Schadrach

We have healthcare, the best healthcare actually

We actually do. We have some of the best healthcare in the world if you can afford it, and healthcare stats that make it absolutely clear just how few people that is.

Robot butler - robot waiters already exist, so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to repurpose one (although they’re only sold to businesses as far as I could tell)

There’s an Asian AI lab that’s demoed an early version of an AI-driven humanoid robot domestic servant. There are suggestions in might hit market within a few years and cost about as much as a decent used car. Figure those estimates are always too optimistic and something like 2035 and $15k is a possibly realistic estimate assuming nothing goes catastrophically wrong.

No it generally makes sense to teach kids to not cite Wikipedia. Though it is consistently checked and updated you can look at the wiki link and drama for the Israeli genocide just to see a perfect example of why it shouldn’t be cited.

Wikipedia is generally terrible for anything that was politically controversial since Wikipedia has been a thing. A lot of why is very intentionally buried in layers of bureaucracy and wikilawyering to make it look like totally reasonable, neutral point of view decision making. One of the big routes to viewpoint control on Wikipedia is arguments about notoriety and what is or is not a “reliable source” and what sources are sufficient to discuss a topic.

If we’re talking about Scott Alexander’s writings, I feel like Sort By Controversial reflects reality far too well. Fucking prescient.

Yeah. Though I liked Ra more than There Is No Antimemetics Division. Especially the way he did a certain thing involving right versus left aligned text early on that if you were paying attention should strongly trigger a “wait, how did that happen?” response in a way that hints at very important things.

Given the Lemmy view on AI, I wonder how many folks are now uninstalling the game and demanding a refund because it’s suddenly transformed into “AI slop”? Or demanding it be delisted from Steam since they didn’t disclose their use of AI on Steam?

To quote UNSONG Chapter 17: No Earthly Parents I Confess (https://unsongbook.com/chapter-18-no-earthly-parents-i-confess/ and yes it’s chapter 17 despite the URL, and I’m sure there’s something significant about that but I am unsure exactly what offhand, but everything in UNSONG is significant):

"Picture a maiden lost in the hills.

“Maiden” can mean either “young woman” or “virgin”. Its Greek and Hebrew equivalents have the same ambiguity, which is why some people think the person we call the Virgin Mary was actually supposed to be the Young Woman Mary – which might change the significance of her subsequent pregnancy a bit. People grew up faster, back in the days when they spoke of “maidens”. Mary was probably only fourteen when she gave birth.

I am a kabbalist. Words matter. Nowadays we have replaced “maiden” with “teenage girl”. A maiden and a teenager are the same thing, but their names drag different tracks through lexical space, stir up different waters. Synonymity aside, some young women are maidens and others are teenagers. The girl in our story was definitely a maiden, even though it was the 1970s and being a maiden was somewhat out of fashion."

Alien hand syndrome?

Chicken breast in a slow cooker full of salsa works well too. Or get one of those birria bombs (it’s like a bath bomb but spices), a pork loin and some Mexican beer (Corona or Modelo is fine, something in that general style), all in the slow cooker, come back half a day later.

Cranberry salad was a bowl of strawberry jello with cranberries and pecans with a layer of cool whip on top.

The variation of that I’ve had involved strawberry jello, whole berry cranberry sauce and canned pineapple tidbits with the pineapple juice from the can replacing the water in the jello. No nuts or fake whipped cream, though.

The two big ones tend to either be the environmental impact of data centers or simple worker protectionism (aka believing that commissioned art should be immune to automation, literally the same position the Luddites had about industrial automation in textile mills).

while not supporting the energy/water leech that is ai images?

Not as much of one as you think, these days. If you have something resembling a gaming PC from within the last 5 years or so you can probably run AI image generation locally, with how large a model and how complicated a workflow depending on your specs. Less stressful for the hardware than running a current AAA game even, depending on the model (possibly demanding more GPU RAM though).

The ai will always be generating in the confines of its training data

…and a human artist will be generating within the confines of their total experiences, even ones they aren’t consciously considering. Nothing is totally ex nihilo.

This moral panic about Abominable Intelligence’s supposedly soulless touch is pointless.

…especially because over time you’ll see an increasing number of artists incorporate AI tools into their workflows.

But like everything else, new tech always scares a significant subset of people, especially tech that can automate things that previously required more human effort or might cost some folks jobs/income - especially if they thought their work was immune to that sort of thing.

I remember an internet joke site decades ago doing one that was sports cars or ED drugs. Don’t recall the name of the site though. Quick search didn’t turn it up.

Depends on model tuning. Basically, you can tune a model to hallucinate less, or to write more human-like, but not really both at the same time, at least not for a model you could expect most users to run locally. For this sort of application (summarizing text), you’d tune heavily against hallucination, because ideally your bullet points are going to mostly be made up of direct paraphrase of article text, with a very limited need for fluid writing or anything even vaguely creative.

Doesn’t do that for me. I have to hold left click on a link for over a second to trigger it.

And yeah, pretty decent. It can produce a basically summary of a fair amount of text pretty quickly and generally accurately. It’s not an expert wordsmith, it won’t give a deep and thoughtful analysis of the poem you pointed it at or anything, but that’s not the use case. The use case is “give me the key bullet points of this article so I can decide if I should give it more attention.”, and it does that job pretty well.

Do people making that argument also find ad blockers even ten percent as horrible as this? They both ultimately have the same effect, which is your web browser not maximizing someone else’s profits by denying them a revenue opportunity.

I’d be curious if the link summarizer in Firefox runs a model locally or calls some remote API. Most current machines ought to be able to run an appropriate LLM model for that task.

They aren’t against the concept of having pets themselves they just don’t like that pets are specifically bred for domestication when millions of pets are put down in shelters because they couldn’t find homes.

…and yet PETA shelters have higher kill rates than many/most others.

So it’s entirely optional, you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way, and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)? Sounds like they couldn’t stop themselves from joining the dick hammering bandwagon, but decided not to hit it too hard.