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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Food is a category made up of human edible materials, usually providing nutritional benefits. There is a larger social construct AROUND food. Like a burrito is a construct, it being a product of Mexican culture is a construct, it being transformed into a “Cali Burrito”, people who have burrito bumper stickers, the type of place you think of when someone says “a burrito joint”. All social constructs. But food itself, I wouldn’t consider a social construct, no.




  • Obviously I have no idea what your opinion is beyond this comment. But from my own view of lemmy it’s so funny to open the thread about windows and people are like:

    “I don’t care if I can disable it. There’s absolutely no reason an operating system should collect that data, except for their own toxic capitalist greed. I want a tool to rip every line of this code out, or I’m installing Arch and never looking back.”

    To the thread on Apple doing it:

    “Apple setting a better example is a good thing to see.” 😂


  • Most news and social spaces on the Internet pull people’s focus to issues they have very little control over. This has been shown to cause a degradation in mental health. Since these places have become a mainstay in society, we’ve seen a plummet in mental health. Things can’t get better if everyone is suffering from depression and anxiety.

    Being informed enough to support a few (2-3) issues with real intention, can be helpful. But letting corporations and politicians leverage the idea that being informed about everything is good, just leads to them pointing to everything that can be spun as a problem. Then nobody does anything meaningful to affect change. They just feel defeated.




  • I think if we sit here and debate the nuances of what is or is not intelligence, we will look back on this conversation and laugh at how pedantic it was. Movies have taught us that A.I. is hyper-intelligent, conscious, has it’s own objectives, is self aware, etc… But corporations don’t care about that. In fact, to a corporation, I’m sure the most annoying thing about intelligence right now is that it comes packaged with its own free will.

    People laugh at what is being called A.I. because it’s confidently wrong and “just complicated auto-complete”. But ask your coworkers some questions. I bet it won’t be long before they’re confidently wrong about something and when they’re right, it’ll probably be them parroting something they learned. Most people’s jobs are things like: organize these items on those shelves, mix these ingredients and put it in a cup, get all these numbers from this website and put them in a spreadsheet, write a press release summarizing these sources.

    Corporations already have the A.I. they need. You gatekeeping intelligence is just your ego protecting you from the truth: you, or someone dear to you, are already replaceable.

    I think we both know that A.I. is possible, I’m saying it’s inevitable, and likely already at version 1. I’m sure any version of it would require access to training data. So the ruling here would translate. The only chance the general population has of keeping up with corporations in the ability to generate economic value, is to keep the production of A.I. in the public space.




  • Thanks for this comment. I totally get how it can feel like ‘free speech defenders’ have a blanket defense that ends up protecting evil people. And you’re right.

    The world has become so loud with instant global communication. So many different ideas, cultures, personalities, perspectives… I think we all wish we could turn down the volume, but none more so than for people that spew hate.

    No group deserves to receive threats of violence, harassment, or belittling of their existence. While I think we sit in agreement that it should be an obvious choice to ban people like Nazis and stop there, you could easily apply my previous sentence to many groups of people. There are some left-leaning communities where you’ll see people wishing Trump to be strung up, or saying MAGA supporters should use their second amendment right and kill themselves. Many members of those communities would never condone violence against the former president or his supporters, but whoever we give the power to make the ‘free speech’ decision may see it differently.

    The whole concept of free speech is not that everybody has a good idea. It’s that nobody can be trusted to decide what is a good idea. If you believe in free speech, you believe in hearing a lot of bad ideas that can make people very uncomfortable. While I do agree that there can be very minimal exceptions to this in extreme circumstances, (death threats, stalking, harassment) we need to be very careful about who makes the call.

    This is asking we put the responsibility of that arbitration in the hands of Spectrum and AT&T. Take a minute and think about that.


  • I keep rereading this comment and as someone in R&D… I’m so astonished that people think that companies just spontaneously come up with everything they produce without looking around. Companies start off almost every venture by analyzing any work in the field that’s been done and reverse engineering it. It’s how basically anyone you’ve heard of works. It goes double for art. Inspiration is key for art. Composers will break down the sheet music of great compositions, graphic designers will have walls full of competitors designs, cinematographers will study movies frame by frame.


  • I think it’s a pretty important question whether we’re reaching the end of the distinction between human and machine. People will begin to use machine minds more and more as part of their work. Tying strings now to the works of machines is screwing the creators of tomorrow. The line between what a person creates and what a machine creates WILL evaporate. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

    Imagine we put a ton of regulations on people who use power tools to do carpentry. I’m sure the carpenters around the time power tools were created figured “That’s not true craftsmanship. They shouldn’t be able to make a living off that!” But the carpenters of today would be screwed by these regulations because of course they have to use the latest technology to stay competitive.

    As for the argument that we’re taking the food out of creative’s mouths: I don’t think anyone is not buying Stephen King novels now because they can just ask for a Stephen King style novel from ChatGPT. You can pirate Stephen King already. People aren’t fascinated by LLMs because of how well they plagiarize. They’re fascinated by them because they’re capable of transformative works, not unlike humans. Nobody is typing “Write a Stephen King Novel” they’re typing, “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle but it’s Snoop Dogg and Betty White in the style of Stephen King.” As much as I’m sure King would love to suck up all royalties for these stories, there’s no universe where it makes sense that he should. You don’t own what you inspire.