OpenStars @ OpenStars @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

Looks like a fantasy/dream home! :-D

If only wives could have the same rights as a frozen embryo!? 🥲

Fair. Though that capability - e.g. the identical wikia software, implementing the MediaWiki protocol - already exists. Maybe federating it would somehow improve it, though it would also open it up to have greater vulnerabilities especially when non-scientists get involved, e.g. a w/article/conservative/vaccine vs. a w/article/real/vaccine. Scientists can handle these controversies, but people who do not have the base knowledge with which to properly understand, e.g. ivermectin, are not going to be able to distinguish between the truth vs. the lies.

So the people that would put it to the best use don't absolutely need it - sure it would be nice but peer-reviewed articles already exist - while the ones for whom it would be most damaging are almost certainly going to be the primary target audience.

"I (want to keep my job and therefore I) AGREE WITH YOU 100%"

They collect the big bucks, the rest of us can suck dirt - barely not able to afford a home, food, medical care, etc. Oh wait, sorry, I meant "YES SIR/MAM!"

"Job titles are actually a fluid concept - why feel a strong need to label everything?" :-D

Look out for the sequel - Too Fast Too Fourier :-P

The bottom looks like a mathematical function to introduce noise into the equation. As in "take shape => make it less shape-shaped" (where shape was one of square, rectangle, circle, oval, etc... at least on the before side). Perhaps it works by scanning the periphery and introducing additional vertices at random spots in order to increase the resolution of the polygon!? Or, you know, maybe they just kicked the box a bunch of times really hard with their feet. :-P

That is perfectly consistent within Missouri. In their eyes, allowing same-sex marriages is "bad" while doing things like this is "good".

Ironically, despite what the Bible says - e.g. in Peter 3:7 commanding husbands to likewise treat their wives with respect, and the punishment of literal death commanded for adultery.

So they are doing the opposite of what the Bible commands themselves, while still using that book as justification for working to overturn things like Roe v. Wade for everyone else. Jesus Himself must be livid at how these hypocrites are abusing His name, and polluting the message of "show love/kindness to one another my dudes, especially those who you disagree with". People are literally dying.

The goal of any medical institution should be to generate profits.

capitalists

First, a lot of people are indeed falling into solipsism. However, not everyone is, and not everything is "impossible". It is true that the barriers can sometimes be high, but they are never insurmountable - e.g., how hard would it be for someone to go get a medical degree? Okay, so that one is high, but there are other, much more low-hanging fruit! e.g. if a religious authority figure says that "nobody will die", and then a couple of months later, half the congregation dies, that does not need a decade's worth of study to figure out that the person "lied". Either knowingly or unknowingly.

Which brings me to point 2: if you can say the former phrase about lying unknowingly, then the definition of lying must be a bit broader than what you are using? People can be said to be "living a lie", as you said b/c they find out later - but perhaps even if they do not? Google's AI when I type in "lie" says:

used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression

So someone can be lying unknowingly if they pass on a statement that is itself a lie - and depending on the context, the punishment might not even be that much less severe, i.e. whenever the consequences are highly severe. But it varies with the level of "responsibility" aka the expectations set forth. Example: a nurse repeats word-for-word what they are told by a doctor to say - are they lying? Not really, especially if they are clear to attribute what is being done, in terms of merely "relaying" the message. The message itself may be a lie, but the person was clear, so is not a responsible agent for the deception, even if participating in it. But a doctor prescribing ivermectin on the other hand? They should have known better, and thereby for a person in such a position of responsibility to pass on improper information, may still constitute a "lie" in that case, even if an unknowing one - b/c they should have known. And if they did not know, then they should have found out. Others may need DECADES of study to catch up to them, but for a doctor who already knows the foundational framework, it is only a matter of a few hours to read some primary source material to catch up on exactly whether that drug is indicated in that scenario, and like what the side-effects are, etc.

