What misconception are you tired of being spread?
What's a common "fact" that's spread around that's actually not true and pisses you off that too many people believe it?
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What's a common "fact" that's spread around that's actually not true and pisses you off that too many people believe it?
That the granny who sued McDonald's was just upset that her coffee was too hot.
She suffered from either third or fourth degree burns, on her lap.
Parts of her were fused together.
She just wanted McDonald's to cover the medical bill, but they dragged her name through the mud.
Yep, also they had previously been warned about serving coffee that hot, but studies had shown that serving it that hot meant that people drank less of it. And that "crazy" judgement (2.5 million?) wasn't a random number. That's how much they make off coffee in one day.
Yeah we actually learned very quickly about that in legal studies (high school) way back in 2000s and it was presented like a silly Americans (Australian here) kind of thing, just a quick silly case in a small box in the textbook. Wasn't til I got older I learned the full story!
We had an Aussie silly case too, not just picking on the US 😅 ours was about some drink in an opaque bottle and someone drank it all before they could see there was some kind of bug or even a snail in the bottle? Something like that so they sued the drink company 🤢 can't remember enough about that one to find anything on it!
I saw that, yeah McDonald's really tried to blast her as a sue happy bitch. All she asked for was medical bill costs initially which is reasonable.
This misconception was well paid for. McDonalds and a large group of fortune 500 companies started a slander ad campaign against lawsuits. They literally paid people to write and run stories about "stupid and unjust" lawsuits, claiming the lawsuits wee a waste and of course bringing up this one.
It worked.
People are really bad with misretelling court cases. The amount of times I've read "this guy was arrested for wearing a silly hat!" Only to look deeper and find out he was threatening to stab people or something.
The average person only lived to be 35 back in the day.
No, the average lifespan was like 35 back in the day. 40 year olds weren't some rare wrinkled old person, the average was affected by the extremely high childhood mortality. If you could survive the first few years of your life your chances of surviving the next 60 were pretty good.
That being said, even among people who survived childhood, living to the ages we see nowadays was more rare than it is today due to a lot of environmental and societal factors like plagues and war. It wasn't unheard of, but that is also something that brought the average down to an extent.
We essentially had a plague in 2020, and there are multiple wars going on as we speak. Those factors didn't disappear.
The deaths from both the wars going on in the modern day and infectious diseases like COVID are nowhere near on the scale that they were before, especially in terms of the percent of the world population killed by them. We haven't had deaths on the scale of WWI or the Spanish Flu since those events.
WWII had 3-5 times the number of deaths (depending on whose numbers you trust) as WWI though? Like, it's not even close. Even using the highest estimate for WWI (22 million) and the lowest estimate for WWII (70 million) WWII was more than triple the deaths.
The global population at the time of WWI was ~1.8 billion, and at the time of WWII is was 2.3 billion.
So in terms of of percent of the world population, WWI loses.
I will concede that the Spanish flu was a lot worse than COVID.
Fun fact, the bubonic plague never went away. It's still kicking around the world. Obviously not like it was with The Plague, but still.
There are a couple cases a year in the States. It's treatable now, that's the difference
True, but we don't wholesale shit in our drinking water any more while riddled with syphilis
I got relatives that lived to their 90's in the 1600's, we may have skewed it a bit
Propaganda from the fossil fuel industry.
Solar panels are the cheapest source of electricity now. Batteries have dropped in price by more than 90% in the past decade, and are now viable for grid-scale storage, addressing the main issue with renewable energy. EVs are competitive with combustion cars, and in some ways superior. Heat pumps are now superior to furnaces in many locations. The solar punk future is now! But you wouldn't know any of this by listening to the public discourse, mainstream media, and many politicians.
Relevant video from Technology Connections
https://xkcd.com/2948/
https://xkcd.com/3214/
I got the vibe of his video as soon as I read the first sentence lol.
History time!
Myth: People in the past drank beer because it was safer than drinking water.
Fact: People in the past drank beer because it was full of calories and tasty. Before modern times people generally had access to or knew how to find clean water, and water has always been the most popular drink throughout history.
--
Myth: People needed spices to cover the taste of rotten meat.
Fact: People ate fresh meat when it was available and preserved it when they could by smoking, drying, salting, fermenting, or otherwise processing it. When they didn't have access to meat they just wouldn't eat it. They wanted spices for the same reason we do - because they taste good.
Wasn't that literally the purpose of grog? A mixture of beer and water used on ships to kill harmful bacteria that would grow in the ships' water stores over a long voyage?
And if people in the past knew how to make water safe to drink, then why was epidemiology invented when Londoners couldn't figure out that they should stop drinking poop water?
Grog was a mixture of rum, water, and lime juice. Beer does not have enough of an alcohol content to have any antibacterial impact. Your basic premise is flawed.
The main reasons grog was invented were twofold, first and foremost, it diluted the alcohol to manage the sailors' intoxication levels (much like drinking a rum and Coke does today). Secondly, the addition of lime juice helped fight off scurvy (leading to British sailors being called "limeys").
While it did improve the flavor of stale water, the disinfecting properties have been greatly exaggerated over time.
I can't speak to practices on sailing ships, those surely differ from general history especially when it comes to fresh water which isn't freely available on the ocean.
And to your second point, in the context of history that happened in modern times. The cholera epidemics happened in the 19th century with the epidemiologist John Snow publishing his treatise in 1855. Unsafe drinking water causing widespread disease was mainly a problem of modern cities in the industrial age and the overcrowding and unsanitary conditions that came with it.
Grog was way after the middle ages.
Beer was the main beverage aboard ships before, as it keeps better than water in eigen kegs. But you can't stock up on beer everywhere. Distilled alcohol has a better form factor, do you can take more. It made the water kind of palatable but doesn't clean it.
Then why does people's preference for spicy food correlate to local food pathogen prevalence?
See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9586227/
To elaborate a little further. "Just not eating" something is a modern luxury. For most of our history, you ate everything that was available or (someone, usually your youngest kids first) starved. The argument isn't that spices cover the taste of rotten food, but that they actually kill the pathogens that make humans sick, making more food edible for longer. This is a spill over from these plants' long evolutionary arms race with phytotoxins. Cultures in places with high food pathogen prevalence, where spicing makes a real difference to survival, develop a preference for spicy food, despite their initially aversive taste. Cultures in cold climates with few food pathogens don't.
I'm skeptical of this. It seems more likely that they're simply correlated because biodiversity is higher in warmer climates, both of microorganisms and plants.
Ask yourself these two questions. One, why would there be any spoiled meat around? Why was it not consumed or preserved immediately? People knew meat spoiled quickly and would treat it accordingly.
Two, have you ever smelled or tasted rotten meat? It's quite literally repulsive, it's hard to even get near. No amount of chili or black pepper is covering it. And if you were able to stomach it it wouldn't be worth the vomiting and diarrhea it might cause. Food poisoning could be a death sentence in premodern times, and in fact diarrhea is one of the most common causes of death in undeveloped regions today.
Billing and Sherman have some pretty robust statistical controls to address these kinds of alternatives. Worth reading the paper.
Fully spoiled food is inedible, but there's a long window of pathogen growth before that point, which can be lengthened further by spices. Why would some meat not be consumed immediately? Because life is messy, people make mistakes, and animals are large.
Yeah no, pubs used to totally used to use curry powder and ketchup to drown the taste of gamey meat.
That all the Y2K preparation stuff was a waste of time / a scam, instead of an example of massive success (people coming together and pulling off something to avoid a disaster)
Also see Acid Rain and the hole in the ozone.
A friend of mine got a high-paying temp job reprogramming servers in some obscure programming language. I think the client was a major bank.
Yeah, a lot of dirtbags took advantage of Y2K, but that doesn’t mean Y2K wasn’t a serious problem. It easily could have been.
It was a very serious problem.
Very few dirtbags took advantage of it.
Obscure language was probably COBOL. Obscure in the sense that it was once immensely popular for business applications, but by the late 90s there were very few new applications written in it, but a huge number of large businesses still ran it.
You are really underselling the fact that many of these businesses are still running COBOL despite it being the equivalent of ancient Mayan.
That's not a fair assessment really... Some of them are still using PROLOG.
Shivers
I meant “it easily could have been” in the sense that it if it hadn’t been taken seriously, it would affected virtually everyone in some way.
These are the people who think the precautions around Covid were unnecessary too. If there hadn't been any precautions, there would have been a lot more deaths and these same idiots would be asking why nothing was done to prevent it. But instead the death toll was kept to a minimum and these people just assume this is how it woukd have been regardless, no sense of cause and effect. Disasters are successfully mitigated and people assume there was no potential disaster at all. But if it had been allowed to happen, then they'd be asking why no action was taken
You're tired of this? Like, you've encountered people actively talking about it so much you're tired? Besides the odd online post, I've never met anyone making reference to or talking about this.
Mate i pulled 70+ hour shifts for months on end to make sure it wasn't a problem, it only takes one fool for me to be tired of hearing it
Fair enough.
Dozens of times yes
The best first aid for someone having a seizure is to shove a wallet (or something) in their mouth, so that they don’t “swallow their tongue”.
NO!
Never do this. Absolutely never. It’s far more likely that you’ll injure the victim (or yourself) in the attempt.
Furthermore, don’t restrain a seizure victim in any way unless it’s absolutely necessary for their physical safety (like if they’re in danger of falling down a stairway. Even then, it’s usually better to just stand at the top step and act as a barrier). Whenever possible, move things they may hit out of their way; don’t try to move the victim. If there’s something you can’t move, try to put something soft between the victim and the object.
Most of the time, the best thing you can do for a seizure victim is to not touch them at all, and simply give them room.
Is putting a pillow or something soft under their head adviseable? I know the floor is considered a hard immovable object but it putting something under them sorta so im not sure if that qualifies
Generally the advice is moving everything out of the way, if possible a blanket or something under their head as quickly as possible if they are on a hard surface and calling the ambulance (if someone else is there get them to do that straight away while you move stuff!) Also a good idea to time the seizure if possible! When they come to, have them stay laying down for a few minutes at least before sitting up. Some people can appear to be okay but go back into seizure so slowly, slowly with sitting up and even before offering a water.
If you know someone who has seizures, even irregularly, it's a good idea to ask them about it beforehand in case it ever happens when you're with them. People can have different management plans and it also just gives you some guidance and the other person some control should it happen.
(I work in disability!)
Thank you. I work with someone that can have seizures and we have a looot of hard floors so this is great advice for me.
Just adding, TIME the seizure. Super important.
