Which end? The main story is just a narrative device, in fact you shouldn’t really obey the narrator at all. Calling any end “The End” doesn’t make sense in the context of the game, really. Unless you just broke out of the mind control facility three times then called it quits? That end is supposed to be non enticing so that you try literally anything else before putting it down. I think the going insane end sticks with me the most. Although the game dev commentary in the recent release is fun.

My parents.

There are times where intersex babies need surgery to prevent complications. For anything else, let them wait until they can decide. Agreed 100%.

In America, it appears to have started being in vogue during WWII as a way for single moms whose husband is overseas to have less to take care of. After a bit of coercion, my parents admitted the hospital did it without even their consent. That does sound a lot like [insert birth state here] in the [insert birth decade here] so I didn’t question it.

Man Skype used to be so good when it was peer to peer… I don’t see anything that MS brought to that platform that improved it at all.

I hate Slack Overflow (using Slack as documentation) but it beats the pants off of Discord Overflow.

I love discord, for what it’s for. Quick synchronous talks you will never refer back to again. So not software development where indexable logs of information are necessary. I know discord has indexing, and now some form of forum. But every discord I’ve been to for development (especially modding communities) has a large corpus of synchronous logs where people get annoyed if you ask a question that was answered one before a long time ago with extremely common language making it nearly impossible to search for because the keywords have been used out of context of your question hundreds of times since the question was asked.

If the Dev communities used the forums mode in discord more, it wouldn’t always solve it, but it’d be much better. There are better places than discord for these things, but I have been trying to meet people where they’re established.

Recalling data, communication. Two things humans are notoriously bad at…

And I wouldn’t call a human intelligent if TV was anything to go by. Unfortunately, humans do things they don’t understand constantly and confidently. It’s common place, and you could call it fake it until you make it, but a lot of times it’s more of people thinking they understand something.

LLMs do things confident that they will satisfy their fitness function, but they do not have the ability to see farther than that at this time. Just sounds like politics to me.

I’m being a touch facetious, of course, but the idea that the line has to be drawn upon that term, intelligence, is a bit too narrow for me. I prefer to use the terms Artificial Narrow Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence as they are better defined. Narrow referring to it being designed for one task and one task only, such as LLMs which are designed to minimize a loss function of people accepting the output as “acceptable” language, which is a highly volatile target. AGI or Strong AI is AI that can generalize outside of its targeted fitness function and continuously. I don’t mean that a computer vision neural network that is able to classify anomalies as something that the car should stop for. That’s out of distribution reasoning, sure, but if it can reasonably determine the thing in bounds as part of its loss function, then anything that falls significantly outside can be easily flagged. That’s not true generalization, more of domain recognition, but it is important in a lot of safety critical applications.

This is an important conversation to have though. The way we use language is highly personal based upon our experiences, and that makes coming to an understanding in natural languages hard. Constructed languages aren’t the answer because any language in use undergoes change. If the term AI is to change, people will have to understand that the scientific term will not, and pop sci magazines WILL get harder to understand. That’s why I propose splitting the ideas in a way that allows for more nuanced discussions, instead of redefining terms that are present in thousands of ground breaking research papers over a century, which will make research a matter of historical linguistics as well as one of mathematical understanding. Jargon is already hard enough as it is.

The term AI is older than the idea of machine learning. AI is a rectangle where machine learning is a square. And deep learning is a unit square.

Please, don’t muddy the waters. That’s what caused the AI winter of 1960. But do go after the liars. I’m all for that.

The term AI is older than the idea of machine learning. AI is a rectangle where machine learning is a square. And deep learning is a unit square.

Please, don’t muddy the waters. That’s what caused the AI winter of 1960. But do go after the liars. I’m all for that.

… Alexa literally is A.I.? You mean to say that Alexa isn’t AGI. AI is the taking of inputs and outputting something rational. The first AI’s were just large if-else complications called First Order Logic. Later AI utilized approximate or brute force state calculations such as probabilistic trees or minimax search. AI controls how people’s lines are drawn in popular art programs such as Clip Studio when they use the helping functions. But none of these AI could tell me something new, only what they’re designed to compute.

The term AI is a lot more broad than you think.

I tried to get into BCI for both personal reasons and for prosthetic reasons. I admit being able to control my computer faster, and draw/play things faster and more accurately was the goal for myself, but the greater good of improved prosthetics was always on my mind and so fascinating to follow progress on.

When I got called for an initial interview with Neurolink, I turned it down, an entry-ish position for what was at the time my dream job, just because I heard the name Elon and would never work for a two bit hack that thinks 80 hours a week is the minimum time you should spend if you want to make any difference (paraphrased direct quote from the man who “works” 120 hours a week according to himself, and sleeps at his desk a solid chunk of that according to his employees).

If we do ever get transhumanism, it will be too expensive to be for the greater good. Only the rich, who have proven themselves incapable of initiating positive change without financial incentive, will be able to afford it for many generations.

It’s only being careful if you’re immunocompromised in some way that would make the vaccine actually dangerous, which is even rarer than side effects being more than soreness.

COVID isn’t a well known virus. The fact that it destroys the nerves between your nose and tongue and your brain is a HUGE red flag that should be terrifying to everyone. Nerves are very similar throughout the body, and we don’t know the full extent of damage caused by it yet. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which may or may not be the same thing as long COVID considering it is generally caused by various viral infections, is incredibly not well known, but affects far less people supposedly. Maybe the fact that 25% estimated last I checked of people get at a minimum mild long COVID symptoms, and 10% of those never really recover, with most people reporting lowered energy levels permanently (not like enough to be a disability for most) will help drive more research, as there’s a lot of cases of COVID permanently screwing over perfectly healthy people.

I mention here one of the least devastating aspects of ME/CFS and similarly long COVID which share a lot of symptoms. There are people who cannot stand up without assistance because of them. People have lost jobs due to them. And in America, not having a job means not having decent healthcare or any sort of benefits.

Being careful means getting the damn vaccine if you can, when you can, as soon as your doctor tells you that you are healthy enough to do so, every single time. If not for you, then for anyone you care about. Care about human life, get the vaccine.

Hannah Montana Linux. Do I have to explain?

This. A lot of kids drove golf carts to the pool and stuff, but while that would be semi-legal in their gated community, they had to cross a public road where even licensed drivers would be breaking the law. No one seemed to care though. I’m fairly certain it’s illegal in most US states.

This is tip culture standard. The company is only required to pay enough such that tips plus pay meet minimum wage. CEO’s should have to work for tips given by their employees in order to earn over minimum wage, change my mind.

Most boomers I know still can’t use a mouse. Millennials and gen X fill most of the old Internet in my mind, but the original '91 Internet was a lot of tech focused boomers, but also was significantly Gen X. '95-'99 seemed to pick up more traction with my generation.

As a cat owner, can confirm cats are always bad. The best bad decisions I’ve made, are my two little fuzz balls. And I hope they’re happy with me as well.

They are the reason we don’t have a Christmas tree anymore.

Still pretty cheap, but yeah. I’ve had little from the Kroger line that I’d buy again, so that’s fair enough.

Interesting. Outside of chips, I’ve had a lot of luck with Private Selection (Kroger’s no name brand). I’ve had quality issues with Food Lion and Walmart’s perishables, but not as often with Kroger. Kroger’s non perishables don’t seem to be much different than Walmart’s though.