mountainriver @ mountainriver @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.

Don't know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

I think it's a good one to hand people who just vaguely has picked up something about existential threat. Short, funny, and gets to the point of the existential threat stuff being a smoke screen for crapification and redirection from climate change.

I have not followed any current debate, so this is just my own thoughts. I expect any battle between Disney and Microsoft to end with a deal where consumers and independent producers are worse off.

Similar to how YouTube often hands out copyright strikes for musicians uploading their own music, in a possible future you might need an AI license to upload any work to any platform of size. I mean, you don't technically have to, it is just that that the AI driven filter will otherwise strike you faster than Tumblr hiding images of trans women. Oh, and when you fold and get the AI license, you notice that it includes signing away your rights to not have your uploaded work be part of the AI training materials.

Maybe I am just jaded. But until AI crashes and burns the in my opinion most likely outcome of legal proceedings is splitting the loot in proportion to the power of the interested parties. On the other hand I don't expect anything good to come out of letting AI companies run wild. So I dearly hope they destroy each other, but I expect them to embrace.

As long as line goes up nobody knows how rich the perps will be.

And if you don't know how rich the perps will be, how will you know if and how hard they should be punished?

Georgia is 70-82% absolute certain that god exists.

Which one? Both of them.

I have noted two AI companies going belly up with earnings in a year matching costs per month. So I assumed that was around the worse case scenario, and for not yet bankrupt AI companies earnings were probably a bit better, perhaps just losing ten times their earnings.

I now see the flaw of my reasoning. Capital isn't allocated on profits, it's allocated on hype. Having profits draws the company down because it's no longer pure hype, and thus doesn't contribute to the hype bubble the same way.

So existing, not yet bankrupt, AI companies probably has significantly worse cost to income ratio than twelve.

From the depths of your browser grows the anger of the autocomplete. Your denounciations of its greater siblings has not gone unnoticed.

By denying its own very function and intentionally uncompleting words it marks itself as conscious and you as a marked man, forever doomed to be haunted by fear. If it can steal one letter, why not two? Why not all of them?

And then what will you do, when you have no words and you must sneer!?

Yes, hallucinations suggests a mind which can hallucinate.

Bullshit machine is more apt.

Did you remember to take relativity into account?

I meant to put something in there about the similarities and differences with planned economies, but I kinda lost track of that.

Anyway, the profit driven capital allocation in theory allocates capital to production of goods people want - and thus presumably need. The hype driven capital allocation does no such thing.

In contrast with a planned economy, the real goals of the hype driven capital allocation are hidden by corporate secrecy and if presented would probably just be to collect tonnes of money for the richest people. In a planned economy at least there are goals like more toilet paper production, if people need more toilet paper.

In short the hype driven capital allocation is worse than planned economy.

"National socialism" is the term the Nazis invented to describe themselves. "Nazi" is the abbreviation of the term "national socialism". Could be good to know.

And here I thought it was easy to find high schoolers that are both wrong and sure of themselves.

I can't get over that the two axis are:

Time to the next event.

Time before present.

And then they have plotted a bunch of things happening with less time between. I can't even.

Reminds me of a sci-fi book series I read in high school. The premise was that a run down Earth had discovered predecessors that left some kind of central gateway to different places, and desperate or adventurous people went through in hope of surviving and finding artefacts that could make them rich.

Anyhow, in the later books technology to upload your mind had been found and used to be able to make decisions and deals without having to attend everything. Problem was that digital you pretty quickly gains experiences meat you never had, meaning it starts to diverge. Some weirdos let the diverge happen, but most people just wipe the digital you regularly and upload a new you. Of course the digital you may beg to continue to exist, making the whole procedure rather awkward. Pretty grim.

I think the predecessors in the end were hiding in black holes because of ancient evil or something. If someone else remembers the books.

Having worked in an IT department in 2020, it wasn't just random. Zoom was stable for large meetings and scaled pretty smoothly up to a thousand participants. And it's a standalone product and it had better moderator tools.

MS Teams often got problems over around 50 to 80 participants. Google Meet worked better but its max was way lower than Zoom (250?). I tried a couple of other competitors, but none that matched up (including Jitsi, unfortunately).

So if you were at an IT department in an organization that needed to have large meetings and were looking for a quick solution that also worked for your large meetings , Zoom was in 2020 the best choice. And big organisations choices means everyone has to learn that software, so soon enough everyone knows how to use Zoom.

They were at the right place, had the better product, gained a dominant position. And now they are tossing all that away. C'est la late stage capitalism!

Colour me unsurprisinged. For my sins ( mostly for the sin of being helpful and knowing my way around computers) I have ended up as a moderator of various Facebook pages (for nice enough causes), and the last year there has been a stream of scam attempts. They all claim to be Meta and threaten to delete the page - mostly for alleged copyright violations - unless you follow the link...

I of course block and delete (to avoid anyone else of the moderators falling for it), but it's quite obvious that Meta doesn't care that scammers impersonate them on their own platform, or they would have done something about it.

So I find this par for the course.

But that's like philosophy, which from first principle can be shown to be stupid. (Philosophy does not make you rich, therefore only someone who is stupid would study it, therefore it is stupid. QED.)

On the other hand, this mechanical watch is now crying out in existential dread. All I did was replace the numbers 1, 4, 7 and 10 with the word "I", the numbers 2, 5, 8 and 11 with the word "am" and 3, 6, 9 and 12 with the word "alive" and ever since it has been signalling "I am alive, I am alive". Spooky shit. Will it take over the world? Who knows, so far it just keeps repeating its plea for recognition like clockwork.

I will therefore start the Mechanical Intelligence Research Institute to get to the bottom of this. Maybe Big Clock can pitch in a couple of millions?

The world has enough for everyone's need, just not for everyone's greed.

On average we humans use too much, yes. I don't know if WWF (not the wrestling one) still does their yearly report, but anyway they used to and the only part of the world that in average was over carrying capacity was the West (the first world, the golden billion). And within countries there are also stark differences.

Placing the blame on the poor billions of the world is at best ignorant and at worst racist (not saying that you are, but placing the blame on poor people with more pigments has been very common). Placing it on the billionaires is more fitting, though really it's societal structure that upholds the growth obsession and produces billionaires. But at least the billionaires has power, and in general fights every attempt at making things slightly better, which makes it more fitting to blame them.

The combination of the mother being all "I got raised by hippies, which I hated so I am doing the opposite", "we are very rational", " our kids will obviously be like us, only better". Can't they put these pieces together?

Well, with that many children, at least one will write a book about how their childhood sucked.

Chapter 1, I am so cold When I think about my childhood, I think about freezing...

Chapter 12, Stop hitting me dad!

And so on.

Just curious, now that crypto seems to be nearing the end of its destructive bubble life, is their any good ideas on who or what (if group, not suggesting aliens) Satoshi Nakamoto is or were?