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Cake day: April 28th, 2024

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  • The AI being hyped right now is not AI at all. It’s really important that we all acknowledge this, that the world is selling itself a multi-billion-dollar lemon: predictive text engines that have nothing intelligent about them. They’re giant sorting machines, which is why they’re so good at identifying patterns in scientific research, and could genuinely advance medicine in wonderful ways. But what they cannot do is think, and as such, it’s a collective mass-delusion that these systems have any use in our day-to-day lives beyond plagiarism.

    Goddamn, a gaming outlet saying what the serious grown-up press should have been saying from the start!





  • gonna keep banging this drum every time this comes up:

    When physicists say “observe”, they actually mean “measure”. And to measure a photon of light, you have to interact with it somehow, there is no passive way to do so.

    The post’s header image implies that the interference pattern goes away just by looking at it. If that were the case, we would never see the interference pattern, never know it was there in the first place! In the actual experiment, they put a sensor at one or both of the slits. But to “sense” a single photon, you have to interact with it in some way. Otherwise you wouldn’t know it was there.

    Again, this is where the language trips us up. Rather than “sensor”, would really be more accurate to say they put a photon-touch-er at the slits.

    So, what we actually get is “Touching the photon changes the photon’s behavior.” The universe doesn’t magically infer when we happen to be looking at it, there is no spooky action-at-a-distance!





  • If people can make it work for them, good on em.

    If you’re considering it, maybe study some of those past attempts. Try to reason through the conditions and contradictions they faced, both material and interpersonal.

    But, also, that don’t scale. I am a 21st century ape, just one cell in this organism called city. I don’t know how else to exist. There’s no folding this back in the bag it came in. Hundreds of millions of people aren’t just gonna start living agrarian lifestyles.

    I’d like for this thing I am a part of to not be a parasite on the natural world, to strike some homeostasis within the overall biosphere before we totally tank it. Can we do that? Is it possible? That’s the really interesting question, as far as I’m concerned.

    Maybe we can’t. Maybe “modern” ends, whethere all at once or the long drawn out decline over several generations. I’m fairly sure whatever happens after that, people will find some new/old/synthesized way to live. But for now, some of us have toilets. I think it would be nice if everyone could have toilets. And everyone’s children and everyone’s children’s children could also have toilets.



  • AppleTea@lemmy.ziptoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldAlpha males
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    1 month ago

    The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

    Terry Pratchett



  • Sure, in a reductive sort of way. Kind of reminds me of native americans who, after being forcibly taken to europe and seeing how the people lived, concluded that no one there was free.

    I think that criticism is still fundamentally true. But at the same time, what we have now is different from slavery. People are no longer legally considered property. Yes, labor is still coerced. But that coercion is now baked into the system, rather than an explicit interpersonal relationship of owed and owner.



  • I have come to accept the research telephone. Yeah, my understanding of the actual research is filtered through countless interlocking individuals and who knows how many narrative frameworks. The best I can do, without just getting a degree in the field, is to try to sample as many of these narrative interpretations as possible.

    When I see the point made that we believe science like a new religion, I cannot help but see the glimmer of truth in that interpretation. Ok, sure, fine by me. I trust the mechanism of passive-aggressive peer review more than any holy text or hierarchy of clergy.



  • AppleTea@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzResources
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    2 months ago

    Most of what the study is proposing would be a modest decrease in living standards in developed countries, for a drastic increase in living standards everywhere else. It’s not asking you to give up luxury, only for the rate of new luxury to decrease slightly as surplus is more evenly distributed.