Schadrach

To be fair, I find the idea of a government outsourcing IT needs to entities under the sovereignty of foreign governments kind of fundamentally problematic to begin with.

So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.

Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn’t really seem to be any area were MS’ core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this “AI everywhere” strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.

It’s a shiny new tool that is really powerful and flexible and everyone is trying to cram everywhere. Eventually, most of those attempts will collapse in failure, probably causing a recession and afterward the useful use cases will become part of how we all do things. AI is now where the internet was in the late 80s - just beyond the point where it’s not just some academics fiddling with it in research labs, but not in any way a mature technology.

Most gaming PCs from the 2020s can run a model locally though it might need to be a pruned one, so maybe a little farther along.

to prove the fucking obvious(that Tylenol doesn’t cause autism)

Eh, there were a few studies that showed a link including one of the largest ones. Now I get to move this from the “very unlikely but possible” column to the “almost certainly false” column.

There’s a pretty wide spectrum with autism, ranging from “a few quirks” to “nonverbal and more or less totally incapable of taking care of themselves, ever”.

Wouldn’t make a difference. We’ve got him for a bare minimum of at least another year and six days. Otherwise it would count as a term for Vance. They’ll Weekend at Bernie’s his bloated corpse for a year if they have to for that.

Robot butler - robot waiters already exist, so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to repurpose one (although they’re only sold to businesses as far as I could tell)

There’s an Asian AI lab that’s demoed an early version of an AI-driven humanoid robot domestic servant. There are suggestions in might hit market within a few years and cost about as much as a decent used car. Figure those estimates are always too optimistic and something like 2035 and $15k is a possibly realistic estimate assuming nothing goes catastrophically wrong.

Given the Lemmy view on AI, I wonder how many folks are now uninstalling the game and demanding a refund because it’s suddenly transformed into “AI slop”? Or demanding it be delisted from Steam since they didn’t disclose their use of AI on Steam?

I remember an internet joke site decades ago doing one that was sports cars or ED drugs. Don’t recall the name of the site though. Quick search didn’t turn it up.

It’s weird that both France and Germany are as low down the list as they are, since English is a Germanic language with an absolute fuckton of words rooted from French.

Doesn’t need to be a sole cause to be a cause. See cancer, where smoking causes lung cancer, but not all lung cancer is caused by smoking. But again, needs more study.

Eh, it’s not totally baseless. Hell, there’s even a non-zero chance it’s true. It’s way too early to claim it as true though, since studies on the topic are few, have mixed conclusions and correlation is not causation. I refuse to give it any more credence than “not totally baseless” though.

Is it? I went to a state college to take advantage of in state tuition, commuted because gas for my Geo Metro 2-seater was cheaper than a dorm room, etc to cut my costs down to where I wouldn’t need to put myself in debt and got a small scholarship/grant (that in turn came with an in-state work commitment that shaped my choices after graduation). Other people my age made other choices related to college that landed them in massive amounts of debt that I avoided.

If I had known that I could borrow as much as I wanted and expect someone else to pay it off instead of being stuck holding responsibility for my debts, I likely would have made different substantially less frugal and less restrictive choices.

Tell, you what, nix an equivalent amount of my debts, and we’ll call it a deal. You don’t mind paying off my mortgage, right? Just because you didn’t take out a mortgage doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be responsible for mine, right?

What’s the best way to do that, presuming I already have access to a Usenet server but that’s really all I know?

I mean I’ve used Usenet before, but that was back in the late 90s using Netscape Communicator and I was mostly (but not exclusively) reading text groups. Most of my piracy back then involved trolling IRC channels to either find DCC bots or get access to FTPs. And even then was limited because, well, dialup.

This corny meme implies that philosophy majors become flat-earthers, etc.

No, most philosophy majors still believe in gravity. While flat-earthers cease to believe in gravity once they realize that a flat earth is incompatible with gravity. They replace it with this notion that the earth disc (and the rest of the system) is accelerating upwards through the void at 9.8 m/s^2.

Though I’ve come across some interdisciplinary studies types who would probably argue that gravity is a social construct because we describe it with language.

The set of all primes is the same size infinity as the set of all positive integers because you could create a way to map one to the other aka you can count to the nth prime. Reals are different in that there are an infinite number of real between any two reals which means there’s no possible way to map them.

Like, most kids in the US had Tylenol. Most kids don’t develop autism.

Except the claim being studied is that Tylenol might cause autism when administered to the mother while pregnant. There are a lot of drugs that will cause a problem to a fetus when administered to a pregnant woman, but do not cause that problem when administered to someone outside the womb. Building a human from scratch is a fiddly process.

