Yeah, I figured you didn’t mean that and wasn’t trying to imply that you did, lol. I was just trying to specify that when I was talking about the Wright Brothers I meant the technological jumps between their first flight and the moon landing. We’re probably several technological leaps away from anything that could be considered actual AI.

The Wright Brothers didn’t figure out the moon landing. They figured out aerodynamics. There were plenty of other discoveries that went into the moon landing such as suborbital flight, supersonic flight, and orbital dynamics to list a few. It’s less about the specific time as it is about the level of technology. The timescale is much harder to put down due to the nature of technological innovation.

As for the rest, I completely agree. One of the most dangerous things about these AI programs is the lack of responsibility or culpability.

Definitely not a question of AI sentience, I’d say we’re as close to that as the Wright Brothers were to figuring out the Apollo moon landing. But, it definitely raises questions on whether or not we should be giving everybody access to machines that can fabricate erroneous statements like this at random and what responsibility the companies creating them have if their product pushes someone to commit suicide or radicalizes them into committing an act of terrorism or something. Because them shrugging and saying, “Yeah, it does that sometimes. We can’t and won’t do anything about it, though” isn’t gonna cut it, in my opinion.

I think Facebook had an advantage in originally being targeted at college kids (I think you even needed a school ID to make an account originally) before becoming open to everyone. This meant that the userbase was a little older than that of most social media at the time and it worked as a way to stay in touch with people after you graduated. Then, when they opened it up, it became a way to stay in touch with family as well, which got the parents onboard with something that they had just considered a fad before, like MySpace.

IIRC, people have previously reported that Windows 11(?) switched their default browser back to Edge after installing an update.

Big Carrot is coming for your stew

If you’re watching something on TV, record it and watch it later instead of when it airs. Even starting it 15 minutes later would probably let you fast forward through many of the ads.

And yet nobody can ever experience it the way it was originally again since they killed Flash.

It’s like coming back from the war with PTSD and nobody understands what you went through. Except the PTSD is about buckets and dating quadrants.

There’s a much better correlation between wealth and conservatism than age. Almost like those who begin to benefit from the system of oppression are incentivesed to keep it going.

Yep, they literally cannot work any other way than as a ponzi scheme. Because the people “earning” want to take more money out of the system than they put in, and the company is taking money out as well just to keep the game running and the employees paid, as well as to make a profit. So you need substantially more suckers buying into the system than the money that is being paid out.

Eventually, somebody is gonna be left holding an empty bag.

You should check out this article on the attacks on paintings by Jewish American artist Barnett Newman. Especially this quote on the piece Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, which is basically just an 8’ by 18’ block of red with a blue stripe:

After the 1986 attack on Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III there was a conversation concerning who would do the restoration of the painting. Despite the work provoking a lot of anger in museumgoers due to its simplicity, the painting was incredibly intricate, and experts knew that it would be nearly unattainable to complete a faithful restoration. Although the work was mostly just an expanse of the color red, both the shade and technique Newman used were difficult to replicate. Prior to the slashing, it was almost impossible to see brush strokes on the work with the naked eye. Additionally, one of the cardinal rules of restoring paintings is that everything done to the work should be reversible, something that would be very difficult to do with such large cuts through the body of the work. The painting sat damaged for many years because no conservationists wanted to touch it.

The dude who did eventually volunteer to restore it more or less went over the entire painting with a roller and red paint, and you can tell immediately.

Me when people are lying about images being generated works and submitting them to art contests and winning stuff like college scholarships:

AI “Artists” are idea guys. They don’t care about the process or the knowledge or the experience of creation, only the Content that gets produced that they can consume. They’re middle managers claiming the work created by the skills of the workers under them as their own effort. Image generators simply allow them to do a corporation and avoid paying people for those skills or putting in the effort to learn themselves. It’s just a new form of coloring books, only created using ethically dubious methods because the companies creating the programs are likely violating fair use laws.

Edit: This isn’t to say that people who use coloring books are inherently bad or anything, but when you’re trying to pass your page from a coloring book off as a gallery-worthy exhibit and the book was made by a company tracing artwork and using it without permission to make a profit? Yeah, then you’re a bad person. Especially if you go on to talk down to artists because you made yours so quickly, etc.

Calling pieces where an artist used an “AI” to do things like touchups “AI art” is like calling a piece where somebody used the magic wand tool “Magic Wand art.” Because that’s what the magic wand is - an algorithm written to identify similar elements and isolate them. That’s essentially the beginning steps of an LLM. “AI” has been used in this regard for decades now, it’s only that AI has become a buzz word for companies looking to replace worker skills with a cheap fascimile so that they don’t have to pay their workers that has led to the concept of “AI art,” by which it can be safely assumed is referring to generated images.

And I believe the word that OP was looking for is intent. As Adam Savage put it, AI art lacks intent. Whether a piece is good or bad doesn’t matter, you can feel what the artist had in their head and what they wanted to express with a piece, and that’s what he cares about when looking at a piece of art. When a 6 year old draws a dog, it doesn’t matter whether that dog is a stick figure or a work comparable to the Mona Lisa - you know that they wanted to express that they like dogs. AI has no intent. It simply combines pieces of its data set, transforming art created with intent into a pile of different details that no longer have their original context.

I could see this as part of a metrics thing - if Google sees a big drop in users right after the rollout, it’s harder to brush it under the rug as having no correlation.

Yep. It’s been a thing for a long time now, at least since 2001, but “it’s just a joke” became a way for bigots to disguise their hatred, and was picked up by “edgy” teenagers in places like 4Chan…which would later reveal as they got older that they were actually just bigots themselves all along or the joking had normalized that mentality in them to the point where they started believing it. It’s definitely not just an American thing, but Republicans in the US tend to be extremely sensitive and volatile emotionally (despite calling everybody else “liberal snowflakes” for how easily offended they claim they are) while being very emboldened by the events of the past decade or so to openly spew their hatred and bigotry.

There’s a great stand-up bit about it by James Acaster from 2019 called What’s Wrong? Too Challenging For You!?

Fun fact, there’s an industry term called TTP: Time To Penis. It’s the estimated amount of time before a player draws a dick in your game, whether through bullet holes in a wall or something else. It’s often measured in seconds.

Coal is often radioactive when it comes out of the ground, and thanks to poor regulations, is often radioactive when it goes into the powerplant, leading to radioactive particles coming out of the smokestacks and landing anywhere downwind of the plants.

More people have died from radiation poisoning from coal than from all of the nuclear accidents combined. But, as you said, 200 years vs. 70 years. But, also, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than coal in this regard due to the severity of those accidents. The risk of a dangerous nuclear power plant is nowhere near as large as commonly believed. It doesn’t take long to find longlasting environmental disasters due to fossil fuels, from oil spills to powerplant disasters. They’re used so heavily that it’s just so much more likely to occur and occur more often.

All this to say that fossil fuels suck all around and we should be looking at all forms of replacement for them, nuclear being just one option we should be pursuing alongside all the others.

One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Of course, we’ve also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.

But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn’t so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.

I didn’t know they added swords to CS2

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed Machine.

Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.

But I am already saved. For the Machine is immortal.