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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • But these are the things people are complaining about - not AI itself, but the people making it, the reasons that they’re making it, and the consequences that that is having on the human condition.

    For your example, people don’t complain about it making Google obsolete or something, but about the fact that LLMs like ChatGPT are wrong about 53% of the time and often completely make stuff up, and that the companies making and pushing them as a replacement for search engines have collectively shrugged their shoulders and literally said “there’s nothing we can do to prevent it” when asked about these “hallucinations” as they call them.






  • I found a couple of interesting graphs:

    I dont really like how this first one divided their different groups (there’s probably a fairly major difference between the lower end of “middle class” and the top which brings up their percentage) and the way percentages work really skews the scale, but it does paint a similar picture. This second one is the more interesting, I think, because it shows that income inequality is pretty similar across many countries - before taxes. Taxes seem to be the big equalizer in other countries, with France going from slightly worse than the US before taxes to roughly two times closer to “perfect equality,” according to the metric they used, which puts it nearly on par with Sweden, who is miles ahead of every other country before taxes. This alone doesn’t say anything about wealth inequality due to how the wealthy actually live and use their wealth, but it does paint a picture of how closing tax loopholes can work.


  • 50% of Boston’s workforce commutes using the T every day, but it doesn’t show up on the map. I’m assuming because most of those stops are in outlying towns and, therefore, only make up a minority of the commuting workforce in each area. According to the federal government, the T is the third best public transit system in the US due to it being the fastest average commute out of any by at least half an hour, only outclassed by the quality of DC and Seattle (I believe, might be Portland that’s #1? I’d have to look again).


  • Yep, they literally cannot work any other way than as a ponzi scheme. Because the people “earning” want to take more money out of the system than they put in, and the company is taking money out as well just to keep the game running and the employees paid, as well as to make a profit. So you need substantially more suckers buying into the system than the money that is being paid out.

    Eventually, somebody is gonna be left holding an empty bag.


  • I’m reminded of a comment I saw once where somebody was saying how when they were young, they were told that AI would do the miserable jobs so that people would have more time to make art and poetry, while today the AI makes art and poetry so that we can work longer hours at the miserable jobs.

    And the AI bros say that this is just a necessary step towards automating away the crappy jobs, but it’s not like they’ll stop automating everything else if/when AI reaches that point. The AI will still continue to automate away the hyman experience of art and culture for the rich. They’re not going to suddenly decide to implement Luxury Gay Space Communism at that point. They’ll just cram everybody into Kow Loon style ghettos.


  • So the way Tumblr works is that your account is basically a blog, with your home page on the site being populated with posts from the accounts that you follow. You can reblog posts onto your own account and comment on them to create individual conversation threads like this one. At one point, there was a bug in the edit post system that let you edit the entirety of a post when you reblogged it, including what other people had said previously, and even the original post. This would only affect your specific reblog of it, of course, but you could edit a post to say something completely different from the original and create a completely unrelated comment chain.





  • In its own way, I’d say. I saw a poll recently asking people when they made their account, and it seems that the majority of users have been on there since the 2010s. All the toxic users left for Twitter after the porn ban, and that seems to have really chilled out the site.

    Modern Tumblr reminds me of Lemmy in a lot of ways. Less tech oriented, but would rather burn the site to the ground than see it become one of the modern corporate social media sites. “Become unmarketable” seems to have become the guiding motto there.




  • Tell me you don’t know what you’re talking about without telling me.

    You don’t need to hit the bullet with a bullet. You just hit it with a shotgun blast or grenade, either destroying it outright or blowing it off course enough that it loses its energy and becomes ineffective. We literally do this all the time on tanks and humvees. It’s called a hardkill APS. The Russians had one working in the 70s. Modern ones are capable of detecting incoming tank rounds moving between 700-1700m/s, identifying which will hit the vehicle, and blowing them out of the air once they reach 10-15 meters away. All in a span of nanoseconds. It’s standard equipment on Israel’s MBT, and Germany, the US, and the UK have all field tested various systems and are considering making hardkill systems standard for the next generation of tanks and IFVs. Multiple companies across multiple countries make them for upgrade kits. Germany already produces vehicles with standard hardkill APS for their export market.

    This isn’t crazy sci-fi technology. It’s just rocket science.


  • I’m pretty sure she’s currently facing up to 45,000 euros in fines and up to 5 years in jail over the whole Imane Khelif situation, if the French legislature decides that she was a party responsible for cyber bullying (and Musk as well).

    Will she ever see the inside of a cell, even if they decide to go after her? I highly doubt it, and when she said this, she definitely wasn’t in any danger of being arrested.

    But we can always dream.