Or they WANT them to feel pain.

In their myths, a woman explicitly incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong strayed from absolute mindless obedience to sky daddy, so all women have to suffer forever, and anything that reduces that suffering is inherently evil for opposing the will of sky daddy.

Not to defend RFK, but this argument is dumb.

People from everywhere it doesn’t natively grow developed cancer long before they had access to tobacco. That doesn’t prove tobacco use doesn’t cause cancer, it just means it isn’t the only potential cause.

Meh, no process is perfect and sensitivity and specificity are often enemies. Basically, in a lot of cases the more sensitive you make a test to detect something, the more likely it is to accidentally catch false positives.

Sounds like they’ve vastly improved it’s ability to detect, hopefully that didn’t come with false detections for people running unusual hardware or software combinations.

Actually truth social would be the perfect example, but again, how many people do you hear talking about how much they enjoy truth social? It’s true nobody wants to be sued by Trump, but that’s not really support as much as fear and its own form of censorship.

Truth Social is always there if you want it, but is it really censorship that keeps more people from using it or is it to some extent capitalism working?

Truth Social wasn’t subject to the same pressures and attacks, largely out of fear of Trump. It’s mostly Trump and his fans that are why anyone cares, but most of the sorts attracted to a site like that came rushing back to X post-Elon.

If you have a truly free market people will just go to another platform bc there’s no reason they have to use X, or Truth Social, or Mastodon, or BlueSky unless one person (or a group of oligarchs) buys all of them and controls the market. If one of those platforms fails, can you really blame it on censorship?

There isn’t, outside of network effects. But the ones being barred from Apple devices, and only able to be sideloaded on Android (at least until Google removes that feature, which they’ve announced is coming) aren’t operating on the same footing as the others, and not because of a failure to draw an audience, but by being restricted by, well, a bunch of oligarchs…

Musk bought X bc he claimed he wanted to have free speech and to get rid of all the bots, but he did neither. Now that place is mainly a bot fueled echo chamber. It’s just not an enjoyable platform to use anymore, and most users have switched to an alternative like bluesky.

The range of rhetoric that won’t get you banned from the site has certainly expanded, even if most of what is actually there is deceptive bullshit. Probably 1 in 10 current Xitter users would be banned for saying unacceptable things under pre-Musk Twitter.

Apple and Google didn’t want to lose business by associating with something the majority of people found off-putting, but is that really censorship?

Tech oligarchs cut a competitor to other tech oligarchs off at the knees to control the span and spread of online discourse - this is the kind of thing that supporting feels like supporting the face eating leopard party.

Again you’re relying on an existing platform to take on supporting your messaging instead of just promoting it yourself. Couldn’t you just rely on a user base sharing a link to download an app rather than putting it in one of the stores?

Build your own entire tech stack from the hardware up, got it. Those leopards do seem hungry for faces though.

But that is also why so many users or instances block instances like .grad and to a lesser extent .ml, and some people do argue they should be de-federated.

I don’t think that’s really necessary. I’m glad to have the ability to talk to and interact with people I don’t agree with on everything. There’s .ml users here that have been very helpful with things nobody else was able to help me with. (I’m actually glad we’re able to have this conversation we’re having.)

I find a certain irony here, given the instance you come from and the instance I come from. Yours has defederated from ~95 other instances, including some for being too left and some for being too right. Mine has only defederated from one, an instance essentially abandoned by it’s admins that was posting spam and actual csam.

But, I’ve also been blocked from .ml communities without any warning bc I shared images of Xinnie the Pooh. So, i’m sure there are some people on the left who willingly identify as tankies, and would enjoy a completely separate dedicated safe space on the internet for communism or leftist authoritarianism. If they made one, it would very likely end up running into the same issues as Gab/Parler, but I still wouldn’t believe that censorship is to blame for its failure.

Far left fediverse instances exist, and can moderate as strictly or not as they please. No third party is actively preventing you from connecting to one with an appropriate client, including client devs. Let alone tech oligarchs cutting them off from major platforms entirely.

It’s just difficult to create a market for a very niche and exclusionary product that a lot of people find off-putting due to extremist content.

Yet, their problem wasn’t not being able to get members organically. Gab was doing pretty well until it got big enough to be noticed and it was forcibly cut off from the mobile market by Google and Apple, migrated their backend to Mastodon as a way around that, and then had Mastodon client devs block them at the client level. At the time of migration, they were the largest Mastodon instance, so it wasn’t a matter of lack of interest. That’s kinda my point - the barriers they faced aren’t organic or a lack of interest but coordinated moves against them.