itty53 everywhere but twitter.

  • 0 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 1 年前
cake
Cake day: 2023年6月15日

help-circle
  • Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.

    He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It’s literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.

    I really don’t get why people think he’s all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn’t sell, theft and litigation.



  • Somehow? I’m not stopping you. You keep talking about something else - you keep insisting China and America do the same bad things. And I’m correcting you. That’s all.

    I’m not stopping you from talking about what America has done, in fact I already told you we can talk about it. Four times I said those words, in each individual comment I wrote to you. Every time you made a choice not to and instead chose to double down on your original take, flawed and incorrect though it was. Every time you just insisted I was defending America and I never did.

    So talk. You have things to say, say them. Don’t do this childish “well fine” act where you pretend I’m controlling what you can and cannot say.

    By the way China never murdered and raped the middle east. Just one more example of the point isn’t it?

    Call me a hypocrite, that’s fine. I never cared much what children think of me. Grow up kiddo.



  • Again, we can talk about the terrible shit America has done and still does. I won’t deny it. Yes murder is bad. Okay? That’s not what you’re here arguing though. You wanna try again, no sweat. I’ll listen. Will you?

    “Anything bad China has done, America has too” is what you said. That is not just factually wrong, it’s childish and ignorant and above all lazy. You can’t even be arsed to be more than nominally aware of things.

    I was very clear about this already, so that you want to keep arguing tells me you’re not reading my replies at all or they won’t matter anyway, you’ll just pound your fists and stomp your feet. Fine. Do that. It’s alright. Won’t help you, won’t get you any closer to a better world, but you’ll feel better for a half second. Neat yeah?



  • That’s a highly generalized take that doesn’t hold water at all. The American government sucks but they’re not operating organ farms in concentration camps targeting religions, they’re not redrawing their maps to include parts of neighboring nations like Mexico and Canada, they’re not funding North Korea as the DPRK launches missiles over South Korea and Japan, they don’t have social credit scores, they don’t systematically harass and threaten their own citizens abroad…

    We can keep going if you want. And we can talk about the terrible shit America does too.

    But “these two entities are both bad and therefore they do the same exact things” is fucking dumb, naive, myopic, childish, and a bunch of other pejoratives I could think of. Grow up.




  • The amount of energy we’d need to pull from those flows even to power the full need of the world is likely pretty trivial compared to the amount those flows actually contain. Oceans are world engines, literally. There’s a lot of energy in there.

    These wouldn’t prevent flows either, just leech a little and slow it down. Worth exploring.

    The biggest issue is upkeep. Oil rigs require a massive amount of upkeep because salt water really wants to destroy most structural material, fast. Then you factor in costs of getting crews out there for maintenance, etc … it adds up. Costs not just financially but in carbon as well. Material advancements help but you’re back to the carbon costs with those in a big way too.



  • There’s a difference between choosing and listening to fans (critics) to improve and being made to feel obligated to do so. This society literally harasses people over being upset at fictional portrayals of cartoons. Sometimes harassed right out of their chosen career. Game devs know this very well.

    Content creators have no obligations to the consumers of the content, period. No more than Picasso had an obligation to paint landscapes. He didn’t care to so he didn’t.

    Content creators, publishers, etc: they’re free to make schlock we don’t like, and we’re free to express our disdain for it, and I’m free to point out that the folks wasting their energy complaining are indeed, wasting their energy. And cringey to boot. There’s a line crossed when you start insisting and making personal commentary at all. A publisher’s interests and the fan’s interests are not always aligned. That’s fine. You can deal with it, I promise. You bring up the snyder cut: Know who probably drove that whole push? The studio. Yeah, every one of those “fans” got played. This kind of shit is unacceptable. Period.

    https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/justice-league-the-snyder-cut-bots-fans-1384231/

    Don’t encourage it.


  • Huh, the games did phenomenally well in America. Weird. /s

    We’re in an age of knee-jerk finger pointing, with the problem getting worse the higher you get in society. It’s just one giant game of blame hot-potato.

