alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]

deleted by creator

The idea that something that affects society can be nonpolitical is just your bias towards the status quo.

Everything was always political, and the status quo has always depended on hordes of lumpen trained to identify with their own oppressors over their own interests.

Before there were networks of right-wing radio and websites distributing right-wing talking points, they just used TV, newspapers, mailing lists, posters, etc. The effect was still 100 million Americans cheering when the national guard shot students protesting against the state sending their friends to die while participating in atrocities in Vietnam.

Even gardening is political; the notion that you should only plant grass and ornamental plants, mow your lawn once a week, and any deviation was a flaw was popularized and enforced by William Levitt to keep people from having too much time to read and become communists.

Similar sentiments spring up after the civil war regarding edible gardening and use of fruiting trees in urban planning, for fear that black people will live off foraging instead of working.

skeuomorphism

The only time the chunkiness of grafting visual clutter and UI elements from a machine that was designed with mechanical constraints and older use cases/capabilities makes sense is if users will not have time to learn the UI and already learned another UI.

Using knobs you have to turn with the mouse with a wooden background instead of volume slider+number field because that’s what was on some piece of audio equipment from the 1900s just makes the software awful to use. It has no place in specialist audio software the user is expected to spend hours using.

I always liked the Nostromo’s design.

I don’t think it has a meaningful effect. Libs call themselves socialists all the time. For every case you’re able to argue for socialism and not have people’s brains shut down, you get 10 “those tankies aren’t real socialists! Socialism is when you for food stamps and means-tested college subsidies”

How much do you think hotels pay for mattresses? Probably a lot less than you.

It’s got all my addons.

I disagree about the coherency.

Coherency requires relating symbolic meanings. AI just uses statistical analysis.

Consider if you were locked in the national library of Thailand. You don’t speak Siamese, and any pictures or bilingual dictionaries were removed.

Given a thousand years, you could look at the patterns and produce text similar to what someone who writes Siamese would write, but there’s still no coherency because you cannot connect the meaning behind any of the words.

That doesn’t necessarily mean your outputs are useless though, someone who does read Siamese can have you generate outputs until you print out something they can infer a coherent thought from, but you’re fundamentally unable to be trained to do that yourself.

If a human being takes people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works without using any LLM/AI or automation tool, is the final result content theft too?

We’re getting into ethics territory. IP is a social construct and we live under capitalism, our model for determining what is and isn’t theft should be selected by what supports artists and consumers against capitalists.

they only see the AIs as content thieves.

AI is a method of content theft, it takes other people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works, without any actual coherency.

I don’t like that it churns out slop that displaces actual content.

I also don’t like the way it’s sped up enshitification of google and news sites. I didn’t think it could get worse than pages of listicles written by disinterested journalists paid fuckall to churn out 10 a day, but now you have chatGPT churning out 100 completely useless articles a day.

How would our minds not being governed by this universe imply free will?

If anything, I’d assume the you don’t have free will if your actions weren’t chosen from experience, but were controlled by a supernatural ghost.

Consciousness has nothing to do with it, observe in this case means “affected something we can measure”.

No idea. I can see why they’d do it if someone was giving out invites to tons of people who literally do not seed, but you can’t expect everyone to have a good ratio since they must all average out to 1.

I think most of the talk is just to encourage seeding.

It’s fundamentally impossible for everyone to have a positive ratio.

we’re not talking about the nature of the system here, we’re talking about this specific instance.

If I buy a million lotto tickets that have a 50% payout, it would be incomplete if not deceptive to point at one ticket and say “Well you might win 100 bucks, we don’t really know” instead of “the reason they’re selling you those tickets is because the risk and expense is greater than the payout.”

Hiring people is extremely expensive and having those people do nothing between projects is even more so.

That’s still an example of NASA eating an expense of R&D while Lockheed gets the profits.

Just because a river flows south doesn’t mean you couldn’t find an eddy in the currents that flows north for a few seconds.

But the water still has nowhere to flow but south. If the cost was less than expected return, these companies would do this research internally. Even if for just one moment, one tiny aspect of the program did make a profit, it wouldn’t change the nature of the system.

If NASA was a profitable enterprise, it wouldn’t require external funding, and Lockheed and co would be doing that research themselves to keep that profit for themselves.

NASA isn’t like CNSA or Roscosmos in that they don’t make their own rockets. It exists first and foremost to funnel money to aerospace contractors by either directly contracting with them or providing R&D in cases where cost/risk is greater than expected profit.

A similar relationship exists with publicly funded universities selling patents to pharma.

I know right? Of course it’s sold at a loss, that’s why NASA is paying Boeing to do the research.

Can’t have Boeing waste money on R&D, that would hurt their shareholders.

Both sides developed jet engines. The allies didn’t get them into a fighter until after the war though.

Car dealership owners are a pretty big lobby, at least 20% of them are making 1.5m/y and tend to be very involved in local politics.

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~yagan/Capitalists.pdf