Worked with a guy who hasn't had a seizure in years and had stopped taking his meds. He never disclosed any of this beforehand. Was a fun surprise when he started to get loopy staring at a rotating motor shaft then trying to touch then hug said shaft spinning at several hundred rpm. Pulled him back from trying to bear hug it for him to start convulsing. Trying to carefully lay him down and support his skull to prevent it from cracking on the concrete and metal flooring was an adventure I'd rather never go on again
Is that for information to give first responders when they arrive? Not questioning your advice, just curious about what to do with that information.
Yep that's right, to give to first responders, the person themselves or any other support people that may be involved. Can help people pick up on if anything is changing, longer seizures can mean medication might need looking at, condition deteriorating etc.
Thank you for the reply! This is great information to have!
That food stamps or any handouts at all are a serious problem. Our (the US) government launches a single bomb that's worth years of food support. Idgaf if the food stamp recipients never do a damn thing but watch TV. I'd much rather millions of people doing that than bombing brown people half a world away.
Additionally, it's been proven in scientific study time and time again that giving people enough money to meet their needs significantly reduces crime and costs significantly less money than the "traditional" approach like inflating police budgets. Literally giving people cash money reduces crime better than any other way you could use the money.
then it wont be able to fund MIC, Prison industries, or low wage. thats why they attack or neglect education funding, and drive culture wars to make jobs pay less by providing billionaires more benefits.
The idea of monetary scale is one I think is a big misconception anytime we’re talking about budget. “This committee wasted MILLIONS of dollars on this stupid niche scenario!” Well, yeah; the USA has millions of people in it. If a program affects the entire country, how much are you willing to spend per person? 8 cents?
Exactly. Budgets on national levels do not compute on a personal level. I like it when articles scale down the numbers to a more individual level "so let's pretend that the federal government is a single family home..."
I also find it irritating when politicians brag about bills like "this will create 3000 American jobs." Seriously, that is not even a drop in the bucket.
I also am sick of the sacrificial worship at the altar of "jobs."
Jobs doing what? Variably scheduled positions pushing bricks around with a broom for minimum wage and getting laid off 4 months later? Jobs only open to those with a Master's in lepidopterology? Jobs at Burger King making flame-broiled whoppers wearing paper hats?
Seemingly the public loses their poop if it means "jobs", but won't put enough energy into support outside of jobs, because we have a state mandated religion based solely on exhaustive toil for its own sake, value and results optional.
Stuff your jobs. Give us healthcare, dammit.
even fast food jobs dont respond to online ads, like from indeed. i notice if the franchise is employing significant amount of 1 demographic they wont hire anyone else but that demo, especially if your name is not of that demographic.
only gop ever brag about it after they voted against it, while the majority voted for it and set it into law. thier supporters are just that dumb.
"Half of Americans voted for this"
No, half the people who actually showed up to vote voted for the guy, but not necessarily all he is and has been doing. It's actually only about 20-22% or less of the population that actually voted this guy into office and fewer than that are on board with current events. Far from "half of Americans", so just stop it.
People who didn't care enough to vote are just as bad as the ones who voted for Trump. They were warned what was coming and they allowed it
While voter apathy is widespread in the US, note that voter disenfranchisement has been honed over decades so many people either didn't get to vote or could not vote because the impact to them short-term was too great to afford making decisions for the long term (e.g. people losing their jobs while living paycheck-to-paycheck).
Approximately half as bad, in raw outcome terms. A vote for the opponent is significantly worse than not voting. But yeah, big losers for not even voting.
Mathematically speaking, each of them is half as bad as one Trump voter
He only got 49.8% of the popular vote in 2024, so while it's close enough that most people would accept rounding up, even this statement is not factual in the most literal interpretation.
NPR: Trump would have won even if everyone eligible voted. I agree that substantial Trump voters disapprove of current events, but the truth is one in two US citizens preferred Trump over Harris on Election Day. Not to mention turnout was 64% not 42%, so it's 30% not 20%
Fair. I was going by population numbers vs votes cast and didn't have the voter turnout numbers handy when I originally wrote that out and was paraphrasing from that to save time.
But that's still far from half, and I'm tired of people using the misconception/phrase to justify their xenophobic rhetoric.
oh i thought you were referring to people saying it to illustrate how bad the system is and how important trump winning the election was lol. i definitely agree that it doesn't justify what he's doing (even if it legally stands, even if it legally stands, it doesn't stand socially)
but it is not inaccurate to say nearly half of the citizens preferred him on election day. per the link, pew research shows 48% of non-voters would've voted for trump as opposed to 45%, with a pretty high validity.
it also doesnt count un-registered people, it just assume anyone of at age that can vote dint, some arnt even registered, and some are unable to vote for one reason or another that is not due to personal choice.
Maybe check your facts. NPR: Trump would have won even if everyone eligible voted
Whether it's your intent or not, the narrative you're spreading is used to dissuade folks from demanding better than the choice between a shit taco and a turd sandwhich. It affirms a shitty status quo and demands political patience in the face of a fucked up world... to the benefit of fascists and their corporate cronies.
Man I like npr but its missing a lot. It says he would have won by a larger margin but he would get a lower total percentage. So its basically saying that many who did not vote would have voted for a third party as in the election it was apparent just over 2% but in the theoretical one the third party would have won 7%. Of course that is the popular voted and it does not go into where the differences were and for which side. Given the electoral college it really comes down to the swing states. In other words does the thing over the country remain the same just looking at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Because if they had moved by less than a percent then the election would have went the other way. The real question is if the third party voters really feel the country would be just as bad under kamala as trump. like how bad they view ice and war and tarrifs and dismantling of agencies and firing of experienced people and having a ever more right supreme court and such. From what I can tell they think it would be just the same using online coments anyway.
nah, the DNC refused to actually released the election autopsy, they know they won but they dint want to call out the rigging. 2024 was so obviously rigged by musk and other people. why should the Dem voters have to vote overwhelmingly to overcoming rigging by the republicans every time, the DINODNC are totally complicit in allowing trump a nd the gop to win the elections.
That just reporting on one study by the pew research center. Which may be non-partisan, but they sure as hell aren't unbiased.
"We are not collectively responsible for the output of this system we collectively use to run our country". Disagree.
A lot of people who voted for him didn't like either choice and thought he was least evil for whatever reason. We can never know how evil Harris would have been - even if she wins in the future that doesn't show what she would have been if she was in now. The situation and people change over time
lol. we 100% could know harris would be less evil than trump. it would have been 4 more years of essentially the same administration but with a younger bend which likely would have been better. only reason people think of trump less evil than harris are ones you cheer on the ice things so they have a twisted version of right and wrong.
That is a matter of opinion. The 'right' has different beliefs from you and finds many of the things 'the left' supports wrong\evil.
Yeah and Nazis had different opinions about Hitler so we definitely should just be all philosophical and say there really is no difference. /s
What a, putting it lightly, not well thought out argument.
I didn't say there was no difference in how they are 'evil'. I said they were both evil and Harris has evils that to the right are just as unplatable if not more than Trump is to the left.
I think they believe that but I have watched thier philosophies dropped by their party to the point where whatever they represent changes whenever. The party is so different now than they were in the 70's that their own politcians would see the current incarnation as evil. Add to this the blatant violations of the constitution. Americans at the least should be able to understand the bill of rights and how it fits into the declaration of independence's grievences that lead to the revolutionary war. What happened in the residences in chicago reads exactly like colonial america you just have to replace ice with redcoats. The fact people call themselves americans and think that due process does not apply to all is just. well. frustrating.
It is very frustrating as someone with those ideas that are lost. Nobody is close to what I want. The left keeps moving to socialism and the right to authoritarianism
the left maybe but not democrats who until recently have been going right such that they have a lot in commone with 70's republicans. Even then the movement left is with a minority caucus within the party but heck it just used to be bernie practically.
That WW1 was the same moral black and white as WW2.
In my opinion, every country in WW1 was the villain just that one side was impatient enough to be the aggressor first.
Yeah. When you look at how the war even got started, you start to see that Germany didn't expect Austria-Hungary to be that incompetent diplomatically and that Russia was the one who threw away a potential peace plan before the war started.
Yep, WWI was the result of a bunch of inbred rulers turning family disagreements into a war because they could.
Ooh this is a hot take, can you explain a little?
I don't think it is.
They all were colonial powers that oppressed and subdued their colonial holdings, extracting wealth and even soldiers. France was the only republic, all the others were monarchies and Russia had the most absolutist monarchy. But that doesn't really factor in, because even France wasn't fighting to spread or preserve democracy.
All were fighting to beat them arch enemies, to steal a piece of land or two or maybe a colony and to test their newly developed industrial weaponry. They were all
stompingchomping at the bit before it started.The German Empire was surely the most militaristic society. But they still fought all for the same ideology and reason.
To my last point, you can see that in the result: the losers had to gave up colonies but not to independence but to the victors as spoils.
There was a large propaganda effort by the British and French to pin the blame for the war on one of the Central Powers and Germany was the only major Central Powers that didn't fall apart due to the war.
Stomping at the bit? I've never heard that phrase
Yeah I meant chomping at the bit. It comes from horses chewing the metal part of the bridle because they're fired up and want to run.
"champing" not "chomping"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/champing%20at%20the%20bit
Ah, thanks. I am not a native English speaker.
May you explain why you think it's controversial? Only if you want to.
To my primitive understanding the war was triggered by the Austrians, escalated by the Germans and win by the Allies. But I've never bothered to question the information, so it felt quite controversial to read. Your other comment explaining it makes perfect sense however.
"LLMs are not AI"
Artificial intelligence is a term used in computer science to describe a system capable of performing any cognitive tasks that would normally require human intelligence - like generating natural-sounding language. The issue isn't that the term is being used incorrectly, but rather that most people think it means more than it actually does. It's a broad term that covers everything from old Atari chess engines to artificial superintelligence.
The problem is people think llm AI means it's thinking, when it's obviously not. Thus: "llms are not ai" is said so people will hopefully stop thinking the llms are thinking.
That's weird because I have a calculator that can think, so AI should be able to think too.
That's not thinking. That's calculating. It doesn't have any thoughts about your math problems.
You say that but I feel judged sometimes.
I'm math intolerant. It destroys my stomach
Really? You're asking what's 6x7? Didn't you learn that in elementary school?
That's about when I first read the Hitchhiker Trilogy, so, yeah.
I can see what it's thinking right there on the screen. It thinks that 6x7=42
Touche
I'll give you that one lol
If you'll allow Me to drop the quips and get more philosophical, I believe that thinking is just a word for processing data. It's obvious to Me that you disagree, but I don't understand why. Your idea of thought seems a little more metaphysical or perhaps even spiritual than Mine.
