discouraging people from calling help when they need it

This is literally why they’re doing it. Government makes simply existing illegal for a huge class of workers so companies abuse them as much as they want while they’re too scared to call for help, no matter how bad it gets. Bonus points if the general population hates them too so even publicity doesn’t matter. (Hey, totally unrelated, isn’t it great how convicts are so heavily vilified for life?) I know the phrase is way overused, but The Cruelty Is The Point isn’t (only) about how psycho some of these people are, it points to how they’ll do anything for money.

In the end, though, this a great way for gangs gain power. People aren’t going to stop calling for help, they’re going to stop calling the police for help. I guess the party of law and order would love a good crime wave.

And nooticing is nooice

Maybe it has something to do with also needing international support in order to defend itself from its neighbor… talk all the shit you want about the US’s stance on Israel, but shifting that to Taiwan is on par with claiming Ukraine deserved to get invaded.

Which I now realize is probably your next line. Anyway, oh well

You’re not an asshole for going faster, you’re an asshole for tailgating

And that’s the punchline

The art is awful and the jokes are either literal nonsense or annoyingly simple. Same kinda stuff being said in this thread. Same reasons anyone dislikes a comic. Just doesn’t resonate. I can’t say why people decide some stupid shit works for them and other stupid shit doesn’t.

I’m not even sure this counts as drama. These people are addicted to wallowing in negativity. Gives me r/questionablecontent vibes, a subreddit about a webcomic where people purport to hate it but continue reading it every day just so they can get mad about it.

Like, I strongly dislike the Far Side, but despite how frequently it gets upvoted I don’t go into every comment section to talk about why. I just blocked the sub and scroll past it when it shows up in other subs. The behavior in these threads is pathetic.

AI is a flawless technology and they’ll have fixed it by next month for sure this time

How do you think DOGE and RFK Jr’s research priories will impact that?

At a guess, they’ll stop tracking the data?

Literally none. DEI straight up means treating everyone the same. They’re working on giving it some fucked up negative connotations the same way they have with “woke” and “critical race theory,” but if you look at the history and reality of where those words come from and what they mean, it becomes clear they’re playing with language, trying to avoid looking racist to the general public while still implementing racist policy.

If by “this,” you mean the reference towards Tubman, then you’re wrong. Talking about the accomplishments of anyone who isn’t a straight white Christian man IS promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion! DEI is a good thing! Opposing it is explicitly racist!

I did not but I’ll give you an upvote anyway

Not sure which of the cabinet said it first, but for anyone wondering–this isn’t satire. The “which 24 hours” is a real line Trump supporters are regurgitating.

I recently read a neat little book called “Rethinking Consciousness” by SA Graziano. It has nothing to do with AI, but is an attempt to describe the way our myriad neural systems come together to produce our experience, how that might differ between animals with various types of brains, and how our experience might change if some systems aren’t present. It sounds obvious, but the simpler the brain, the simpler the experience. For example, organisms like frogs probably don’t experience fear. Both frogs and humans have a set of survival instincts that help us detect movement, classify it as either threat or food or whatever, and immediately respond, but the emotional part of your brain that makes your stomach plummet just doesn’t exist in them.

Humans automatically respond to a perceived threat in the same way a frog does–in fact, according to the book, the structures in our brains that dictate our initial actions in those instinctive moments are remarkably similar. You know how your eyes will automatically shift to follow a movement you see in the corner of your vision? A frog responds in much the same way. It’s not something you have to think about–often your eye will have darted over to the point of interest even before you realize you’ve noticed something. But your experience of that reaction is also much richer than it is possible for a frog’s to be, because we have far more layers of systems that all interact to produce what we call consciousness. We have a much deeper level of thought that goes into deciding whether that movement was actually important to us.

It’s possible for us to continue to live even if we lose some parts of the brain–our personalities will change, our memory may get worse, or we may even lose things like our internal monologue, but we still manage to persist as conscious beings until our brains lose a large number of the overlying systems, or some very critical systems. Like the one that regulates breathing–though even that single function is somewhat shared between multiple systems, allowing you to breathe manually (have fun with that).

All that to say the things we’re currently calling AI just don’t have that complexity. At best, these generative models could fill out a fraction of the layers that would be useful for a conscious mind. We have developed very powerful language processing systems, at least in terms of averaging out a vast quantity of data. Very powerful image processing. Audio processing. What we don’t have–what, near as I can tell, we haven’t made any meaningful progress on at all–is a system to coalesce all these processing systems into a whole. These systems always rely on a human to tell them what to process, for how long, and ultimately to check whether the result of a process is reasonable. Being able to process all of those types of input simultaneously, choosing which ones to focus on in the moment, and continuously choosing an appropriate response? Barely even a pipe dream. And even all of that would be distinct from a system to form anything like conscious thought.

Right now, when marketing departments say “AI,” what they’re describing is like that automatic response to movement. Movement detected, eye focuses. Input goes in, output comes out. It’s one small piece of the whole that’s required when science fiction writers say “AI.”

TL;DR no, the current generative model race is just tech stock market hype. The absolute best it can hope for is to reproduce a small piece of the conscious mind. It might be able to approximate the processing we’re capable of more quickly, but at a massively inflated energy expenditure, not to mention the research costs. And in the end it still needs a human double checking its work. We will need to develop a vast number of other increasingly complex systems before we even begin to approach a true AI.

I’ve always known the average voter is a huge idiot with a tiny attention span, but articles like this really put into perspective how bad it is. How the fuck do you manage to forget the COVID pandemic? Did everyone really buy the “Chinese bioweapon” propaganda in order to avoid blaming Trump or something?

Trump was awful before and already ballooned the debt once. How do you not expect it to happen again?

I’m probably just old but it’s always faster to type :) than it is to find the 🙂, same goes for every emoji really.

Also they convey slightly different emotions

I heard those kittens were eating people’s pets.

You’re responding to a Nazi. Reread their comment, they’re saying all the people being illegally arrested are rapists and murderers

I think you meant to say he isn’t not unwrong

Good thing they already put the “TP” logo on there so I won’t forget to wipe my ass with it.