In the above I had to make a major presumption here, in that someone did not pollute the various information streams that doctors have access to. Indeed if that were to happen, then it is possible for even doctors to, while passing on incorrect information, not be "lying" while doing so, in the same manner as a nurse. But I think at least that my former scenario is what happened during the pandemic? Someone started talking about using that horse drug, doing the work of a scientist except skipping the parts about actually doing proper testing, and so essentially doing unauthorized "human trial experiments" on actual, live human test subjects! :-( Perhaps they thought it was for the greater good even, like if people were going to die anyway then at least they could offer some protection? Except that's not even how that drug works under the most ideal conditions, thus doing so violates the most foundational and sacred oaths of the medical profession: to first do no harm. So then... it's a lie either way? Whether through nearly criminal ignorance or to fully criminal and unethical behavior. Tbf, not every "doctor" is a good one, BUT, in defense of my position, EVERY doctor (in the USA at least, and I thought in every part of the world?) MUST take the Hippocratic Oath. So it gets REALLY hard to defend such a person then, who either lied while taking it (in that they could not in fact manage to uphold those standards of integrity) or got lazy later on in terms of upholding it.

Which begs the next question: how can someone both "lie" and yet "not know that they are lying" at the same time? Admittedly this one is fairly complex in needing to dig deeper into human psychology. Or, I don't even think this is unique to humans, though it does seem far more developed in us than in animals. Let us switch scenarios b/c I think I have an easier one here. Let us say that a person has read the Christian Bible, and know for certain what the commandment by Jesus to "love one another" means - it means to be patient, and... you know what, let's just stop there. So when someone KNOWS that they have been COMMANDED to be patient, and yet they are NOT patient, but they still call themselves a "Christian" - that word means "follower of" btw - how then are they not "lying"? The answer, I believe, is that they are lying to themselves. Specifically, I am referring to cognitive dissonance: b/c our brains are complex enough that we utilize neural pathways that interconnect with one another without necessarily having to uphold one single, consistent Truth, it is fully possible for someone to both "know that they are lying", but also "not know that they are lying", at the same time. Such a person is usually LOUD in their condemnation of others who lie, and who e.g. are impatient, and yet they do not choose to see that they themselves are being thus. Hence the lie, b/c this is "knowing / willful misrepresentation of the Truth", the caveat being that here, only half of the cognitive processes are aware that it is a lie, while the other half act as if it is legit. These people will look you full in your face and claim that they are telling you the Truth. And that is the Truth. But it is also a lie.

2+2=4 | {2, 4} ∈ ℤ is a True statement? But if I say then that 2+2=2 | {2, 4} ∈ ℤ is also a True statement, is that a lie? What if I have no idea what those things ("numbers") mean? That gets back to that "accountability" issue from above - I really should know that, and all the more so if I am the one bringing them up? So acknowledging that and setting it aside, adding statements that are untrue converts a True statement into a False one. "There exists a True statement within this pair of statements" is True, but the overall pack of them is False. Hence, someone suffering from cognitive dissonance is guilty of telling a lie, to themselves. We all do it I am sure, it takes ENORMOUS efforts not to, especially when our culture is... well, as you mentioned, the way that it is. Though as we agreed: it is a descriptive statement to say that if and when that happens, those statements are still "lies", even if they are only partially known while partially unknown.

And all the more so when someone raises themselves up to become a (co-)leader of a nation - e.g. by voting. In that case, the statement that "they should have known" raises that specter, yet again, of responsibility: if they are going to chart the way forward for the entire nation - i.e. by depriving people of certain rights, like to medical care - then they should have thought deeper about the matter, and the excuse "but I did not know" does not work anymore. The reason it does not work anymore is b/c if you ever cross one of these people, they will cite this exact thing to you: YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. It is the metric by which they judge - so it is not even me judging them, so much as acknowledging that this is the metric by which they judge themselves, and indeed by which we all judge our "leaders". At which point... they really should have known better, than to believe in a lie so hard that they actually vote on it, and all the more so when they do that in order to overturn the determinations of the people who actually DO know better - e.g. the doctors, who are aware that ivermectin is a horse drug, and if ever to be used in humans is only for extreme cases and for malaria, not covid and especially not as a preventative, and all the more so not as a substitute for a vaccine.

simply using a LLM to condense an introduction from whatever data you feed it isn’t plagiarism.

Agreed. Though as you are saying, it is what you DO with it after that, which may make it plagiarism. A student using an LLM to personally learn? Not plagiarism. A student turning in that summary as evidence that they "understand" the subject matter? Especially without bothering to read it first? Now that is plagiarism!:-P

LLMs are tools like any other. Using a gun to kill someone? Well... is it self-defense? Then not murder. Are you a court-appointed executioner, in a state that offers the death penalty? Then not murder. Was it an accident? Then not... exactly murder. B/c you are Russia/Israel and you want the land next to you? Somehow also not "murder", depending on who you ask, but c'mon... really?!