The obvious assumption I could make is that you believe thinking has internality and data processing doesn't. But if that's the case, then you don't really have any proof for your beliefs, because we can't ask calculators if their data processing is accompanied by an internal experience. And that's why it seems to Me that your assertions are unprovable and thus essentially religious in character.
I like it!
I apologize about the spelling, im still on my cup of coffee. I attribute thinking with inwardness, yes. Conciseness is a completely unknown state. No one knows how it works, why it works, what it works in, etc. its a block box.
All we know is that we have conciseness. I belive most animals have conciseness, and thus can think. Insects and amoeba, small life forms, have sentience. Sentience is the ability to react to the environment and stimulus, but is unable to think and have conciseness like humans do.
Inorganic objects do not have either of those. You can't imagine what its like to "be" a rock.They simply are just matter. Computers fall into this category. Computers follow the 1s and 0s, and exacute those instructions. They don't consider what they're doing. They don't ponder on why you're asking or try things on thier own. They are as sentient as a screwdriver.
Marketing and pr pressure to be able to use the term "Ai" because it's the current hype. Everything is now Ai. It's now a meaningless term. Image processing, data calculations, language interpretation, language generation, all claim to be Ai. If your product has Ai it now tells me nothing about what it does.
Marketing only calls everything AI because that's the only term people recognize. ChatGPT is AI, yes, but it's an Large Language Model to be specific. Dall-E is also AI but the more accurate term is Diffusion Model. There's just no point in using these terms in marketing because 90% of people would have no idea what you're talking about.
When people say that LLMs are not AI they usually mean that LLMs are not generally intelligent (AGI) which is true, but they do still count as an AI.
Exactly but so many people form strong opinions and expectations because the say "Ai" but it could mean so many things.
As a guy working in tech for decades I disagree.
We coined the term wrong. The literal words do not match the technology, as in intelligence.
That 'we' agreed on that llm is ai does sadly not make things better.
Anyhow here we are with neither you nor me being able to leave this hype train.
But we don't have agreed upon definition for intelligence either:
I see AI as a term similar to "plants." When I hear this complaint it sounds to me like someone asking how strawberries and sequoia trees can both be plants when they couldn't be further apart. Well yeah, but that's why we have more specific terms when we're referring to a particular plant - just like with AI. Plants and AI are both parent categories that cover a wide range of subcategories.
Respect for you, good sir! A good point well made.
It's just my interpretation or current understanding of intelligence. I think I am adding sentience and motivation accidentially.
So your original point stands.
Thank you.
I think the issue is that when people hear "AI," their minds immediately jump to the sci-fi AI systems depicted as as smart or smarter than humans. They then see the stupid mistakes LLMs make and reasonably conclude these systems are nothing alike, so LLMs don't count as AI in their minds.
However, the AI systems in sci-fi aren't just intelligent - they're generally intelligent. That's what LLMs lack.
The way I see it, there are levels to intelligence. A chess bot is a narrowly intelligent system. It's great at one thing but can't do anything else. Then there's Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is basically human-level intelligence. The next step up is Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) - a generally intelligent system that's superhuman across the entire field of intelligence, unlike a chess bot that's only "superhuman" at chess.
I'd say LLMs are somewhere between narrow intelligence and AGI. They can clearly do more than just generate language, but not to the extent humans can, so I wouldn't call them generally intelligent. At least not yet.
And yeah, I don't think sentience necessarily needs to come along for the ride. It might, but it's not obvious to me that one couldn't exist without the other. It's conceivable to imagine a system that's superintelligent but it doesn't feel like anything to be that system.
Minor corrections: AI does not just comprise methods for tasks that require 'cognition'. Let's rather use the more general "information processing". Nor is it restricted to "normally requires humans". Think of swarm intelligence methods for example, like ant colony optimization.
There is an inherent issue in the definition of the word "intelligence" though. For labelling a bunch of methods, that's not as problematic, we could call all that 'banana milkshake' as long as we agree upon what we put into that category.
But we do not even have a good definition of "intelligence" itself. As soon as this issue is solved, we might start rethinking the label 'artificial intelligence'.
My proposed "information processing" is also insufficient, as it would make a fancy pocket calculator indistinguishable from what we usually call "AI".
Thinking about that: if we would apply some AI methods, e.g. from the field of machine learning, to perform operations that a pocket calculator already solves (which is kind of ridiculous, because we would be using a computer to train an AI model to mimick a computer) does that make a calculator AI? Or the AI a calculator? What would that make us humans?
Arguing that because nerds appropriated an original term does not mean that we have to change the meaning of the original term...
I don't look out my "transpart glass" I look out my windows. Even tho that's the name of an operating system. If I say I grok something, it means I understand like Heinlen intended, not that I asked a racist AI about it.
"Artificial Intelligence" and all sorts of things computer nerds are trying to claim they invented have existed in theory at least as far back as Rome.
So "the problem" is you first heard about it in the context of chatbots, so now you want to insist that is the only meaning the phrase has ever represented and everyone else needs to change to accomdoate you.
The problem isn't people are using the phrase wrong, the problem is you don't know what it means except in a very narrow context.
None of any of this shit is new, people are just ignorant.
It's like when I was a kid and watched pro-wrestling, I thought I was cool and original, because I didn't know the media that they were blatantly ripping off of.
That's where you are at right now with Artificial Intelligence, you only know the version the grifters have appropriated.
Pre-emptive edit:
I'm not saying chatbots are AI, I'm saying the definition that calls them AI is incorrect because grifters just changed it to fit what they were doing, for money.
You say that like computer scientists in the 1950s who invented the concept of AI stole it from science fiction writers instead of the other way around.
See also: "crypto."
No, it's a term used in science and engineering to categorize a bunch of algorithms, methods, and models that is being misunderstood by many people in the first place and has existed well before the first chatbots.
Such misconceptions are not unusual, which is often a result of using scientific terminology from a colloquial point of view. Think of the term "theory" for another example.
I disagree with the money part. You are now throwing scIentists and engineers into one pot with those who exploit this term for marketing purposes alone.
But I agree that the "intelligence" part is difficult to justify.
I understand that it is an intuitive choice for labelling methods that can mimick or outperform "natural intelligence" (people, birds, ants, fungi, bacteria, ...) on tasks that involve some form of information processing. The "artificial" part underlines that these methods are usually well... not found in nature (although often inspired from) but manufactured, man-made.
From my point of view the issue really begins at the "intelligence" part. We throw this word around as if it was something unique to humans. Yet, there exists no solid definition of what the fuck 'intellgience' even is. I challenge you to think about an airtight definition of 'intelligence'. If we have a solid definition for that, we can think about how we might carry that over to what we currently call artificial intelligence and may consider relabeling if necessary.
Currently, I lack an alternative. And for that reason I stick with AI as a commonly accepted working label.
First, that actually is how language works. Meaning is given to words by consensus and consensus alone. Generally, since it came to widespread usage in the modern lexicon it means exactly as they described.
Second, you say it was appropriated. Okay, from what?
"Just doing my job" being a valid excuse for causing even minor harm.
Maybe it would be very hard to choose not to take thay paycheck. Maybe it would have negative consequences for you to not sell fake insurance to people who don't know better. You don't get to pretend you didn't choose to do harm to others.
The old "tomatoes are not a vegetable" is pretty frustrating. They are a vegetable.
In botanical terms, the concept of a vegetable does not exist, which is where tomatoes are classified as fruits. But in culinary terms, vegetables do exist and tomatoes are classified as such.
I just find it frustrating, because I believed that garbage myself at some point, and I thought, I was smart for knowing that.
Just one of those examples that you can easily spread misinformation, so long as you make it sound plausible.
In culinary arts vegetables are the non-sweet edible parts of plants (not fruit). So no, they are not a vegetable.
What is true is people call them a vegetable.
There are vegetables where you eat the root.
There are vegetables where you eat the leaves.
There are vegetables where you eat the stem.
But for cucumbers, pumpkins, aubergine and paprika you eat the fruit, why should the tomato be different?
I believe the point is non-sweet, tomatoes are often quite sweet without any cooking required
Yes, but bell peppers are also quite sweet. As a kid I learnt that vegetables are from perennial plants (only live for a year) but that rule of thumb is also inconsistent.
Vegetable refuse to be categorised. Become unrulable.
Got it, if ungovernable, it's a vegetable
Other sweet plant parts are also considered culinary vegetables: carrots, squash, red peppers, sweet potatoes, fennel, and onions.
Some of them you do have to cook to perceive as sweet, but non-sweet doesn't seem to be a good dividing line. Striving for non-overlapping categories instead of just accepting the mess seems like a mistake.
As a cook, you are wrong. Those are all vegetables. There is no purity test you can run on what is a vegetable and what is not, it’s literally just what people arbitrarily decided however long ago.
If you're responding to me, that was my point. They're all vegetables.
Oh yeah I definitely responded to the wrong person. It’s annoying how often that happens on Lemmy lol
I will accept these are also not vegetables in the culinary sense as well. Looks like you have single handedly eliminate a bunch of vegetables, congratulations.
Ok, so what about peas? Or cabbage? Artichokes? What's the specific cut off for being too sweet to be a vegetable?
If it is sweet and is a berry/fruit like a tomato then it is not a vegetable. I am personally not having a hard time with this. Not sweet = vegetable. Sweet = debatable.
Hold on, it didn't need to be a berry/fruit earlier, does that mean carrots and sweet potatoes are vegetables after all?
You know what, let's try this the other way around: could you name specific examples of things you consider vegetables? Because we've named quite a lot now and you don't seem to consider any of them vegetables.
I am literally going off the culinary definition which is related to taste. If it is sweet it is a good chance it is a berry or fruit of the plant and not the vegetable matter.
If you want to get pedantic the tomato is a berry.
Sure, but it is not a vegetable.
Venice is often touted as being the “birthplace of Opera.” When in fact the true birthplace of Opera is Florence. We can credit its development to a group of artists and intellectuals called the Florentine Camerata.
This is extremely important everyone! Please take note of this and the next time you and your fellow construction workers are debating the intricacies of music history, set them straight!
Also, editing to add the little fun fact that one of the Florentine Camerata’s members was Galileo’s dad, Vincenzo Galilei.
I am the very model of a modern Capitano.
Agreeing to disagree is only applicable to matters of taste.
Example would be a preference of maple or agave syrup with your choice of cooked dough.
One cannot agree to disagree when one of the parties is factually wrong.
I see the "agree to disagree" as a bit of a social flag for the conversation that says "I don't wish to get into it / continue arguing about it" because there is no way to respond to it. If you try to continue the debate you look like an asshole, and if you drop it the person who says it gets to continue being wrong without being challenged.
It's very annoying and I hate it.
