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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Were probably? That’s a giant understatement and you know it.

    Ai will save billions of lives and improve the living standard for everyone on the planet, it’ll be just like mobile phones where the biggest benefits come to the poorest communities - tech haters often ignore this reality, millions of children in Africa, Asia, etc were only able to get access to education through mobile infrastructure.

    The internet has given everyone access to huge amounts of education resources and it’s only increased as they technology matures - current LLMs are amazing for language learners and for people who need things like English articles explained in their own language, I just asked chatgpt to explain the code I’m working on in Tagalog and it did it without hesitation (I can’t speak for the accuracy personally but looks legit) it even translated variable names but not function calls.

    And this before we’ve scratched the surface of it’s utility, I’ll tell you one thing if you ever say to your grandkids ‘o I was against ai when it came out’ they’ll look at up like you’d look at someone who said they didn’t think math would catch on or that iron would never be as popular as bronze.


  • Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.

    I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’

    People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you


  • Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.

    The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they’ve put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.

    It doesn’t really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo – of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does…

    Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it


  • The problem is that’s kinda true of pretty much everywhere so your choices are to isolate and only get lied to by your own politicians and corporate overlords or to accept the complexity of the world and try to work on moving forward where possible.

    I do agree that this entirely greed based approach from the company is wrong but honestly I prefer it to your extreme xenophobia towards them. Yes there are issues with China just like all our countries have issues, they’re not the devil though not by a long shot.




  • Wow you’ve brought back unhappy memories ‘a for achievement, d for effort’ and ‘you got everything right but poor presentation, c’

    Worst was when I’d to a test and get all the answers right and they’d question how I did so well, bitch because you can’t take marks away for no reason on a multiple choice. Actual worst was that this was 1990 and they wouldn’t let me do my homework typed ‘when you get a job your boss is going to need things hand written’ fucking what lol


  • That’s ridiculous, if I think that one apple plus one apple is going to result in three apples then I try it and find it’s actually two I’m not going to blame the universe I’m going to know my understanding of arithmetic is flawed.

    It’s not the math of the human made model that controls the universe that would be silly. The model is the current best approximation of the actual math that defines the universe.

    An accurate model allows you to predict the outcome of events, like we can predict how many apples will be in the bag. With some things it gets very complicated because there’s lots of things and various possible states but we can model that with statistics and calculous and stuff. We can even make a set of all possibile results and use that as a map to tell us if something is possible, how likely it is and what we can do to make it more or less likely - nothing the guy said was controversial, we can map cellar interactions even if that requires using complex multidimensional math (mathematics have had to get used to doing this sort of math a lot recently so I’m sure they’ll manage)




  • Yes that’s a model, I’m not saying the model magically controls reality but that the underpinning reality is math - the reason you always have two apples in a bag when you start with one and add another is because of math, the human model of that isn’t controlling it but if we want two apples in a bag and we currently only have one then we can use our model to determine how many apples we need to add into the bag.

    The same is true of more complex systems, if we can accurately model the cellar interactions then we can derive solutions in the same way



  • But it doesn’t do that instantly and it does it for good reason, eyes and the sections of the brain using them require energy and are vulnerable to infection so in situations where they don’t provide an advantage they increase the likelihood of death before breeding thus giving any offspring born with less energy devoted to eyes has a small advantage which over s very long time results in them being selected away.

    So unless the creatures reach a perfect form for their environment then they’ll always be in the process of changing and have some of the old junk in there. Also if the formerly useful part doesn’t make any real difference to survivability there’s no force driving it to be selected away from, it might eventually be removed by lots of pure chance events but that’s going to take a huge amount of generations meaning the middle time where there’s junk not yet removed us going to be very long








  • Conspiracy loons are wild on Facebook so I know what you mean, it’s so hard not to poke them occasionally. I like that the feed is so broken you just start getting the most insane things - block as many shitty pages as you can, like all the ones that post about how a guy with one leg drove a truck 19 hours a day to pay for his grandsons double cancer so that means poor people shouldn’t get hand outs. Then you start getting into the real weeds, oh and block the bot farm ones, you’ll recognise them they post pickles comics and no human could bring themselves to do that.

    When you start seeing Indian mechanical engineering memes like ‘how to design flat roof pitch common mistake 💯 slope degree 13.5° ☑️’ you’re getting close, you’ll start seeing things like ‘today it takes us two years to build a family home but ancient people could do it in three weeks’ the comments will be full of people who know every facet of whatever conspiracies the post is somehow referencing, which is normally a lot.

    ‘normies don’t realize how much easier life was when we had sonic resonance construction tools, if they did they’d rotate the sixth tower of Thomas Tesla to reopen the Elizabethan Toltec free energy portal’ and you think they’re just in their own world but everyone will be replying ‘yeah, robin Williams was killed because if you watch Mrs doubtfire at the same time as eyes wide shut the dialog syncs up and they warn biden will cover up the free energy machine’

    Except of course they can say it in 20,000 words if they feel like it.