• 0 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: November 8th, 2022

help-circle
  • Society developed the tools to manipulate humans based on common errs we make, and so of course the logical end-point is the continued control of those already in power. We’ve also deprived the vast majority of people from the tools for counteracting common mistakes, behind paywalls, time theft, and esoteric elitist language. By this, we’ve kept the means of inoculating ourselves against control out of reach.

    The rich directly define how this world by who they lobby, what charities they fund or deprive, and what they make their news outlets pedal. They are the reason for ignorance, stupidity, and fanaticism.

    First we must educate others in order to inoculate them. Then we must organize to wrench our power back to ourselves and away from the elite.



  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltoVideos@lemmy.worldFirefly and the Lost Cause
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I agree that the Lost Cause myth is romantic, and I’d say that Whedon used it very effectively as a theme.

    I can’t really agree with Feral Historian’s take that this myth was ‘kinda true’ for the south as that seems to suggest that southern fighters are somewhat absolved of guilt. “They were just trying to preserve their way of life!” When that life revolved around assisting plantations in maintaining control over their slave populations, often by hunting down slaves, or acting as overseers of their work, rings hollow to me.

    It reads the same as anyone who’s kept their head down to get by in an unjust system. You are culpable. And then fighting to try and preserve that unjust system makes you even more culpable.





  • Alright, I see what you’re saying now. We’re on the same page.

    As an additional thing regarding AGI, I think it should be noted that ‘human-level’ and ‘human-like’ are importantly distinct when talking about this topic.

    In reality, if an AGI is ever created, it will most likely not be human-like at all. Humans think the way we do out of an evolutionary conditioning for survival, a history an AGI will not be coming from. One example given by Robert Miles is a staple making machine becoming an ASI, where it essentially would exist solely to make as many staples as it could with its hyperintelligence.

    We mean to say that this AGI is a ‘human-level’ intelligence in that it can learn to utilize abstractions and tools, be able to function in a large variety of environments without intervention or training, and be able to learn in a realtime fashion.

    Obviously, these criteria for any AI shows just how far away we are from achieving anything right now.these concepts are very vague and the arguments for each one’s impossibility or inevitability are equally vague and philosophical. It’s still mostly just stuffy academics arguing with each other.

    One statement I agree with, though, comes from the AI safety collective: We don’t know what we’re doing, and we should really sort that out. If any of this is actually possible and we accidentally make an AGI/ASI before having any failsafes or contingencies, it could be very bad.


  • I am not bait-and-switching here. The switchers were the business-minded grifters which made the term synonymous with LLMs and eventually destroyed its meaning completely.

    The definition I gave is from the most popular and widely used CS textbook on AI and has been the meaning used in the field since the early 90s. It’s why videogame NPCs are always called AI, because they fit the conventional CS definition, and were one of the major things it was about the most.

    As for your ‘1’, AI is a wide-but-very-specialized field and pertains from everything from robots to text autocomplete. If you want the most out of it, you need to get down into the nitty gritty and really research the field.

    On a Seperate note, while AI safety, AGI, and the risk of the intelligence explosion are somewhat related to computer science’s pursuit of AI systems, they are much more philosophical currently, and adhere to much vaguer definitions of AI, Such as Alan Turing’s.


  • IIRC, within computer science, which is the field most heavily driving AI design and research forward, an ‘intelligent agent’ is essentially defined as any ‘agent’ which takes external stimulai from a collection of sensors in some form of environment, processes that stimulai in a dynamic fashion (one of the criteria IIRC is a branching decision tree based on the stimulai), and then applies that processing to a collection of affectors in the environment.

    Yes, this definition is an extremely low bar and includes a massive amount of code, software and scripts. It also includes basic natural intelligences such as worms, ants, amoeba, and even viruses. One example of mechanical AI are some of Theo Jansen’s StrandBeasts




  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltoVideos@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    Title’s hard click bait. It leads up to talking about Arrow’s Impossibility theorem, which sets forth some explicit rules for defining a fair election, and communicates that all finite-vote systems are dictatorships that fail to meet those criteria, including ranked choice voting. Arrow’s theorem also uses ‘dictatorship’ in a pretty weird technical fashion, meaning that one individual can technically sway any election with their sole choices.

    Directly after, though, Veritasium does acknowledge that Duncan Black pokes holes in the actual value of Arrow’s theorem, by showing that many ordinal voting systems will still favor majority preference, and that Arrow’s theorem does not apply to rated voting systems like approval voting and STAR voting.

    It’s pretty bizarre that he decided to make such a click-baity title and front-load only skim over the better solution at the end, right near election month.


  • I think this is coming from a “plugins enshittify projects” mentality where the assumptions are:

    • code bases should be as succinct and stable as possible.
    • plugins add large amounts of unused code and obfuscate many granular aspects of program execution, increasing debug and research time.

    Seems that the author views that the above devs chose to use plugins instead of writing their own code and shot themselves in the foot by doing so. The final portion seems to suggest that the person pushing all these changes then bobs out before any of the problems caused by these changes actually get solved.





  • You already have an entire vocabulary for solar time (sunrise, morning, noon, evening, sunset, night, midnight). This being all of a sudden assigned to a different time on a clock does not change things in any dramatic fashion. It would also be a consistent change for your current location, guarantee it only takes you less than a work week to acclimate.

    All the things you’ve described I’ve literally been doing for 6 months now. It is not a noticable difference and does not impact me.

    Also, a book that says “it was 5 o’clock” is objectively more boring than one that describes the shadows of twilight blanketing the scene in a checkering of shadow. Also TV shows show outside, where solar time is visibly apparent. The specific time is not nearly as relevant.

    Also, you already look up time zones when scheduling international meetings, and those aren’t going to tell you about siestas or other local practices which might affect scheduling. Maybe just actually ask the person what times will work when trying to schedule, and now since you’re both using UTC, you both can figure it out together without looking up timezones.