A lot of people don’t understand “factually wrong” is often not possible, if you’re literally debating specific stated facts that you have outside references to sure but anything relating to complex systems, issues, the human experience etc is simply not that black and white
That the general population are directly responsible for the amount of pollution occurring a la "carbon footprint" when there are 10 companies producing 70% of the world's pollution
Huh, odd, why do they do this?
To make the general population think that they're responsible for the problems caused by the massive uncontrolled exploitation of limited resources by corporations.
(Or in simpler terms; So the general population don't show the CEOs just how fragile their mortal bodies are.)
No, why do they produce all the emissions?
Combustion produces byproducts, such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and depending on the fuel or the quality of combustion, sulphur oxides and other fantastically poisonous substances that are building up in our limited breathing air and drinking water.
Engines that use this process are called internal combustion engines, they mix the fuel with air and ignite it, this creates heat and pressure, because the big molecules that make up the fuel are broken down into a massive quantity of smaller ones. That pressure then pushes on pistons which turn a crankshaft that can be connected to a transmission in a car, or a generator in a power plant, the hot exhaust gases that make up a lot of the pollution then get forced out of the engine into the air.
Unless you're asking why specifically those companies are the ones producing the emissions, in which case it's a matter of the amount of carbon fuel they use to mine/refine/move the materials and build/run the factories, and the transport they use to move their finished product and run all of the processes that lead up to the product being made. All of which drives emissions.
To draw on an example thats incredibly apt right now, considering Utah is now allowing a datacenter that will use 9 GW of power, more than every combined person and business in the state uses.
A data center is designed in CAD software - electrical energy from the grid is used in the computer
The data center is built - Heavy machinery prepares the ground and Concrete is poured - earthmovers use carbon fuel, the concrete manufacturer itself burns fuel to create the concrete, then ships it via trucks to the building site where it is poured, setting concrete also releases carbon dioxide.
The computer components are built - rare earth metals are dug from the ground and refined into chips that are shipped to factories where they are assembled onto circuitboards - the material and manufacture requirements of these components take a lot of fuel, and a lot of highly specialised equipment that is energy intensive
The computer components are shipped to the site - this also takes fuel.
This is all contributing to the emissions cost that the company has racked up, and the datacenter isn't even active yet.
ALSO, NONE of these examples take into account physical pollution, where crude oil or a carbon product (such as in Palestine... the American one; where a derailed train load of polyvinyl was set on fire and left to uncontrollably burn because it was cheaper than calling a chemical spill team) is either poured into the worlds water from crashed tankers or from drilling platforms (or from military actions where refineries are burned, and we get events like the mass swathe of marine life dieoff thanks to oil being spilled into the ocean)
Hopefully that answers your question, if not you'll have to ask a different way because I don't know what you mean when you say "why do they produce emissions?" (The answer is burning things makes emissions, and they're burning the lot.)
The point they are trying to get at is that the vast majority of carbon produced by these companies is produced to see to the wants and needs of common people, and it is disingenuous to imply that solving climate change would impact no one except these companies shareholders.
Most carbon isn't being created to build data centers. It is used to build roads, apartments, office buildings, cars, and trains. It is created by people driving cars or using gas stoves or eating hamburgers or running a heat pump on electricity generated in a coal plant. It is created when cheap plastic knick knacks are manufactured in indonesia, shipped across an ocean, and then transported overland to a store where they can be bought, used today, and thrown in the dump the next.
So regardless of where you apply pressure to stymie climate change, common people will be impacted, and pretending otherwise is essentially telling a lie to those common people.
Yeah convenience culture will have to die. To keep food not in plastic and not shipped halfway across the world you're going to gave to give up getting your favorite flavor of dorito from the gas station at 2am. They won't be able to package specialty flavors at a plant 600mi away then seal them in airtight nitrogen and ship them all over the country to that stores that are open 24/7 where they'll be shelf stable for the next few months. You'll have to order them by mail yourself or make do with local / regional variants made with different ingredients. The kids who stop eating when their dino nuggies have a different breading are just gonna starve (had an ex like that at 25y/o he was exhausting.)
Where did I imply that making it so the planet doesnt kill us impacts only the companies?
I used one single example among many, datacentres are a single part of the problem, but a not inconsiderable one given that 7% of the total power consumption of the entire US goes to datacenters.
In no way am I saying that mass consumption of oil product tat that goes to landfill after a week isn't part of the problem, given that plastic waste in the air and water is also a major part of pollution and feeding climate change.
I'm not pretending that people aren't going to be impacted, but I'd much rather a change where people can't buy useless tat, than one that we're living in now, where we can buy the tat but where doing so is destroying the planet we live on.
Blaming people for the companies making products worse, advertising disposable plastic items as if it solves the problems we already solved (but its so much cheaper for the company to make things out of plastics and not materials that last, and they can sell it to us ten times over to make up their profits) and then shipping them around the world in boats that use bunker fuel is unsustainable.
I spoke at length about the processes of one small part, but none of what I said was all-encompassing, it was merely a simplified example of one thing among many that make up the system of manufacture and shipping that feeds pollution into our planet for the sake of profits.
You implied it when twice you went on long tangents going into the minutiae of the carbon production process while avoiding providing the simple, obvious answer to the question. Why do those companies produce all that carbon? Because they are making things that people want and need.
The problem with this framing is that it implies that climate change exists solely due to a few bad actors, and if we just constrained them or sestroyed them or whatever, then we would all live happily ever after. But this is not the case.
Suppose we round up all the CEOs and major shareholders to these companies tomorrow, and put them on a firing line, and threaten anyone else with the same if they don't immediately dissolve the companies. Well, after maybe a year or two of a global economic crisis and restructuring of the world's supply lines, do you think carbon emmissions would have gone down? Probably not. Instead, you would likely have new major players who stepped into the old companies roles. Or maybe now those roles are more dispersed - so instead of 7 companies emmitting all this carbon, we now have 700 million.
Now, I'm not saying that the concentration of global economic power isn't a problem. But it isn't the main problem to solve if we want to solve climate change. Because the production of carbon isn't driven by companies making products, but by consumers demanding products. Nigerians coming out of poverty want dirty two stroke mopeds. Vietnamese pho vendors want propane to power their food carts. Latvian software developers want to display their wealth by driving low end luxury cars. Argentinian housewives want to eat steak for every meal. And remote villiagers in Pakistan want to keep enjoying the power they now have in their homes for only the last few years that comes from the coal plant 100km away. And if we want to snap our fingers and decarbonize the world, then at least some of these people are going to face disruptions to some of these goods.
That doesn't mean that a decarbonized world has to be worse for everyone. But it means that maybe Latvian software developers need to develop a taste for expensive watches, and maybe Argentinian housewives will need to learn to grill jackfruit, and maybe an NGO needs to pay for rural Pakistanis to have solar panels on their roofs. But the actual number of companies that are the endpoints of pollution based on whatever statistical analysis is fairly irrelivant. Whether it is 7 companies or 700 million, we need to stop the demand for carbon intensive goods that is driving the supply - and that means changing peoples preferences or creating alternatives for those preferences to be met which do not depend on carbon emmissions.
I'm being a bit annoying about it because the companies don't burn all that crap for fun but, as you laid out, for our collective consumption patterns. I developed the impression that the whole "x companies do y% of emissions!" thing, similar to "no ethical consumption" reminders tends to fulfill a function not aimed at motivating larger-scale changes (e.g. banning animal agriculture wholly instead of making an individual choice to not consume em; banning ICE cars from being produced/sold while creating comprehensive public transport instead of merely biking to work yourself) but at detaching oneself from the role we do actually play in society. (Also, smaller/individual scale weirdoes are a good source of activists that can radiate social structures out into general society)
I'm not saying the "70% of emissions come from 10 companies" fact as a get out of jail 'I'll burn tyres in my yard because the companies do worse' - that's being part of the problem and not helping in any way.
I 100% agree with your follow up of we need to embrace the fact that we exist as part of a system and our actions have consequences.
My position is and has always been that we need to take better actions to prevent these companies from digging oil out of the ground or the pandemics, famines, resource wars, baseball sized hail, mass flooding, wildfires and supercell tornados are going to only get worse for everyone.
The problem with relying on the mass of society changing their consumption patterns is that the mass of society is too damn poor to even give a damn, let alone scrounge up the extra money it costs to buy the non-polluting version of the commodity they need.
We’ve been trying to implement bottom-up change for 50+ years, and pretty much the only people who have made any voluntary changes are middle-class yuppies.
On the other hand, top down legislation has had an exponentially larger impact on emissions.
To be clear: the direction I'd like to see isn't ignoring larger-scale changes but embracing that these things are linked. Companies don't burn fuel for fun, but for profit (or non-capitalist modes of resource allocation - if the central party committee decides to satiate the people's hunger for meat and cars, that's also a problem). And the profit there comes from all of us, individually as well as collectively. So action against that probably should also happen on both levels.
I think the issue lies in that the corporations have an incentive to keep the increased carbon footprint and the average person composting or sorting trash for recycling (typical footprint reduction suggestions) does nothing to reduce this incentive. Moving the markets desires away from items with high carbon footprints is a monumental task and one we should strive for but a faster method of reduction would be direct pressure to the corporations exploiting cheap labor that has a higher carbon footprint cost
It’s a nice “gotcha” you’re trying do. These companies emit because they are producing goods and services for us, the people, right?
No.
The point of blaming 10 companies for 70% of emissions, most of whom are fossil fuel energy companies, is that we have the technology and the resources to begin a 100% switch over to cleaner energy sources today. But these 10 companies make obscene profits and use those profits to control the political system and prevent that switchover.
We don’t have to use fossil fuels to maintain our society, but these companies use their influence to make sure we do it anyways.
That you only need headlights to see in the dark. Headlights are just as much so other cars can see you, than they are so you can see. In the rain and in the fog, they're crucial to have on.
I live in the PNW where is rarely sunny and often raining and the number of people who don’t understand this is too damn high!
So do I. Guy almost hit me a few years back because I lived on a mountain road and it was pouring out, didn't see him at all.
The birth rate going down = the population is collapsing.
No.
The birth rate is going down and the population is increasing. Both of these are happening at the same time.
It does mean population aging. Which isn't great.
Other than capitalism, why? We have enough resources to support everyone if we want to. People are still having kids just not as many. Why do we need so many people? What if the population drops to a more sustainable number?
The problem isn't the number of humans on the planet. The problem is how many of them are retirees/elderly compared to working age.
