backseat about to shoot you. The train makes more noise, but the more immediate threat is the guy with the gun. Being more calm helps to discern those sorts of distinctions, and that the best solution would be to run from your car rather than try to pump the gas.

    For every could, might, and may there’s a didn’t, might not, etc. You could start pissing blood tomorrow, but I assume you’re in good health that you probably won’t. But you still technically could.

    The news media across the board is optimizing for ad views to support their existence with money. Keeping people stressed out increases viewership, so it’s in their best interests to put everything through a funhouse mirror and rely on technicalities and speculation to stoke emotional response. There’s been studies done and books published on this.

    Bad times are not end times.


  • We had four years under Biden to find the skeletons from Trump’s last presidency. Please point me to them, as obviously I’ve missed something huge like roving squads of minority slayers or something.

    It’s going to fucking suck. Yes, people will die as a result of horrible policies and the general sociopolitical climate, but people claiming that minorities are literally going to be hunted en mass are out of their gourd.

    Too many armed civilians spread through all the population demographics for that to work to the level a lot of people are screaming about.



  • Panic doesn’t help anything. Neither does horror. We survived one Trump presidency, we’ll survive this one, despite it being monumentally worse.

    Do what you can to help those you can around you. Work in and grow the support structures in your local community, family, and social circles.

    Panic leads to stupid, rash, not well thought out decisions. It should be avoided as much as possible while you take a long, honest, realistic look at the situation and evaluate what is and isn’t in your power to effect.

    You’re right that passive defeatism isn’t helpful, but you don’t have to go straight to the other extreme of emotional turmoil.






  • And here we have issues with the many different definitions of AI. Nvidia used machine learning to simulate countless iterations of their chip design to find the best configuration and layout (for the specific goals they set their AI to optimize for). They did not use chatGPT or anything that has textual output. It literally cannot spontaneously develop that ability.

    It is constrained by the bounds that are inherently neccessary to make it function and by the goals it is created to optimize for. It cannot just arbitrarily “choose” to go do something they aren’t pointing it at. It may do things that aren’t intended, but those are “happy accidents” related (again) to the goals it is given to optimize for. Like a delivery AI jumping off a balcony because it’s the fastest way down, since no goal weighting was given to self preservation or damaging the package.

    At the very least, until we have some way to codify the abstract concept of comprehension into a scoring system can be optimized for, none of these things are going to even approach AGI. This is due to the simple reality of how they work under the hood, and don’t for a fucking second believe the charlatans saying that we can’t understand them. We may not be able to discretely track each and every step a model takes in modifying it’s weights or each decision poiny when optimizing for specific output, but that’s a matter of storage space to store each step and drastic speed loss that would occur recording each step. It is not some inherent untracable magic in how they work.

    Computers, even quantum computers, work through billions of discrete traceable steps occurring each second. AI still needs discrete inputs, discrete goal/optimization/math to discern good output from bad, even if we choose not to track each step in between.

    Put as simply as possible: You cannot duct tape infinite speak and spells together to spontaneously create an intelligence, and that is effectively what current AI is doing in ever increasing amounts. We’re brute forcing it by throwing ever increasing amounts of resources at it, with rare and minor improvements in the underlying math occurring at far slower rates. The nvidea chip thing is just improving the ability of chips to do the math we’re already doing for this stuff even faster, so… more brute forcing.

    Edit: Also, nvidea is making more money than they ever have riding this hype train. Of course they’re going to push the idea that absurd leaps of progress are right around the corner, and that their products will get us there. They are the best in the market right now, but anything beyond that is pure conjecture to help drive sales. Their chips are not fundamentally doing anything new, just the same things but more efficiently.