Signtist

I’ve got a dispenser that basically works like a gumball machine. Goes every day and only needs to be refilled maybe once every month or two. Even has a battery backup in case the power goes out while we’re on vacation or something. No need for smart home integration, just listen to your pet when they complain that they don’t have any food, and make sure you’re full up before leaving for an extended amount of time.

Anything worth doing is worth reviewing.

I’d imagine that plants need to grow big on land in order to be taller than the other plants to avoid competition for sunlight. In the water you can only go as high as the surface, and you didn’t need to grow any bigger to get there, so microscopic plants won out. Why grow big and complicated if you can get all the sun you need by just being small and finding a little spot at the surface?

Well, elections and the second amendment, yeah. Hopefully we can build a world where a policy can be made for good that actually does good, but we’ll see.

People are dumb and often do things that harm themselves and the world as a whole. That’s the reason AI is bad - not because we don’t like it, but because we shouldn’t like it, it makes us dumber, and is terrible for the planet on top of it all.

It’s like if I lit a bunch of tires on fire, bottled the smoke to smell as perfume, and justified it all by saying I found someone who liked the smell. It’s irrelevant, and doesn’t justify my actions at all.

…our president is a criminal who deserves to be in jail, but isn’t. Lawmakers themselves obviously can’t be trusted with this, either. I’d trust a random person off the street more than anyone in the government.

What I’m describing is our current reality where policies are enacted for “safety” when really they’re to be abused. The news calls them “bad actors” or “rogue officers” but anyone who doesn’t see them as the expected results they are is fooling themselves. Stories like this are to normalize a system specifically being designed to vilify normal people instead of our actual enemies.

We can’t have a discussion about what a moral government would do with surveillance until we have a moral government. It’s so far from happening that the idea that it will ever be used to provide more good than bad is concernedly naive.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t take threats of violence seriously, I’m saying that a person’s private communications should never be publicly available, regardless of what dangers might go undiscovered, because the real danger of such a policy being misused overshadows that risk by orders of magnitude.

The issue with surveillance is that it relies on the assumption that the people with the privilege to access the information are honorable enough to only use it when necessary and only use it truthfully. I don’t trust our country or corporations not to have an AI “hallucinate” a death threat so that they have reasonable cause to detain anyone they want whenever they want.

Plus, I didn’t really think it’s all that different between my sister and I and a teacher and their students. My wife was a teacher, and while she never said she wanted to shoot a student, she’s certainly said she wanted to strangle one. Most of the other teachers I know have said similarly violent things. I also used to work with doctors, and they often say similar things as well.

People with tough jobs often release stress with violent candid statements about things that frustrate them, then go on to obviously never actually do anything violent. Again, it’s called hyperbole, and is a very common thing across all language. Even if this AI was completely infallible and couldn’t be used dishonestly, it would still have so many false positives that it would be nothing more than a boy who cried wolf.

The amount of times I said I was going to kill my sister in my life would have gotten me arrested if the government were listening to me. Anyone who knows me knows I love my sister, and would obviously never kill her. Hyperbole is frequently used in all aspects of human communication, and anyone who says it should be grounds for investigation is either lying, or stupidly believes that those in power could ever be trusted with such privileges.

Damn, that sucks. But yeah, legal battles are so exhausting that even when you win you just feel tired.

It’s still very important for genetic testing. If someone has a genetic mutation, it can be difficult to know whether that mutation is going to cause its associated protein to stop working or not. Even if we know all of the “normal” proteins in the body, there are countless variants based on people’s specific genetic differences that may or may not have major effects on how those proteins fold, which in turn can have major effects on those individuals’ health.

To be clear, I wasn’t necessarily disagreeing about AI’s utility, just about how protein fold AI isn’t the same as LLM AI; we’ve used computer models for predictions of protein structure and genetic mutation severity for a while, though they have always been taken with a grain of salt that I fear is no longer being done - a prediction is still a prediction, after all. Doctors were already incorrectly confusing computer model predictions of genetic mutation severity for positive test results back when I was working as a genetic counselor in the 2010’s - my concern is that the widespread trust of “AI” is only going to exacerbate that.

I’m a bit confused, though. The AI doing it was AlphaFold, which is shutting down. Shouldn’t your statement be AI was already doing it? Gemini is an LLM - not the same type of thing as AlphaFold, despite the fact that they’re both called “AI,” which was the cause of my original argument. The AI that was doing the protein fold prediction is being replaced with an “AI” that can’t. It looks like there’s still RoseTTAFold, but losing the frontrunner is still not great when it’s shutting down to focus more on LLM’s.

Funny, one of the first arguments I had about AI was with someone who insisted it would be incredibly helpful at predicting protein folds.

The wealthy have a huge incentive to want unskilled teachers. They’d probably rather go back to the days when only the wealthy were educated at all, but creating a bigger gap between the quality of education of the rich and the poor is a passable short term goal for now.

Remember, the point of a company isn’t to make a product, it’s to make a profit. It’s more profitable to have a dumb population that unquestioningly buys whatever you advertise to them, and if you sell a few crappy AI teaching robots along the way, that’s just a cherry on top.

Note that this happened in 2019 and is only finally seeing justice now. My own legal battle cost around $25,000 per year. That’s not something most people would be able to afford for 7 years straight.

People naturally want to make things as easy as they can for themselves; if you introduce a tool that can make things better when used in moderation, but worse if overused, it will inevitably be overused so long as that’s the easier thing to do. Convenience is one of the biggest factors in making the global population dumber and more complacent, and it’s often introduced as a useful tool in moderation.

Unless they’re going to see real repercussions for doing so, get definitely can do whatever they want. Rules and laws only matter if people care enough to follow them and enforce them. All they have to do is pretend the person didn’t comply, and now they’ve got all the authority in the world to anything they want, regardless of what it says in the law books. Just look at what ICE is doing to US citizens; border patrol knows they can do all of that, too.

Nintendo had long since realized that their customers are kids who see Pokemon and Mario and scream at their parents until they buy it for them. They can charge whatever they want and those kids will still bug their parents until they get it.

Everyone else that buys their products is just a bonus if they still keep buying even after the prices get jacked up. Nintendo made their decision about who to prioritize, and the only boycott that would work to turn things around would have to be orchestrated by all the parents of all the 6 year olds in the world, and I doubt that’ll happen.