Old people don't work or work less, still require food, and often require increased amounts of medical care. If you view the world's economy through a detached, Sim City player eye view, the elderly are a dummy load we dump resources into out of a sense of sentimentality. In an extreme case, where a baby boom is followed within a lifetime by a baby bust, you get into this behind the power curve situation where most of the relatively few working age people are employed in the elderly support industry making orthopedic shoes, walkers, those strawberry hard candies and staffing hospice houses.
That extreme case? Actually happening right now, especially in Korea and Japan.
Yes but again those are only issues because of capitalism. What if we tried something else? If the system doesn't work anymore why not change it instead of trying to make more babies to fix the issue? Why is the only option more babies? It's not the only thing we can do
That has nothing to do with capitalism. How does communism solve the "we have a lot of old people that need care" issue that doesn't divert more people of working age to the Taking Care Of Old People industry? The Soviet answer seems to be "life expectancy of 52" and the Chinese answer seems to be "that's their state mandated 1 child's problem."
I didn't say communism solves anything. But we have enough resources and technology now that we can provide for everyone without everyone having to work. If only like a quarter of the people got all the "work" done the rest of the people could be old or care for them.
A lot of the "work" that people do today are just jobs programs to keep the system moving. Think of people working at insurance companies or car dealers. Pointless middle men that could be free if they weren't in this system.
You blamed the problem on capitalism, I used communism as a non-capitalist example to demonstrate irrelevancy. If the tire is flat, it doesn't matter if the car is manual or automatic. That is what leading scholars call an analogy, it is a rhetorical device used to draw comparisons between relationships. Stated in full: The problem of an aging population has as much to do with capitalism vs communism as a flat tire has to do with the vehicle's transmission being manual or automatic. I state this because I have come to believe you're the kind of internet idiot/troll/bot that takes analogies literally out of genuine stupidity or intentional bad faith.
We don't have the technology to eliminate the majority of the workforce. If we did, the Epstein class would have done it by now out of pure shitheartedness. And only in the fever dreams of a syphilitic moron would one quarter of the population work to take care of the other three quarters be a solution to anything.
"Water drains in opposite directions in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres".
No, it doesn't.
The coriolis effect is a real thing, but it is spectacularly weak.
Strong enough that you have to steer against it when flying, too weak to decide the handedness of your toilet.
The atmosphere is much larger than my toilet.
it's like gravity
(small objects don't have (well, show, I guess but uhhh) it but large ones do)
Demonstration of the effect
Sure it does. Up here it drains down but down there it goes up.
I'm sick of people saying there are no original movies. Original movies come out literally every week, and I'm using the actual meaning of the word literally. Look at the website MovieInsider for a list of all the movies being released. Some recent original movies are quite popular too, like Sinners, KPop Demon Hunters, and Project Hail Mary. It pisses me off because if you care enough to complain, you should care enough to look up what movies are out instead of just knowing about the ones heavily advertised. I don't know what video games are out but I would make an effort to know if I played video games. If you care what movies are out, you should look it up.
I think you might be judging these people too harshly. I think what they really mean is less that new movie ideas are not coming out and more that there are too many re-hashed ideas. The two ideas are easy to confuse. And I think you'll admit that there have been long strings of superhero movies, tons of vampire movies, never-ending franchises and that doesn't even include all of the tropes that get used over and over again. This leaves people like me wondering how many great ideas pitched to Hollywood are turned down in favor of another sequel because it's perceived as the easiest way to make a quick buck. I'm always delighted when a movie surprises me because so few do.
Maybe I take things too literally because of my autism, but in the contexts I see these comments it seems to mean there are no movies that aren't sequels or remakes. There are plenty of movies that aren't sequels or remakes and these people seem to be willfully ignoring them. I've seen many movies this year, some have been sequels or remakes, some have not been. I personally count movies based on books as original, like the movie Reminders of Him, but that's not good enough for some people. The authour of the novel had an original idea and it was made into a film, but no they won't accept an adaptation as original. And yes, some original films are derivative of ideas that have been done before. All fiction is derivative of other fiction. It's basically impossible fir it not to be at least a little derivative.
I concede that it is unfortunate that there are likely original ideas being rejected in favour of franchise movies. But I think part of the reason this happens is audiences are hypocritical. If the audience would put their money where their mouths are and see more original films, more original films would get made. Franchise films are getting made so often because it's what people want, as proven by them making money. People blame the marketing for their choices. It's a chicken and egg situation, franchise films make more money because they're marketed more and they're marketed more because they make more money. If people saw more original films, original films would get more marketing. I'm annoyed by people blaming the corporations for their own choice to see franchise movies more than original movies
I think it could be a bit of both.
I mean independent films don't aire in as many locations so it's a self fulfilling thing to some extent.
I've never really known if it's the chicken or the egg. For example, I like a smaller cell phone. It fits in my pocket and is easier to use with one hand. But... It's also harder to see. Smaller phones are going extinct. Is that because people want larger phones or because companies want us to want larger phones? I have no idea really. All I know is it will be very difficult for me to "vote" for smaller phones with my dollars, if there are literally no smaller phones to choose.
Project Hail Mary is an adaptation
Some of our most beloved classical movies are adaptations. What’s your point?
Name one anime that wasn’t a manga first.
You erroneously listed it as an example of an original film, is my point.
That person didn't list it as anything. Pay attention to who you're replying to. For the purpose of the discussion about whether Hollywood is making any original movies, people mean as opposed to remakes and sequels
Okay it was an adaptation, but it wasn't a remake or a sequel. I understand the definition of original to be not remake or sequel. If adaptations don't count, that significantly shrinks the number of original movies that have ever been made. Why is it not enough the movie isn't part of an established film franchise, it also must not be an adaptation? The authour of the novel had an original idea and it was made into a film. The film is contributing to new, non-franchise, films being made popular. No, ideas must go straight to being film or they don't count?
Because original film has a specific meaning, that it isn’t adapted from an underlying work.
But for the purposes of these conversations, people are complaining about sequels and remakes being too prominent. I don't see why an adaptation of a book that has never been adapted into film before should be part of that complaint
Okay, but you can’t just redefine established terminology to make it fit your argument. Besides, people complain about adaptations from other media just as much as about remakes and sequels.
People complain about original movies too, what's your point? People are hypocrites. They ask why nothing original is being made and them Disney announced Hexed and it immediately got backlash. People are accusing it of being a ripoff of Owl House but there's no good evidence of that. People complain no matter what.
Maybe I've misunderstood and people usually aren't just complaining about franchise films but also about adaptations. To which I'm even MORE annoyed with their complaint about no original movies being made. The original Mean Girls was an adaptation. So that movie shouldn't have been made? Why shouldn't Hollywood look to books for material? Why this arbitrary demand that the movie can't be based on anything? All stories are derivative. The original Star Wars was original, not a remake or adaptation, but it was inspired by Flash Gordon. It's basically impossible to make a story with no connection to any preexisting story
Different categories apply depending on the context. Adaptations are a different category than remakes or sequels and in this context make sense to classify as original. It's not based on any preexisting movie
I dunno, all those movies you mention seemed to have a lot in common, like a protagonist who becomes unsatisfied with their life, enters a new realm with different rules, undergoes great trials, almost fails but receives unexpected aid, and ultimately gets what they sought but finds themself no longer fitting into their former life.
Just something I've noticed.
That is the standard plot for any good story.
The most basic version is: normal person gets pushed out of their comfort zone, undergoes turmoil, comes out of this turmoil changed.
Unfortunately popular movies tend to make them all “tough guy gets pushed into violence, destruction ensues, he gets the girl and/or revenge” or “uptight person gets put in absurdly contrived cringy situations that are supposed to be funny, then comes out of the situation not uptight and gets the girl.”
I just came from another post that reminded me of this so I’ll go with it: gerrymandering does not affect your vote in statewide races.
I kept coming across people before the 2024 US elections saying their vote wouldn’t matter in states like TX because of gerrymandering. No. No! It screws you in representation, but not the votes that are a raw count like governor or president.
There might be second order effects of gerrymandering in terms of voters feeling disenfranchised, and deciding their vote doesn't matter. And not going to vote at all, even in state-wide elections. Not saying this with any evidence just thinking.
Totally!
Gerrymandering makes many elections useless if you’re in the districted minority, so you and many who think like you don’t vote. Results come out showing a sweeping win for the majority, so you and others who think like you feel like you’re so far in the minority that there’s never a point to voting because you’ll never “win,” even in statewide elections.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a part of the calculus behind gerrymandering in the first place. Not only do you get the immediate representation you’re seeking, but also makes it so people who disagree just stop voting altogether.
What about the electoral college?
in most states its all or nothing so its the popular vote of the state. I think some have some sort of proportional but not sure if its based on districts.
Adding onto the other commenter - yes the electoral college skews votes towards less populous states. But state borders weren't drawn with this intent, so it isn't gerrymandering.
It doesn't though.
It used to, that is true, but it no longer does.
The Constitution allowed for midwest states to have a minimum number of college votes so Congress would not be dominated by the biggest states.
But since then, the population of those states has grown so that they meet the numbers for those votes anyway, exception in a few cases, and even then the disproportion is small.
only two states award electors by district, the rest are winner-take-all
your brain doesn't do maths to figure out how to move yourself or how to throw things, it just learned/knows which neurons to fire to move different parts of your body and has an impression of how much force must be applied to do different types of physical work. (e.g move through fluid)
True. But our bones do some of the calculations as well. We're born with kinematics. Contrast with a video game that needs to do a lot of IK math to simulate bones.
And our neurons are doing a lot of calculations ... just a different way.
But yeah, nobody is doing that Sherlock Holmes fight club stuff in their heads.
I do, but only when i shower.
"One bar of soap to the left arm. Top. Bottom. Clean: 12 hours "
Might start doing this technique to be fair
That's more than 12 hours of clean in my book though, if i may say
I wonder, do the Clean buffs stack? Or are you a percent clean?
Alright, here are the official stats: getting perfectly clean gives you the buff Cleanliness IV for 1 hour, which then degrades to Cleanliness III for 3 hours, to Cleanliness II for 8 hours, followed by Cleanliness I for 12 hours.
The time runs at a base rate of 1 hour per hour, but your environment may lead to the rate accelerating or decreasing. For instance, being out in the hot sun may lead to sweating which increases the rate to 1.25-4 hours per hour depending on how hot it is and your passive constitution score and buffs. Being in a perfectly air conditioned, filtered environment could reduce the rate as low as .5 hours per hour.
There can also be instant hits to the timer. For instance, being hit by a thimble of mud may take off 10 minutes at once, slathering it to to cover more skin will take off a larger chunk from the timer.
I miss when games were simpler...
Definitely doesn't stack because i feel like if i overclean i get dirtier quicker. What's so unfair about this is that the dirty debuff stacks.
