FaceDeer

If you divide the sides up to “people who care about this stuff” and “people who just want to make games”, then yeah. One side’s doing okay.

Frankly, nobody that’s involved in this fight are looking good to me on either “side.” It’s a fight that shouldn’t be happening at all. This is a game engine. Why is it a battleground for this?

Yeah, I’ve got my own anecdote to chip in with on that, my dad was in the hospital for a month with a plethora of various potentially-fatal difficulties he was fighting with. There were ups and downs but many of the problems were being addressed. Then the diagnosis finally came in that the root cause was advanced lymphoma and there was no realistic chance of “beating” it, he died later that very day.

I don’t think that it’s necessarily a question of “willing yourself to die” or “willing yourself to live,” but I do think that one can decide how much effort is worth putting into the fight versus deciding to relax and let it go. Whether consciously or subconsciously.

Yeah. Scientific papers may teach an AI about science, but Reddit posts teach AI how to interact with people and “talk” to them. Both are valuable.

The term AI was coined in 1956 at a computer science conference and was used to refer to a broad range of topics that certainly would include machine learning and neural networks as used in large language models.

I don’t get the “it’s not really AI” point that keeps being brought up in discussions like this. Are you thinking of AGI, perhaps? That’s the sci-fi “artificial person” variety, which LLMs aren’t able to manage. But that’s just a subset of AI.

By the time intergalactic navigation is relevant we’ll have likely dismantled Earth. The vast majority of it is just sitting there generating gravity, a huge waste of its potential.

I was going to suggest the Great Attractor or the Shapley Supercluster, but I think your suggestion is better. It’s more point-like and since it’s farther away (well outside of the reachable universe) it results in a more uniform set of directions over long distances.

Of course, cultural influence will be big. If these explorers are Terragen then most likely the Milky Way’s north/south direction will be pretty deeply ingrained in their coordinate systems. They might keep on using that, since it’s not like manual astrolabe-style navigation will ever be relevant at that level of technology.

If this isn’t a military battle then that makes Israel’s actions look even worse.

They were triggered indiscriminately. Israel had no way of knowing who was holding each pager or where it was located when it went off.

It’s complicated, but this might be considered a war crime. A key quote from the article:

A booby trap is defined as “any device designed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object,” according to Article 7 of a 1996 adaptation of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which Israel has adopted. The protocol prohibits booby traps “or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.”

The prohibition is presumably intended to make it less likely that a civilian or other uninvolved person will get injured or killed by one of these seemingly harmless objects. If you’re booby-trapping military equipment or military facilities then that’s not a problem, civilians wouldn’t be using those.

I’m Canadian. I would say that I don’t think much about it in terms of current events, I haven’t heard much in the news about it in recent years. And my assumption from that is that’s probably a good sign. There used to be a steady stream of bad news, and “no news” lies along the path in between “bad news” and “good news.”

I did see a video recently about Iraq’s plans for a giant new port facility on that little tidbit of Persian Gulf shoreline it has and road/rail link from it up through to Turkey, and thence onward into Europe. It sounded like a very optimistic development if it can be seen through to fruition, opening an alternative trade corridor to the Suez Canal. Anything that diversifies a country’s economy is a good thing, and anything that removes single points of failure in global shipping networks is also a good thing. I can’t imagine the Houthi obstruction of the Red Sea would still be a problem by the time that route opens up but at least it’ll be an option if something like it happens again.

Things change. There was a period before this information was easily available; this repository only goes back to 2013. Now there’s a period after this information, too. Things start and eventually they end.

Here’s hoping that some neat new things start up in its place.

The Fediverse seems a lot “bubblier” than Reddit, with people quicker to hit the downvote button for views that intrude. I’ve lost a lot of drive to engage here, I find myself often dropping a comment into a discussion and then never looking back at it. Unfortunate, but I suppose not too surprising when communities are smaller.

It’s often not a choice between an AI-generated summary and a human-generated one, though. It’s a choice between an AI-generated summary and no summary.

DMCA is about copyright (that’s what the “C” is). The name of a show isn’t copyrighted, it’s trademarked. Different type of IP altogether.

“Takedown notice” has legal meaning, it’s not some random cease-and-desist letter that you can draft for anything you want and that has no legal weight other than that it might be scary.

The chart is actually not so terrifying once the cause of it was discovered. Basically, new regulations reducing sulfur content in ship fuel that went into effect in 2020 and put an end to an unintentional geoengineering experiment that had been running due to the enhanced cloud cover the sulfur dioxide particles were causing.

So this is a strong data point showing that solar geoengineering could work, if we resume it deliberately under more controlled conditions.

No, it’s opt-in. If you do nothing you won’t have it.

They’re not “pushing their Recall shit whether we like it or not”, they’re explicitly making it opt-in. They gave a fuck about their users’ complaints and made a bunch of modifications to it.

You may still not like it, but give them some credit.

If you simply don’t want to engage in a discussion with him, then that’s fine, you should let him know that you’re not interested in talking about it. You don’t have to justify your choices to him, if you want to use a particular browser then that’s fine and if he spontaneously decides he needs to “talk you out of it” then that’s a dick move. Tell him that you don’t want to debate the subject and it’s no skin off of his nose so he shouldn’t try to engage you in one.

But if you’re asking “how can I convince him that he’s wrong”, well that is engaging in the debate. And if you’re going to engage in a debate you should try to be as open about it as you’d like your debate opponent to be in turn. Have you considered that perhaps he has some valid points and is not taking that position just to be contrarian?

Personally, I find that it’s pretty much impossible to talk someone with a strongly-held position out of that position. The value of Internet debates with people like that is that lots of spectators who don’t have such strongly-held positions may be watching, but when it’s a one-on-one situation it’s likely to be a futile and frustrating effort with no benefit. So I would advise going with the “don’t bother engaging” route. But of course, if you feel strongly that you want to engage, I can’t change your mind on that and won’t try. It’s your time to spend.

I think it’s generally pointless, spiteful, and only harms ordinary users who might someday have found value in coming across your old posts on Reddit from a search. It doesn’t harm Reddit itself, the “value” of your individual account is very small compared to their vast archive. And they still have it, deletion just removes it from the public-facing front end. If the reason you’re deleting it is because you don’t want AI to be trained on it, that ship has long ago sailed. There are downloadable archives of Reddit floating around that it will never be deleted from.

So I wouldn’t bother.