Tools, by lowering the barrier to performing a task beyond what can be done naturally and unaided, mostly just enact the will of the user, though somewhat also act to "tempt" the user to do things that they might not have otherwise been able to do - e.g. murder, or plagiarize.

But congress-people did not need LLMs to pass bills written by lobbyists - the only thing changing there is how easy the latter process is, though to the congress-person it is the same level of ease as before, zero effort required:-P.

I would naively think that as well - you would expand your alphabet of "symbols" to include both single letters and numbers and punctuation but also common words as well. It is still a lot of combinations to have to try though, even if less than each letter by itself.

I am not seeing where copyrights came into this discussion, but fwiw the bills I mentioned were passed many years ago, before any LLMs existed.

I don't think congressional bills even need to be copyrighted.

Academic papers do not either, although plagiarism still exists, yet has nothing to do with copyrights.

Summaries are fine for like a Google search, but for a scientific paper using other words without proper attribution is enough to lose not only a job but to have one's degree revoked, even decades after being awarded.

Never forget! :-D

The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.

The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people "feel" informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?

Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we're working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an "encyclopedia"?

Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.

"Well-regulated militia" - oh wait no, forget that part, it's impossible to allow any kind of regulation at all.

"You can impeach someone for criminal offenses" - oh wait no let's ditch that one too...

No wait, I want it back again!

I also want back the 3/5ths of a person thing, but let's expand that to also include anyone with a college degree or lives in a city, suburb, or even those in rural areas who don't support their local Republican church strongly enough.

"One rule for me, while the polar opposite rule for thee" - it's not hard to understand in the slightest. We all played these games as toddlers, the difference being that some of us allowed ourselves to grow up. :-|

It goes much deeper than that, imho: "every accusation is a confession". It bespeaks how they make fun of the ones that they do not agree with - and therefore imagine that the "other side" simply MUST be doing that to them (regardless of any evidence yay or nay to that effect).

But to answer your question: yes there are a lot of "city folk" inside of Texas - mostly Austin and Dallas - but since they are concentrated into those areas, the state overall votes along with the rural base. Except that they fear that their children even in the rural areas are leaving Christianity in droves, so that too.

Mostly though, it is a "truthiness" statement - not meant to be factually correct so much as to evoke an emotional response. e.g. the Holy Bible, which they claim to revere, says things like "judge not, let you be judged in return" applied to non-Christians but also has enormous punishments for Christian LEADERS who are caught in things like infidelity especially with under-age children, both of which need to be swapped 100% in reverse in order to match their actions as depicted in this meme. As in, maybe people aren't making fun of you b/c you follow the Bible, but b/c you claim to but then don't?

It's got a lot of good stuff. Like, "the worker deserves their wages", no wait let's throw that out, and "take care of the poor & needy", no let's ditch that too, and "your breasts are fiiiiine gurl", no wait let's never read that out loud ever, anywhere.

My favorite is "be skeptical - test everything", oh no wait no let's redact that too... (I just realized how that doesn't mesh with the most important verse of all: "just do whatever we tell you, no questions asked, capiche?")

The hilarious part is not that they are reading the Bible - it is that they are not! Likewise for the Constitution that they showed up on January 6th to "defend".

This goes beyond riders. "Bought" politicians are SO bought that when lobbyists ask politicians to do stuff, they do it unquestioningly. And I mean: THE WHOLE BILL - not just one sentence within it.

But, you may ask, aren't they also incredibly lazy too? And the answer is yes! So the lobbyists have to do all the work to write out the bills... and then the congressperson simply signs it, easy peasy. "I, insert name here, from state, insert state name here, do solemnly swear that..." - AND I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING, the bill was passed while STILL saying both "insert name here" and also "insert state name here"!!!!!!

So while I am shocked and sickened afresh to hear of plagiarism within academic circles, which I had hoped would be one of the last hold-outs, literal beacons and bastions of Freedom and Truth and all that rizz, politics was the opposite of that and has allowed plagiarism for a LONG time.

I mean, I would not say that it is reality, just that they act like it is - except even that much is not true, b/c when they get REALLY sick, they finally show up at a hospital begging to be saved. So even they know, deep down, where the medicine is at. Cognitive dissonance is a horrific, terrible thing:-(.