So yeah, there's a percent clean and when you get over 100% you're in raw skin territory. Microbiome extinction.
I agree so much with this. We can use math to describe what you are doing when you throw a ball, that doesn't mean you are doing the math calculations when you throw it.
We can use math to calculate all sorts of things, doesn't mean those things themselves are doing math to decide how to do them. Waves, the moon's orbit, all kinds of natural systems we can use math to describe, but they aren't doing math.
That's philosophical.
Are our neurons, are waves etc. not just a system that directly 'perform' maths without 'doing' maths? Math can be seen as a language for us to describe, explore and predict stuff. But you could equivalently say that the math is already there and we just discover it and put it into words.
That relates to the question whether math is discovered or invented. The one is an act of uncovering universal and natural truths, the other a rather creative process of bringing something new into a universe where it isn't naturally found.
But that's the catch. We wouldn't say that, for example, coffe machines are discovered, they are not found in nature. (If they would, that would be quite a headline to wake up to.) They are clearly invented. Math however builds upon a fundament of provable truths. Of stuff that is already there and can be found in nature. So while we might argue that at least some parts of math may be invented (just like the coffee machine that operates on physical principles that exist elsewhere in nature with respect to their components), isn't the fundament of math itself rather discovered? We just put into words and symbols, what is already there and uncover the hidden mechanisms.
I am not a mathematician, but have heard somewhere that it is already quite an effort to prove why our numbers make sense or why 1+1 can equal 2. And while we certainly do not need to tie math to an observable physical reality, we derived fundamental working principles from it, don't we?
Trump was good for the economy.
During the election this kept being repeated even though the economy collapsed because of his covid response
Things being "illegal".
No it's not against the law. Just because someone can sue you doesn't mean what you did was a crime. Just because a business can't sell a particular product doesn't mean it's illegal to have. You can't 'get arrested' for half the shit people think is 'illegal'.
That Social Security is going to collapse. I've been hearing it for literally 50 years. I honestly grew up thinking SS would not be there at retirement, and now I'm collecting it (although I'm not retired). It was a psy-op the whole time, trying to keep workers anxious, and at the grindstone.
Social Security is literally the easiest problem in DC to fix. All they have to do is raise the income cap. Right now, the cap is $184,500. You pay into Social Security on the first $184,500 of income, and anything over that doesn't get touched. If you make less than that, then 100% of your income gets tapped for SS. But if you make more, you pay a much tinier percentage of your total income.
So if SS is looking like a problem, all they have to do is raise the cap. It goes up a bit every year anyway, but there is no reason it can't be $500,000, or even $1 million. Of course the rich will scream, but they're always screaming. We have to learn to ignore that as background radiation, nothing to be concerned about.
Raise the cap enough, and you not only protect Social Security forever, you can give Grandma a nice raise. Doesn't she deserve it for all those delicious cookies? Or brownies actually, in my Grandma's case. She made the best homemade brownies, and she cut them BIG!
Orrrr just remove the cap entirely. No reason to give them any happiness at all. Raise the floor above 100k and remove the cap. And then change the rate to say 5x.
Or even a sliding scale, so the further you are above the floor, the higher rate you pay.
Over 1 million or so and it gets up to 100%.
I've thought of that, but then we miss out on the opportunity to piss them off every time we raise it, and that's so much fun.
I love when rich people start screaming that they don't have enough money, and the poor get all the breaks, and it isn't fair. Hilarious.
Oh I'd rather just drown them in their anger and literally tax them to financial (and in most cases actual) death then keep them around to listen to their torture. I'm actually 1000% ok with making a new law yesterday that just means death sentence for having over a certain amount. Legal to earn only if you can show that you are personally investing billions into infrastructure and public good. To be planned and handled by neutral parties, so you can't be faking numbers and all that.
I feel like it's the reverse of that saying from the Incredibles.
Once no one is rich, everyone will be.
Valid perspective, the main point being that it is imperative that we reconfigure our country so that neither society, nor the government serve the needs of the wealthy, the wealthy serve the needs of government and society. The wealthy have no needs, they are wealthy.
They need to learn that they keep their money at the pleasure of the Citizens, and if they step out of line, or even hint at trouble, the Board of Directors goes to prison, and their entire net worth is confiscated. Do that to a few wealthy families, make them destitute, and have to send their kids to {gasp!} public school, and they'll learn real quick who they work for.
Nah, just guillotine them and make the kids wards of the (new and improved) state. Everybody wins.
50 years ago was 1976, which was before the 1983 reforms. In 2023, I see a prediction it will run out of trust money by 2035. In 2009, they were predicting the same trust exhaustion in 2037. In 2005, Bush's campaign warned it would run out by 2042. You'll notice that these dates keep moving closer and closer as we get more data. There are real structural problems in social security.
With the cap, social security collected 1,159,984 + 188,399 million dollars in 2024, on the 6.2% + 6.2% tax rate. Medicare with no cap at the 1.45% + 1.45% tax rate collected 441,003 million dollars.
That implies taxable income for medicare was 14,172,517 million dollars, and for social security it was 10,874,056 million dollars. Completely removing the cap on social security would fix the current shortfall, but leave the structural issues in the program intact. Maybe it would buy us 25 more years. There are still people living today that would pay in more than they can possibly receive back from the system.
In short, you're telling the people funding your lifestyle, "Fuck you, I got mine", then denying that that is what's happening.
another one, single or more public option for healthcare cost more, or takes too long to see a doc. not true its almost equal to Insurance provided healthcare in wait times. but the cost is way more significantly higher rather than low cost or free.
also depends if your using a PUBLIC network with govt subsidized hospitals over a private network that is subsidized by the govt that provides free healthcare to patients.
God.
That we eat spiders in our sleep. Just grab them and nomf or they willingly crawl into our mouths of something.
New cars are reliable.
First of all, no. Their more complex and failure prone, and you are the guinea pig they test new crap on.
Second of all, you literally cannot call a one year old vehicle reliable. You do not have enough data to make that claim. My jeep is about 40 years old, and with the 40 year old head start will still out live a brand new jeep. It has no "limp mode" because u slipped out of 4 lo in the woods (actual customer example), and it doesn't require Internet connection + a security gateway authentication to reset things like limp mode and doing a clutch position relearn. If you want a reliable vehicle get something made between 85 and 05, as long as it doesn't rust out from underneath you it will give u less headaches than anything made in the last 20 years.
Marginal Tax brackets drive me insane especially my parents constantly misunderstand and think a payrise will make them lose money.
They don't understand that the tax is only paid on the money earned in that bracket. So going up 5% isn't your total income being taxed an extra 5% its only the money earned on that bracket that is taxed at the higher rate.
Oh plenty...
The myth of "alpha wolves" and all the men who build a toxic social and psychological image of themselves and other men because of it, apparently because they would like to live in a zoo and get into conflicts with other men they have never met before or something.
But seriously, there were some grave errors in how this came to be. This wasn't observing wolves in their natural environment. There are no "alpha wolves" in nature. The researcher, David Mech, who was in part responsible for this stupidity has been working since then to correct this, but media and society already swallowed the misconception too hard.
Next one:
"LLMs are not AI." Yes, they are. AI is a scientific label for a bunch of methods, algorithms, and models.
"But they are not 'intelligent'." My dear fellow flesh bag, we do not even have a clear definition of what 'intelligence' even is. Come up with a good one, then let's talk about this particular label. Until then, you can rename AI to 'pesto alfredo' for all I care as long as we agree what kind of methods we mean by that to categorize a bunch of computer science stuff.
In the opposite corner:
"We have achieved AGI with LLMs". No, we have not. There is still a substantial lack of capabilties and properties.
Or: "LLMs are sentient and self-aware". To the best of my knowledge, they are not. To be fair, there is little room for debate, which often boils down to stuff like semantic arguments about consciousness and definitions of understanding, but the consensus is that they are not.
Another one:
"Homeopathy cures diseases." No, it doesn't. It has a placebo effect but that's pretty much about it.
There is more:
"Evolution theory is just a 'theory'." No, it's a proven set of explanations and models supported by overwhelming empirical evidence. Popular confusion of the colloquial use of the word "theory" with the scientific one.
Colloquial meaning: a guess, hunch, speculation, or unproven idea.
Scientific meaning: a well-substantiated explanatory framework supported by extensive evidence and capable of being tested and potentially falsified.
And there is even more, but I have already written a wall of text and am tired now.
What I would give to make everyone in the world understand that a computer responding to a string of 0s and 1s in the order directed is not thinking.
How do you define "thinking"?
In its most basic form: the continuous formation/recall of associations and disassociations between stimuli.
That is the atom of thinking. But even that rules out ANNs pretrained using gradient descent since they can’t learn in response to stimuli.
The next simple step up is the ability to overwrite those learned associations which probably is solved by completing the first task but it’s important to note.
The following step up is being able to process those associations/memories themselves as stimuli which can be associated forming new connections/memories that can be recalled and associated and so on ad infinitum.
That rules out finite non-recursive neural nets, and that still puts us no where near AGI. It’s basically just an ml taxonomic tree builder
The next necessary piece for actual high level thinking is curiosity and action. The system needs to be able to take a concept and a relation (abstract idea of a particular kind of association between two concepts) which currently don’t form a known relationship, and attempt to find the missing concept which would complete that relationship. (Most likely this involves either finding relationship chains between the two which in all other known cases are equivalent to a known relation OR following some procedure to experience the relationship directly as stimuli.)
Lastly, in order to experience the idea of thinking, we first need to have the ability to form temporal associations, but also have working memory of recent past thoughts, and finally the ability to compare those with previous recent memories or the most current stored thoughts. Finding patterns in our thinking helps us be better at thinking. (This is a prerequisite for the experience of free will and consciousness)
That’s what higher level thinking entails.
Of course tuning the system’s response to recognized associations, how memories are stored and recalled, how frequently the system experiences curiosity, etc. will all impact the overall intelligence of the model, but considering most current “AI” don’t even check off the first box, that’s all a bit out of scope.
Spontaneous signals sent in the human brain in response to stimuli. The thing about computers is that their only stimuli is 0s and 1s, and their only response is 0s and 1s. They're a complex system of switches. Humans experience the entire world of stimuli, and we made this system of switches to convey representations of the meanings we create in our brains. A computer has no mechanism to understand that the purpose of these 0s and 1s we're sending is to ask and answer questions, to solve a problem of how to build a bridge, to come up with a compelling story to make our friends laugh. We can program it to very accurately perform an action. That's what it can do.
This sounds a bit circular to me. Almost like saying "thinking is what brains do."
I'm also getting the sense that you're partly talking about consciousness there, which I would personally treat as a separate subject. It's not obvious to me that in order to be able to think, one would also need the capacity to experience.
