Just a little technical note;
White phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon because it operates primarily by heat and flame rather than toxicity, making it an incendiary weapon. Its use is governed by Protocol III of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW)
Not saying that it can’t be used in bad ways but it has legitimate uses in combat areas (mostly as a flair) so the issue of supply, etc is not as simple as were it an actual chemical weapon
Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.
I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’
People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you
Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.
The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they’ve put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.
It doesn’t really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo – of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does…
Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it
What is happening?
Yeah it’s frightening that there’s literally a cult developing of home schooled zealots brought up on the wackiest conspiracies on YouTube. I was friends with a guy that was brought up by intese Jehovah’s witnesses and even though he stopped participating and believing it took a long time for him to understand the stuff they’d taught him was crazy - like he was shocked that I believed in evolution because as far as he knew it was long since disproven.
The real problem was critical reasoning skills and learning skills, he had no idea how to verify information or seek out out from reasonable sources. I think we’re going to get a lot of people in the same boat, except a lot more violent and terrified of the world.
The problem is that’s kinda true of pretty much everywhere so your choices are to isolate and only get lied to by your own politicians and corporate overlords or to accept the complexity of the world and try to work on moving forward where possible.
I do agree that this entirely greed based approach from the company is wrong but honestly I prefer it to your extreme xenophobia towards them. Yes there are issues with China just like all our countries have issues, they’re not the devil though not by a long shot.
I wonder if human labour becoming worthless due to automation will result in prison reform or if it’s more sinister and actually it’s pretty much just a scam to get government money into the hands of private businesses via lucrative contracts
I think part of it is that if things suck it’s an excuse to not do much, things are going to shit and I’m just trying to keep my head up nothing really matters anyway we’re all doomed… Compared to things are getting better, the future is looking positive, I’m not really doing much though.
It’s why people are so upset at every positive new development in anything and instantly start exaggerating flaws or just refusing to acknowledge it. Post an article backed by real science that mentions we’re doing well transitioning away from Carbon and you’ll get a couple of doubtful comments and a few votes then post a random guy on the street saying ‘i don’t really know anything about it but we’re probably doomed’ and it’ll be front page for days
Another example is the sheer amount of people who claim they can’t think of a single good use for natural language computing, they’ve read a hundred articles/memes about ai bad but not a single one mentioned any of the ways it could save lives, improve life style and productivity, etc…
People don’t want hope, they want an excuse
Fun note too that theologians have decided it wasn’t betraying Jesus that got him damned to hell for eternity that would have been fine and they could have all enjoyed heaven together but he got depressed and killed himself which damned him to hell
Jesus just watching with a shrug as his friend who helped him carry out his whole destiny of saving us from original sin burns on agony
Also one of Jesus closest friends who’d been there with loads of the proving Jesus is Christ moments still didn’t really believe in him enough to actually think he was the literal son of God who reigns over heaven or surely he’d understand the his earthly death isn’t really a big deal to him - like when I log off a video game and I’m back in my bedroom.
Don’t do what this person says it will damage your computer, computers are delicate electrical devices therefore much more akin to fish and should be submerged completely
I have a community for a project on Reddit which is the only reason I use it anymore, I’ve tried using new Reddit so many times but it’s so painful that I really think I’m just let the community die if they force me off old
It’s fair in a way though, if someone has invested time and effort into developing a workflow using a tool then the hammer company come and say 'we’re talking away the solid handle and replacing it with a soft one then of course you’ll be angry.
The worst is when they make things look like bad science fiction by moving everything into awkward places and wasting 90% of my screen with dumb looking polish that does nothing but slow performance and add bugs.
That’s ridiculous, if I think that one apple plus one apple is going to result in three apples then I try it and find it’s actually two I’m not going to blame the universe I’m going to know my understanding of arithmetic is flawed.
It’s not the math of the human made model that controls the universe that would be silly. The model is the current best approximation of the actual math that defines the universe.
An accurate model allows you to predict the outcome of events, like we can predict how many apples will be in the bag. With some things it gets very complicated because there’s lots of things and various possible states but we can model that with statistics and calculous and stuff. We can even make a set of all possibile results and use that as a map to tell us if something is possible, how likely it is and what we can do to make it more or less likely - nothing the guy said was controversial, we can map cellar interactions even if that requires using complex multidimensional math (mathematics have had to get used to doing this sort of math a lot recently so I’m sure they’ll manage)
I hate kier but not voting for Labour would be stupid, protest votes or non votes don’t count any the only people pushing that idiocy are the rich right wing because they don’t want you to vote against them
Everyone just thinks ‘oh look these people are too dumb, busy, or disconnected to vote oh well’
You can still resist and work against a system you voted for,
You’re using odd ways of describing things to try and win a pointless argument, even if everything you say is correct then it changes literally nothing about anything so whatever yeah use words like a weirdo if you like
Yes that’s a model, I’m not saying the model magically controls reality but that the underpinning reality is math - the reason you always have two apples in a bag when you start with one and add another is because of math, the human model of that isn’t controlling it but if we want two apples in a bag and we currently only have one then we can use our model to determine how many apples we need to add into the bag.
The same is true of more complex systems, if we can accurately model the cellar interactions then we can derive solutions in the same way
Everything is math, it’s what controls gravity and cell division and protein folding - there is no god it’s all just math
Of course the model is only a model but the point is you can use the model to predict real world responses, therefore you can test millions of things and do the one which is most likely to work
But it doesn’t do that instantly and it does it for good reason, eyes and the sections of the brain using them require energy and are vulnerable to infection so in situations where they don’t provide an advantage they increase the likelihood of death before breeding thus giving any offspring born with less energy devoted to eyes has a small advantage which over s very long time results in them being selected away.
So unless the creatures reach a perfect form for their environment then they’ll always be in the process of changing and have some of the old junk in there. Also if the formerly useful part doesn’t make any real difference to survivability there’s no force driving it to be selected away from, it might eventually be removed by lots of pure chance events but that’s going to take a huge amount of generations meaning the middle time where there’s junk not yet removed us going to be very long
It’s still a rusty machine even if the maths that control it are a bit more complex
Were probably? That’s a giant understatement and you know it.
Ai will save billions of lives and improve the living standard for everyone on the planet, it’ll be just like mobile phones where the biggest benefits come to the poorest communities - tech haters often ignore this reality, millions of children in Africa, Asia, etc were only able to get access to education through mobile infrastructure.
The internet has given everyone access to huge amounts of education resources and it’s only increased as they technology matures - current LLMs are amazing for language learners and for people who need things like English articles explained in their own language, I just asked chatgpt to explain the code I’m working on in Tagalog and it did it without hesitation (I can’t speak for the accuracy personally but looks legit) it even translated variable names but not function calls.
And this before we’ve scratched the surface of it’s utility, I’ll tell you one thing if you ever say to your grandkids ‘o I was against ai when it came out’ they’ll look at up like you’d look at someone who said they didn’t think math would catch on or that iron would never be as popular as bronze.