WoodScientist [she/her]

I want to see the timeline where Steve Irwin was not only killed by a stingray, but by one falling from the sky. A man makes a career getting up close and personal with the most dangerous animals on Earth. Then he’s finally done in when one falls right on top of him in an event completely unrelated to his film work.

Frankly, I am far, far less concerned about the Chinese government spying on me than I am the same about the US government. What’s China really going to do with my data, maybe deny me a visa if I try to visit there? Maybe study urban commuting patterns to aim their nukes? Use that data to make more effective propaganda?

Compare that to the US government, my own government. That’s a government I actually have to worry about seriously harming me. Unless I choose to physically get on a plane and fly to Beijing, China having my data is going to have very little impact on my life. In contrast, the US government might subject me to arrest, detention, persecution because I’m a member of a targeted demographic group, due to my political activities, etc.

I’ve considered this as well, but machines need not be conscious to replace human labor. Maybe there is some ineffable spark of human creativity that is necessary for coding that no machine can duplicate. That doesn’t mean that eventually they can’t have 100 AIs working on coding with one poorly paid human at the end of the line providing that ineffable spark for $12.50/hour. Even if some human input is always required, that doesn’t solve the labor displacement issues if one person can now do the work of a hundred. The steam machine wasn’t conscious, but it still killed John Henry.

If AI companies are telling the truth (HA!), then we’re on the verge of automating nearly all human labor. At that point, any claim of meritocracy goes out the window completely. We no longer have a competition of people each trying to succeed by their own merits. The economic winners from now on are just those who happened to already have money at the time of the Singularity. Such a scenario doesn’t even leave room to pretend that meritocracy still exists.

The solution? Nationalize the AI companies. From now on, any AIs must be publicly owned, and any of their output belongs to the public.

In other words, the moment you build the grand Communism engine, that’s the time to actually implement Communism.

Reddit banned the Efilism subreddit.

Fucking cowards. Can we ban conservative Christianity next?

We are all Hitler. There is only one soul. Reincarnation jumps not only through space, but through time. Your next life could be a Roman slave girl c. 100 C.E. And it’s just one big endless loop of consciousness. As soon as the one soul has traversed the totality of lives of every conscious being that is, was, or ever will be…then it loops back on itself and starts anew!

Yeah, the people I know doing it are either just making it for themselves, or sharing with others at-cost. Though there are definitely some in the homebrew community experimenting with drugs that aren’t typically used for HRT, like pioglitazone.

One of the vaccine-eligible conditions is depression. Seeing vaccines being chipped away like this sure has made me depressed as of late.

Yeah, as a trans person, I support bodily autonomy if nothing else. Fine to poke fun at the crypto bro aspect of it. But the basic aspect of wanting to have control over one’s own body and biology? That’s perfectly understandable.

isn’t there something along those lines for trans people in countries where they can’t get hormones?

There’s a whole online infrastructure for trans care like this. It’s often referred to as “DIY.” And the DIY options actually tend to be cheaper than the cost of obtaining medicine through a doctor. There’s also a whole community of people who share knowledge of homebrewing. That’s where people order the active ingredients of hormone therapy and compound their own tinctures, creams, sprays, and injections.

People do it for a variety of reasons. Some do it to save money. Some don’t have good doctor options anywhere nearby. Some live in repressive countries. Some live in rapidly deteriorating countries (like the US.) Some just like the independence of it, and some want to be able to access forms of HRT that aren’t available in their country.

At least in the US, DIY and homebrewing is undergoing a giant surge of interest. And if trans treatments are excluded from Medicaid coverage, the demand for it will absolutely explode.

Clickbait title. Fuck driverless trucks, but also fuck clickbait titles. The title implies they physically followed driverless trucks to study their danger, driving errors, etc. The video contains nothing of the sort. It’s a general video on the effects of driverless trucks on the labor market. Important info, but grossly misleading title.

Get involved with local IRL leftist groups. There are some in every city. Find people who are doing work you find admirable and are interested in, and get involved with it. Maybe you’re helping the local homeless population in some way. Maybe you’re helping trans folks get access to HRT or other transition things. Maybe you’re training immigrants on their rights in regards to ICE. Get involved in community or guerilla gardening. Help leftists candidates run for office. Participate and organized protests. IDK what the Hell you want to do. But there are so many possibilities. I guarantee you that there are needs in your own community that you can contribute to solving. You may not be able to change the whole world, but you can make a difference in your own world. Find what interests you, where your passions lie, and find others doing the same. Yeah, if you’re in suburbia, you’ll probably have to drive to meetings to participate. But you live in suburbia, driving is a given.

Evil poop wizard indeed.

SWAMASP

I dub it, “Project Swampass.”

They think they have a messaging problem, rather than a sickness in their souls.

The good news is that apparently it’s a lot easier to copy an existing AI than to develop an equivalent model from scratch. So you can copy ChatGPT or other AIs by just asking it a very large series of prompts, getting replies, and using those to train your own version of ChatGPT. And apparently, this takes far fewer resources than training ChatGPT from scratch.

If training an AI based on actual human-created copyrighted works isn’t copyright infringement, then training an AI based on the output of another certainly isn’t.

So even if AI companies manage to set this precedent, open-source AI creators can just copy OpenAI’s homework and make their product worthless.

I used to know a guy who tried convincing everyone he could become a super saiyan. He was 27 years old.

I’ve never known a Saiyan. The closest I’ve ever come to that is a comment on reddit once of someone describing how their childhood friend tried to go Super Saiyan. At 10 years old or so, he stood in front of the TV, firmly planted his legs in a dramatic squat pose, and tried to go Super Saiyan. Shouting, clenched muscles, the works. He didn’t manage to go Super Saiyan that day. He did however manage to crap his pants in the attempt.

You know what? Make a play for it. People used to contrive to steal crowns in all sorts of convoluted ways. I want to see someone try to do that…but for a constitutional monarchy! You poisoned and slept your way to the highest royal office…a purely ceremonial office.

Or simply, “I don’t recall…,” “I don’t recall…,” “I don’t recall…”

https://archive.is/TLH08