That's not wrong to say though, because it's true. Thought is a function of a brain. There's no mechanism for non-brains to think. I think you're confusing computation for thought. Computation can result in a product that looks like it came from thought, but computation itself fundamentally has nothing in common with thought. It's not a spontaneous, creative response to the stimuli we experience in the world. There is no process of meaning-making. There can't be, because it has no mechanism to understand what it's responding to.
Brains are made of matter that obeys the laws of physics. I don't see why that same function couldn't be performed in silicon. I wouldn't say our current systems can think in the sense that people understand the term, but I see no reason to assume they couldn't in the future - or that thinking is reserved only for wet meat computers.
I don't really see how you could make a brain out of silicone, because thought a product of cells. The cells send signals to each other, and that's how you get thought. You could maybe grow a brain in a lab, but I don't see how a plastic replication would work. And even if you did grow one in a lab, who knows how not being connected to a body would impact its ability to develop thought.
well theoretically with a computer powerful enough, one can simulate all the brain cells and effectively emulate the whole brain
I agree. We could design actual thinking AI, just not with our current technology.
That's an unserious definition because if thinking is defined as happening in the human brain, then monkeys can't think. Obviously monkeys can think.
I would say that thinking includes the ability to generate novel ideas and the ability to reason. This ability to reason may include viewing a situation from another perspective than one's self. An AI does not reason, it recognizes patterns in a huge dataset and generates output based on that.
"Things were better in the past"
No... you just spend too much time on the internet. And yes, that includes comparing everything to 1950s America. Of course, there are ebbs and flows, and things get worse for some people or groups of people sometimes. But on net, if you compare the present to the past over any substantial period of time, based on metrics that people generally find important like health, safety, free time, and freedom to choose how to live their lives, the present is wildly better than the past.
Taking 1950s America for example, since it is such a popular example, 1/3 of homes didn't have indoor plumbing. We don't even have to go back to medieval times and talk about how you probably wouldn't be a princess - we can just compare to the supposed golden age of one of the richest societies the world has ever seen, and you have a one in three chance of having to poop in a hole outside every day and heating your bathwater in a stock pot on the stove.
SOME things were better in the past. Most were not. Just because someone can you can name a few examples of things that were better doesnt make them right.
I agree. I think that there are some things that were better in the past - mostly the defaults we had set in diets, exercise, and social interaction. Since we now have the option to be sedentary, eat processed food, and stay isolated, this can lead to a great deal of unnecessary unhappiness unless you make a conscious choice to do otherwise. And this choice can feel difficult to make, because so many other people have normalized an unhealthy way of life. But still, it is a choice, and any individual can choose to live differently if they want to.
It doesn't piss me off at all, but too many people think time is consistent. Time fluctuates, moves faster or slower depending on your relative speed. There could be dead spots in the galaxy/universe where time simply does not pass.
Time does not pass for entities traveling at c. Everything else is reference frame.
That's crazy too. Light travels instintantly, but it takes time to reach us. Reality be cray, i love it.
That's because light is in a different reference frame than we are.
Your mom so big she absorbs lights refrence frames
Yo momma so fat she got an event horizon.
That's a good one
I’m with you aside from the places where time may not pass. Time isn’t a “place” thing. Particles traveling through that space would have time pass for them so long as they were traveling sublight.
I'm thinking there's got to be areas where there is nothing passing through, somewhere out there. It's more of a thought experiment than anything i suppose.
This is one thing that always got me. Isn't this all based on movement? When we talk about time in warped spacetime being different from time "elsewhere" isn't it usually based on how we track time? (physical clocks, atom vibration, etc...) An example I remember reading about was the light clock on a moving object. The faster you move the "longer" it takes the light to bounce from mirror to mirror, but that shouldn't change what one bounce was initially defined as.
We defined time as a measurement between two points of "existence" to relate to changes within that period at what I'd call "standard spacetime." I've always felt like one second is one second, it's just your clock that was affected.
I guess it's the relative part that gets me. If it's all down to movement, down to the atom, everything that could happen in 1 earth second on earth happens in the ticking of 3 seconds in altered spacetime does it actually mean anything significant?
...idk now after writing it out I'm more confused about why I was confused. It makes sense, it just feels like it shouldn't make sense lol
I hear you one hundred percent. If it wasn't tricky our best minds wouldn't still be scratching thier heads over it.
Tryptophan makes you sleepy on Thanksgiving.
Large doses of Tryptophan can make you sleepy, but the amount you get in turkey doesn't come close. Thanksgiving meals make you sleepy because you eat a huge meal. Eat a huge meal without turkey and you will be tired, eat a normal sized meal with turkey and you won't be more tired than any other meal.
The only electricity generation we need/should have is solar.
Nuclear is fine, it's only unsafe when people are idiots. Oh wait, actually scratch that, in that case it's not safe. /s
There's more to it than just Chernobyl.
Chernobyl is hardly the only meltdown we have seen. 3 reactors in Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Fermi 1, K-19 soviet submarine, the US SL-1 test reactor. And there are plenty of non-meltdown radiation releases. Newer designs do seem safer, but the track record of nuclear power is checkered, at best.
That and the fossil fuel industry creating Greenpeace to spread propaganda far and wide under the guise of environmentalism
I've heard the argument that nuclear is also bad because it still uses steam turbines which require grease/cooling oil derived from petroleum. Lot of anti turbine people for that reason. I wholeheartedly disagree and am what you could consider a highly knowledgeable person in the matter.
I think we have to settle with the fact that all oil deposits are going to be extracted and used by humanity. I'd prefer if we used it slowly to grease turbine bearings rather than just burning it all the time.
Also, until fairly recently, we were using whale oil for lubrication in a lot of things. As fucked up as it is, that shit is renewable. There are alternatives for lubrication that are slightly more expensive than petroleum products.
I absolutely agree with everything you've said so far.
And yet the petroleum industry is pushing so hard to brainwash the public to think another Chernobyl is inevitable, even though they can make the very products that can prevent it.
Why do you say that? Isn't it better to diversify to guarantee supply when the sun is out? What's the problem with wind, hydro or geothermal?
Plus, having other means to generate electricity would also somewhat bring down the cost of solar cells due to lower demand.
I'm saying a diversification of generation is needed. All eggs in any one particular basket is ignorance.
I'm dumb. I forgot you were saying that is a bad take. My bad.
Yeah we need a good mix of things. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear.. Why not burn trash for electricity as well, unless we figure out excellent ways to recycle everything. Coal, gas and oil fuels should obviously be phased out as fast as possible, as much as possible.
But in the end isn’t all energy solar?
Most energy sources trace back to the sun’s power through direct or indirect processes. Fossil fuels, wind, hydro, and biomass all originate from solar-driven cycles on Earth. About the only thing you could argue that isn’t solar is geothermal. But even that exists because some sun exploded created gas and dust that clumps together and forms a planet.
Sure, that is a statement a human could type or vocalize.
I assure you I am human. But isn’t that exactly what an AI would say?
Although I also believe we live in a simulation so in the end maybe we are all AI.
Hairs grow longer, thicker and darker when you cut them.
That cable TV news has to report in the public's interest like broadcast TV (before that ass kisser Brendan Carr took over the FCC) used to.
That Dems are Communists. Like, if only.
The persistent myth that corporations are legally required to act only in the service of shareholders’ financial interests.
Powerful groups have a vested interest in keeping the myth around, but it doesn’t even pass the smell test— they were more interested in social control with the return to office stuff. Even though productivity is higher and costs are lower with WFH. Even if you argued it served the interest of shareholders as a broad class, without checking for the real estate holdings of the company’s shareholders, they could accidentally assist companies that their shareholders don’t have investments in. Or worse, competing ones.
It goes further. Why not treat employees better to reduce turnover or improve performance? No, of course not. It is used exclusively to justify immoral actions.
I got another one. It bugs me when people say that it's not possible for two dark haired people to produce a blonde child. These people think they're so smart because they know genetics exist. But if they learned anything about genetics at all, very basic punnet square genetics you learn in highschool biology explains why it's not only possible but pretty common. If both dark haired parents are carriers for the blonde gene, there is a 25% chance of a blonde child. And reality is probably more complex than what I learned in highschool.
It's like the stubborn fuckers who refuse to accept the science of sex and gender being any more complex that "penis man vagina woman". They think they're so smart for knowing "basic" biology and refuse to fucking learn anything beyond that.
"survival of fittest "was not coined by DARWIN, it was by herbert who co-opt his research.
Chronic lyme does not exist as a disease, and its coined by non-scientist which has snowballed into a large industry(providing questionable testing, LYME DOCTORA) by providing services that is equivalent to pseudoscience AND Belief its in more than 1 country, eventhough its mostly found deer ticks in americas, and not ANY TICK species. people actually went a little crazy with the Rx. basically people have what psyches called, delusional parasitosis, or psychosomatic disorders, i visited these forums and it seems alot of these people have mental illness+ they long term damage from using supplements and plant extracts that are likely somewhat toxic. seems pervasive in the midwest, and what a surprise chronic use of antibiotics from these "lyme doctors" also have cause long term damage. and this pairs with homeopathy/naturopathy/alternative medication.
Most MSMs prior to trumps 2nd or 1st term is not "liberal leftist" media, none existed for decades. the only 1 i see was a podcast/on a obscure channel and time Demcry now! is the closest thing to be talking even something remotely "left". every other just fawns over "Fallen soldiers" even cnn did often, plus its significant amount of copaganda show.
also recently the artemis launch is , and the cold war launches are wildly still believed by asians as faked, and done in by studio. the most common excuse is why "is there wind in space, because the flag is "flapping"...etc. i was actually surprised older asians still widely believe it. during 2019, and currently to.
AI/llm is just a statistical word predictor.
You could perhaps make the argument that it's a statistical token predictor, but that is about as useful as boiling down various weather services as "just statistics" or the economy as "just statistics".
Making a language model that speaks a language is not that hard, but the world of science underlying how this is done is anything but simple. Saying it's just statistics is ridiculously reductive like saying your response to this comment is just chemistry. Context driven tokenization, byte level byte pair encoding, RoBERTa, fine tuning methods, direct preference optimization, dataset curation and management, and curriculum learning for targeted performance and memory are things that are being developed and refined very fast (like weekly or monthly breakthroughs sometimes) and with pretty staggering performance increases. It still is not for everyone because power tools injure, but instead of saying "just a statistics engine" say what you really mean "I don't understand it, but I believe XXX is a bad use case for LLMs."
To a lesser extent that any company is "programming AI". Not in the way that you mean it; curriculum learning, guard rails, and fine running are all extremely indirect. Nobody had their hands specifically in a model's parameter space directly.