    Here’s the thing: The producers don’t owe the fans shit. They don’t owe the fans an explanation even. They owe the investors an explanation. The fans are just there, that’s the reality of being a fan of something. We don’t get a say, we just can choose to watch or not, and then decide to trash it or praise it online if we want to.

    So while there’s a problem going up the ladder of the blame game, there’s another one coming back down the ladder, and it’s entitlement. For some odd reason there’s an air of “we deserve this content, exactly to our specifications” and it permeates games, movies, music, all of the entertainment content we have been inundated with as a society. And I think the culture generally leans towards encouraging it because it keeps the culture thriving. But it also keeps us in the exact status quo we’re in as a society, beholden to these billionaire publishers we all rail on daily.

    Because let’s face it: We as a society spend an enormous amount of energy and as such, destroy a lot of the planet, on all this entertainment. If we can’t accept that as a fact then we’re fucking doomed.


  • Right now a lot of the electricity we send from A to B gets lost as heat energy, among other sciency shit. So for every watt of power you use, it takes more than that to get it to you. You’re phone heats up because of this. Computers all require ventilation and heat sinks because of this. LED screens are even warm and they’re meant to be as not warm as possible.

    Super conductors at room temperature addresses that fundamental problem of moving electricity.

    This doesn’t even touch the magnet factor. Super conducting magnets can levitate. This is literal cars without wheels territory. Maglev roads. Railgun shuttle launches. The abundance of the materials one question is also highly promising. We’re not talking rare earth.

    If this is true it’s the biggest discovery since the transistor, no sweat.






  • You’re following me exactly, just not seeing what I’m pointing at.

    I agree, a human can’t meaningfully distinguish between a flat white picture made by a human (with say, MSPaint) and one made by an “AI” with a data model that includes the color Flat White. Similarly there’s no meaningful distinction to be made between 4’33" as performed by an algorithm vs one performed by a master pianist - humans can’t do that and neither can a machine.

    We’ve called certain kinds of entertainment “formulaic” - well that wasn’t inaccurate. It was. It is. We are. We are algorithmic. And just like in decades past when scientists put forth the idea that our emotions are just the combination of biology and chemistry, there will be serious existential pushback from certain sectors of humanity. Because it belittles the idea of what it is to be human and relegates us back to simple animals that can be trained. The reality is we are just that. And we keep proving it.

    We’ve been seeing this problem framed as one facing teachers and educators: How do we know students aren’t cheating and having an LLM writing their term papers? The reality is if they have been and teachers didn’t catch that from the start? The fault isn’t the tool they used. They’re teaching and grading the wrong thing.

    Language, like math largely did with the calculator, will be relegated to machines and algorithms because we already did that to ourselves a long time ago. We’re just building the machines to do the same thing for us, and getting the desired results. If I ask you what 237 x 979 is I don’t expect you to math that out in your head, I expect you to probably use a calculator to get that answer. But it’s still important we teach kids how to multiply 237 and 979 together on paper. It’s very simple to do that and avoid the use of computers altogether. It’s basic writing skills after all. Teaching isn’t about producing term papers, what does it matter that LLMs might be used to cheat them then? It’s about educating the students. Our whole focus on the problems of LLMs is just highlighting over and over and over the problems we as society have had for a long long long time, far before anyone knew what an “LLM” was.

    Sorry. I rant.


  • I really hate the label AI. They’re data models, not intelligence - artificial or otherwise. It’s PAI. Pseudo Artificial Intelligence, which we’ve had since the 80s.

    The thing is that these data models are, in the end, fed to algorithms to provide output. That being the case it’s a mathematical certainty that it can be reversed and thus, shown to be from such an algorithm. Watermark or not, if an algorithm makes a result, then you can deduce the algorithm from a given set of it’s results.

    It wouldn’t be able to meaningfully distinguish 4’33" from silence though. Nor could it determine a flat white image wasn’t made by an algorithm.

    I think what we’re really demonstrating in all this is just exactly how algorithmically human beings think already. Something psychology has been talking about for a longer time still.