Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Can you back this up with anything but personal observation? There is nary a country in Europe that is under threat of a Russian invasion as much as Poland, now that they’re already in Ukraine. Right wingers all over Europe are very pro-Russian - except in Poland. History looms large in a country whose neighbors split it 3 times. It’s obviously possible that Polish younglings, unburdened with things like history, like the culture. You are well within you rights to separate the culture from its people’s history or what the current government is like. But I have a hard time imagining this as more as a passing fluke at best, or propaganda at worst.


  • I take solace in the fact that a lot of the output of so-called AI needs to be checked and doublechecked, rendering any time and overhead savings nonexistent. This may change but I’m clinging on.

    It’s too early to tell where on the “modern technology replaces humans spectrum” the advent of so-called AI falls. Are we talking about enraged workers seeing their livelihoods in danger by industrialization throwing their wooden shoes, sabot, into the machines? Hence, or so the legend goes, the word sabotage. Or are we talking about accountants and bookkeepers, whose need to exist was questioned when Excel became a thing and automated something like 60 percent of their work. They actually grew in number because they could do more sensible things now. We can at least hope it’s the second scenario.

    As far as the masses enjoying so-called-AI-generated music is concerned, I think of how the availability of photography changed paintings. When you couldn’t just snap a picture of something, a photorealistic facsimile in oil on canvas was fantastic. It took weeks but you didn’t know better. When photography became widespread, artists went banana. Picasso actually knew how to draw things correctly but you wouldn’t think that seeing his later body of work. Impressionism is delivering lovely scenery without sticking to the realism of the Dutch masters. Art isn’t in a vacuum, it develops around life, life includes technology - it’s an unavoidability that technology influences art.

    Any photograph would be amazing to the people in 1830. Wow! It’s my neighbor Bob sitting on a chair. Wow! It’s a picture of a thumb. I have two of those but I’ve never seen them like that. Wow! It’s a picture of New York. I’ll never be able to go there because it takes 6 weeks and costs more than my net worth. Jump to today and we’ve become much more discerning about what a good photograph is. I live in hope that we develop a so-called-AI discerning taste as well. Especially in music. We’ve done okay with photoshopped images too.




  • He’s probably right that a so-called-AI software can assist a teacher in making sure all students get to be on the same page. With the unreliability of models today though I would be more concerned with the crap hallucinating wrong math formulae or the Italian-Zimbabwean War of 1647. This needs tight supervision by professionals. But in his defense, he was just shooting the breeze and didn’t give a time frame. In a decade this scenario might look less wacko. But we also thought we’d be fizzing around in flying cars already.

    What else is he gonna say though? They pivoted hard into it, of course he’s gonna sing the praises. In other news, water is wet.

    In my experience, the courses on DL are getting worse. Erratic changes, mistakes, etc. I’m just not ready to kiss my 1000 day streak goodbye yet!




  • Whether you like it or not, they probably already know who you are too. They’re collecting shadow profiles of people who haven’t signed up through various means.

    If others have posted pictures of you on a meta service, there is a good chance it already knows what you look like and they know it’s you even if you’re not tagged.

    People who allow them access are just less work for them. And now they have info to train their so-called AI models. Now it’s a question about what are they going to with them. The application is wide. Create fake pictures, create fake profiles, etc. And at some point we will find out about a massive data leak that happened because the company is run by unapologetic sociopaths.



  • I think there may be a paradox hiding in your question. You cannot believe in free will. You have it or you don’t - I would postulate you need a neutral third-party observer to tell you. For us humans, a Martian might do. Believing is an act of faith. Faith tends to bend will to its dogmas. I would go so far as to say belief is the natural enemy of a free will.

    We are distracted animals. All things being equal, the Martian observer will after years of careful study come to the conclusion that humans have free will. But it’s constantly battered by short attention spans, a tendency to go with the herd, presupposituons in our heads that we don’t often or never question, etc. We are a smartphone full of bloatware running on too little RAM. It takes skill to operate. Some are more skillful than others.

    You could of course counter that by saying that’s what you believe. It’s paradoxes all the way down.








  • You have to consider a few things here. You’re not the only one with social anxiety at that event. Your reaction is not to go in the first place (my MO as well) or to sit quietly hoping it shall pass with haste. Others talk too much. School reunions are such a rich vein for neurosis because you’re guaranteed to be judged by your peers. Peers who knew you very well when you weren’t a more well put together person yet. Few people behave like themselves there. So if the woman says she cheated a million times lol, her neurons may be on the fritz as well because she’s more thinking about how she dunked Sharon’s head in the toilet in freshman year or whatever. And that memory is haunting. And she’s sitting just over there! WHY HASN’T SHE SAID ANYTHING? … So you need to have a salt shaker handy for anything you hear.

    Also, some people like attention and will say anything to get it. People like to construct a public persona around their worst character traits, the ones they’re unable to change. It’s like they’re putting a cool leather jacket on, aviator shades too. To distract themselves from their inner monolog, which very well might be telling them what a piece of shit they are.

    And cheating is common. In my social group I know of a handful of cases. Drunk and horny, sober and crushing - the motivations are on a scale. In some relationships these secrets never get revealed, in others they’ve made the bond stronger, others have broken up. I would say very few people brag about it but hey, we contain multitudes. Some people end up in an unhealthy game of hurt oneup(wo)manship. Relationships are hard fucking work.

    It is also a different picture when you have children with your partner. The willingness to forgive infractions increases for the good of the children.

    And while centuries of indoctrination of monogamy and loyalty to your spouse can make this hard to accept: some people make open relationships work. I think it’s more often than not the last stepping stone to disaster but if you can make it work, vaya con dios. I have a hard time with it but I’m trying not to judge.

    None of this needs to change how you feel about cheating though.



  • Without wading into the therapeutic too much, is there a way to move your PC, maybe to the bedroom. Or to set your partner up with wireless headphones.

    I would say it isn’t so important to put a label on either of you as it is to find a workable solution. So frame your approach in these terms, make a schedule for headphone time, don’t engage in the at home therapy. Other than that, look for somebody who knows both of you better than me or anybody else here. The advice is probably going to be better.

    How long have you been together? How long since you moved in together?


  • Scale is the factor here. You could say that small places can benefit from a sort of benevolent authoritarianism. I’m thinking Singapore, Liechtenstein, Monaco. None of them are bigger than a postage stamp and the population will go along with it. The bigger the country, the more injustices authoritarianism accumulates, the harder it is to keep people in line, the more suppressive it becomes.

    Ideally, democracy trumps everything. It is the only system that has the built-in power to cancel itself. It needs all the people to be aware and to participate accordingly. It’s not perfect. It’s not always fair either. But I’d rather live in a system that can decide to end itself than in a system that would try to end me if I wanted to be critical about it.