Aight, ima bite. LLMs are just statistical word predictors.
I would agree that parts of weather services are weather pattern predictors (which likely do include some machine learning nowadays) and certain aspects of economics are statistic predictions (the rest is either monopoly or pseudoscience lol), so yeah both are statistics.
I’ll also agree that the statistics of “AI” is difficult and honestly beautiful. Transformers really are ingenious and the methods for optimizing them are as well.
However, I don’t think it is comparable to “your response to this is just chemistry”
There’s a significant difference between these systems.
One is a machine emerging from physics over billions of years to eventually comprehend various aspects of the universe and social interaction as a byproduct, experiencing the illusion of free will, and deciding to respond/not-resopond to a comment.
The other, is a machine built with the sole purpose of predicting the “right” next word. It’s a novel area of science, but it is a science and it is still just a word (or “token” if you want to be pedantic) predictor.
Saying your response to the comment is just chemistry is more like saying AI is just the laws of electromagnetism; both of which are stupid. But saying a specific statistical modeling method is in fact a statistical modeling method is just a fact.
And I’m not saying this as someone who is pure “anti-AI” since it does have its uses. The work going into LLMs is incredible and the breakthroughs for LLMs typically can be extended to other machine learning problems.
If you can train a model to notice unsafe code, who do you think will find bugs/exploits easier in a large code base? A model you can parallelize that never gets tired or a pen-tester/programmer who will eventually need to sleep? Obviously the model wins for vulnerabilities that are common and that is significant because if they are common vulnerabilities, you probably have them in your code base.
Machine translation is, of course, the standard perfect use case for LLMs. With newer models even idioms can get translated well, and there are many more uses outside the realm of text-based models too.
But again, all this is still 100% statistics. These models are statistical models. They are using previous data and specified parameters, “guardrails”, etc. to build a model which when given some new data will give an output with probabilistic accuracy. That is literally the core of statistics.
On the note of “no one has their hands in a model’s parameter space directly” that’s actually false and there’s been more active study into finding and “inhibiting” certain parameters that have correlated with “lies.”
But yes, the point of AI (like that of any statistical model) is to remove the need for manual tuning. So yeah the point is mostly to not mess with parameters directly, but to build a framework by which you can basically just pump training data in and get a model which makes high accuracy predictions. That’s the same point for polynomial regression, there are just more applications for neural nets than simple regression models.
Sure there are some who are trying to build true artificial intelligence by replicating the neuroanatomy of living things, which could be non algorithmic and possibly even eventually sentient. But LLMs? Yeah no, those are just a fancy new statistical modeling method. It’s new so there’s more to explore and lots of stuff that hasn’t been tried yet, but that’s just how new things are in science and math.
LLMs are just statistical word predictors.
I took some time to reflect on this post because I don't prefer to be the moron, hopefully that didn't slow you down because your response is a good response.
To start I think that hyping up the thinking people do as a counter argument is exactly the same thing I was doing by describing recent advancements in AI and I'm not sure it moves us foward, so I will count that as a wash.
The next thing I will add here is an article I read... idk awhile ago but it shows the explainability of AI decision making in a more advanced way than like Shapley parameters for example: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html
And you basically hit it for me: my biggest gripe is that we are not doing one word at a time predictors any more. So functionally yes it's true, but practically we are doing next word prediction for LLMs in the same way you're doing next word prediction when you talk: you know where you're going and we build sentences one word at a time.
I also don't think it's fair to say that "oh fundamentally LLM stuff is just electromagnetism" because while that is literally true, I think it's still a better analogy to say statistics vs chemistry. The comments are going to make you feel a certain way, you'll make a response based on that feeling and what you know, and we will continue. I think that's pretty functionally the same as "here's an open prompt, we need to answer it, let's take a statistical approach to the specific wording we will use".
Now that we are including end goals, reflection, and rule sets, I don't think it's fair to say it's just one word at a time prediction anymore because training and optimization are happening at the prompt and response scale, not the word scale anymore.
I have not read anything recently that is purporting to do something useful by editing NN weights directly, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening. I think that is actually just a side discussion in the end.
In the end, if there is evidence of planning and then adding words to meet this plan, even if it goes one word at a time, I think we are escaping "statistical word generator". And if you say that we didn't escape that threshold, I would suggest that when we talk we are doing the same thing: we understand grammar at a pretty fundamental level, but when it comes to vocab there are only a handful of words that make sense and we are making that decision in a way that is not altogether different from LLM sentence generation. I think the only sane way to disprove that is if you want to go looking for substantially offbeat phrasing or expression that would be outside the bounds of "statistical regularity" that LLMs are using.
Unless you want to show a history of totally whackadoodle phrasing for ideas in lemmy, LLMs are no more staticstical word predictors than you are.
Okay, yes, we aren’t doing single words at a time (technically some models do chunk long words anyway so even from near the beginning we weren’t doing “singular” words at any time)
However, you are both right and wrong in your assertion that LLMs our equivalent human responses.
The translation of thoughts to words and words to motor functions both can be approximated by ANNs. And yes, the work done to select words we use is a probabilistic process like you describe. We hear patterns in language and that makes us more likely to use that phrasing. The more you hear a phrase the more likely you are to use it over another and when two or more phrases would communicate what you want to say your brain basically just picks one.
So, If speech production (or sentence construction) was what you meant by saying “it’s the same for human responses,” then yes, we agree. Both are probabilistic word generators and likely work in similar ways. (In fact I think place cells were found in Wernicks area (?) or one of the other speech corteces which means some of our word selection is likely similar to the results from transformer architectures)
However, if you meant the entirety of human response—as in from hearing/reading a comment, thinking about it, responding—is the same as current LLMs generating text. I strongly disagree.
The actual process of “thinking” is not something an ANN (especially a non-recurrent one) can do. The ability to ruminate on thoughts and make changes/learn-new-things simply by trying to formulate ideas before even deciding to comment cannot be accomplished with a pre-trained static net, not even one with memory or the illusion of memory like current LLMs. (Not to mention that identity also plays a large role in our responses and it too cannot arise from current deterministic architectures)
As for me asserting human response is chemistry is more like asserting AI is electromagnetism, there are many reasons why, but the simplest illustration would be this:
This is what I meant.
That would be crazy, I'm glad you would disagree with that.
This is moving into a funny gray area, but what you are talking about is, I think, only possible if you take a route like the one covered in Jeff Hawkins' "A thousand brains". It's not the most fun read if you're not into neuroscience, but the second half is pretty relevant regardless.
I haven’t read the book but I am familiar with the thousand brains hypothesis. The real problem as far as I can tell seems to be the variations in morphology and connectivity of different neurons.
The brain might make every column the same to begin with but if that’s the case, the diversity of the initial columns is immense. So many different genes even for just pyramidal neurons. Not to mention the inter neurons and other glia.
Plus the function of many cells are still unknown like chandelier cells. They’re everywhere, they regulate firing, but we’re not sure how. They can be inhibitory or excitatory and sometimes they can fire in response to both inhibitory or excitatory input, Etc.
And don’t even get me started on how no one actually seems to agree on the function of the layers of the neocortex. Every paper I read on the topic poses almost entirely different hypotheses for the function of each layer and the few connection maps you can find will show many connections that violate the idea each layer takes specific inputs.
Sure spiking networks are much more biologically plausible (and fun to work with so I recommend you try one out if you’re interested in this field) but the connections and learning rules are what seems to matter more.
Deleted: accidentally posted same comment twice.
You're literally arguing with the thing they're debunking by just saying the thing they're debunking
Here's one that makes me angry: the myth that suicide is a criminal offense, that you can be criminally charged for attempted suicide. This myth might make people reluctant to seek help. Police don't only have power to intervene when there's a crime. They intervene to protect you if you're attempting suicide. It is NOT a chargeable offense.
I'm tired of people thinking that a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes because Microsoft says that in file explorer. A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes and a gibibyte is 1024 mebibytes.
I'm tired of people thinking this is commonly used parlance because of some Microsoft file explorer choice and not because that is how it was taught in Comp Sci classes all over the world for decades, even before Microsoft. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this isn't really anything to do with them... The new SI standards for Kibi et al were standardized around 1999, and college CS classes were still teaching without using them at all up to at least 5 years later when I attended. And the tech boom of the early 2000s was rife with "well actually, you should know" misinformation spread by news and media outlets and "a kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes" was part of that. Then you get wrapped up in the awful awful corporate lies spread by ISPs, RAM, and Storage drive companies that will happily exploit the confusion of the consumer to their advantage every fucking time, trying to hide behind "bits vs bytes" confusion...
I feel like the blame has shifted over to the companies that still use the binary standard nowadays. The SI standard has been around for over 25 years now and yet they still use it. As a gen Zer myself, pretty much all the people I know that still use the binary standard are doing it because they saw it being used in their file software (Microsoft file explorer.)
Also not trying to put the blame off of the SI standard itself here. If the SI standard said that a KiB is 1000 bytes and a KB is 1024 bytes, then there would be no need to argue about whether to use the binary or SI standard when referring to KB.
RAM manufacturers disagree. I've seen many sticks of RAM in my day and none of them have ever said "gibibyte" or "GiB" on them.
I will die on the hill that binary prefixes are stupid and unnecessary.
A byte is 8 bit.
I’m trying to understand what you’re saying. Would you say that someone who identifies as nonbinary is not transgender? If so, does that mean that transgender only exists within the gender binary?
That social democracy "failed" to implement socialism.
This is incorrect in several ways. The most obvious one being that this is usually claimed by Marxist-Leninists, who have only ever succeeded in creating centralized economic dictatorships (as well as political dictatorships).
The secondary issue is that it puts the bar for what counts as socialism far too high. Any business that is owned by capitalists qualify as capitalist ownership, but only a 100% fully democratized economy counts as socialist. It's a hypocritical way of thinking. A more rational approach is to admit the truth: that any organisation that is owned and controlled by the workers is a socialist organisation.
Nordic social democracy has the objectively greatest track record of implementing actual economic democracy in the whole world. We had plenty of worker's co-ops, consumer co-ops, sports unions, hobby unions, non-profits and worker's unions.
"Oh, but the Nordic countries fell to neoliberalism!" Yes, AFTER more than half a century of socialist policies and economic democratization. The USSR fell to dictatorship and centralism on day one. Nordic social democracy had decades of socialist progress where the USSR had absolutely none!
Nordic social democracy is the greatest success story of socialism in the whole world. Marxist-Leninists use every dirty trick in the book to discredit social democracy because they know that their shitty authoritarian mess of an ideology can't compete with real progress.