CarbonIceDragon

CarbonIceDragon , 4 days ago

the original undermines its own message: they are lifting it, even if barely and with difficulty, which implies that those characters are within an order of magnitude or so of literal divine power.

CarbonIceDragon , 4 days ago

something something grapefruit technique

CarbonIceDragon , 10 days ago

I dont think Ive ever even pretended to think they are, for me children, especially babies and toddlers, give me a pretty bad case of the uncanny valley effect and look eerie and cause discomfort, as well as anxiety since Im even less sure than usual what they're going to do and dont want someone's kid getting hurt because of something I failed to notice. I dont hold it against them or hate children for it, its not their fault after all, but I do try to avoid being around them where practical.

CarbonIceDragon , 10 days ago

Id say yes to that statement, but for reasons that dont have to do with AI as I dont really view AI training as piracy.

CarbonIceDragon , 12 days ago

The voring stick claims another victim

CarbonIceDragon , 15 days ago

Would this even be necessary for automated ordering anyway? Given that every company under the sun wants you to use some app of theirs these days, including fast food companies, Im kinda surprised they dont just get rid of the speaker/microphone system, and just put a sign with a qr code in front of the drive through telling you to download and use their app to put in a drive through order

CarbonIceDragon , 15 days ago

One of the problems of car centric society is that the process for licensing almost has to be too lenient, because it causes major issues with people not being able to get around unless almost everybody can get a license, which means that regardless of safety, the bar has to be set low.

CarbonIceDragon , 15 days ago

If they're calling a brain their original processor, these robots could be a result of successful transhumanism rather than conventional robots, ie, they could be humans that have made themselves into robots, rather than robots built for some specific purpose. In that case, they might create child robots and grow them over time to reproduce, just because they find that mode of reproduction familiar and wish to continue it.

CarbonIceDragon , 27 days ago

1442? surprised its not 1444

CarbonIceDragon , 1 month ago

Honestly, they don't really deserve the idolization they get even beyond the movies. Sparta was a rather brutal slaver society after all, the reason for their famous military training was mostly to deal with rebellion by their slave population which greatly outnumbered them. If they still existed as they did then, they'd probably be viewed with the same kind of contempt we view places like North Korea.

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

As I understand it, "real communism" is supposed to be some kind of stateless society. As the GDR was, well, a state, it clearly did not achieve that. Nor would it ever have been likely to, as actually doing what was ideologically promised would have required those with power within that system to relinquish that power, which is incredibly rare as it conflicts with human nature.

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

In what sense is this semantics or bad faith? I meant this sincerely.

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

I think you have an unrealistic estimation of how much most people understand the topic of communism, if you think not labelling different types of communism as the same ideology is living under a rock. More than half the country doesn't even realize that socialism and communism aren't complete synonyms, and a good fraction think paradoxically that center right liberalism is somehow communist.

Basically, I think you're doing this: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/average_familiarity_2x.png

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

Furries are centered around anthropomorphic animals. Anthropomorphic means it has human traits. Humans are an animal species. Humans have human traits by definition, therefore humans are technically anthropomorphic animals, therefore all art of humans is technically a subset of furry art.

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

Not sure why nobody would expect an italian inquisition of food, they literally have a unit in one of their law enforcement agencies trained to do things like find fake extra-virgin olive oil. Ive seen people jokingly call it "the italian food police" even. If anybody was going to run a food inquisition, itd be the italians

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

Is it just me, or does that discussion of the various ways to counter drones, kinda miss the obvious of just shooting them with a conventional gun?

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

If you can target them with a laser though, why would a gun be much different? I know there's dramatically more travel time, but bullets are still extremely fast, and even if one shot misses, something like a machinegun with a computerized control system seems like it ought to hit the thing before too long? Maybe the risk of missed shots causing harm might be too high for populated areas?

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

I didn't really think human operated, I was imagining something pretty much exactly like phalanx, but with a much smaller caliber and turret size owing to the small size of drones. Like a phalanx type software controller mounted to a small turret with a small caliber machinegun or automatic shotgun type weapon.

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

Admittedly not, no. I was making the assumption, possibly a naive one, that a computer should be capable of understanding the physics behind bullet trajectories well enough to shoot accurately even if the target is mobile.

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

Stargate is the best "star-" franchise imho.

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

What if it wants to be drunk, for it's own nefarious reasons, and it's smart enough to understand that better branding makes that more likely?

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

RIP chef Mike

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

This reminds me of something I sometimes wonder about lotr: does the ring make you more evil, or does it just make you more like Sauron? If you're already even more evil than Sauron and you put on the ring, does it slowly turn you ever so slightly more good, to align with Sauron better?

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

Doesn't the fediverse userbase trend towards being made up of millennials? I'm on the older end of gen Z myself and grew up with CDs and DVDs, so I imagine most people here are familiar with the technology.

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

Don't forget, it's built out of materials which are more suitable for making airplanes than submarines, and is bound by no safety regulations

CarbonIceDragon , 2 months ago

I have to wonder what Zeno would have thought of calculus

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Ironically I have had good enough experiences with one or two Chinese brands to probably look at their stuff first whenever I ultimately replace/upgrade what I've got from them, but they certainly aren't the "spam random letters to game Amazon's systems" sort of brands and are really only slightly cheaper than the equivalents from elsewhere.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

What a scam, my fursona didnt cost me anything

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

One of my cats actually seems to like belly rubs and doesn't really do this. From what I've heard though, the reason some do this is actually that their belly is really vulnerable, because there's just some skin and little else protecting their vital organs under there, so them stretching out and showing their belly isn't really an invitation for belly rubs, but a way of saying that they trust you not to attack them. Then if you go and touch their belly, they go all defensive because that part is soft and vulnerable and from their perspective touching it is exactly the reverse of how you were supposed to respond to that.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy a lot of the prerequisites

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

At that size, that death would probably come the moment anything exited it, from it suddenly taking up too much blood and leaving the brain without enough.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

did they stop trying with the anti-adblocker stuff at some point? when they were rolling that out Id get a "adblockers violate our terms of service" message once every few days or so when uBlock Origin hadnt updated to work around it yet, but I dont think ive seen one in a while

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Taking a breath is not universalizable, because some people currently happen to swimming and would drown.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I could have used this when I was a kid playing games and would go "sorry, my cpu is bad" whenever I had lag issues even though the cpu was actually okay and it was really because of playing on a laptop with integrated graphics and a spotty internet connection, because at the time I thought CPU was just a short way of saying ComPUter...

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I mean, hypothetically couldn't they mix some proprietary chemical formula into the ink and incorporates some device that analyses the ink chemistry and doesn't print if that proprietary mixture is not present?

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I think think for awhile as a very young kid I thought the former (by the time I learned about hard drives I knew what a monitor and computer were), but in my defense, my first exposure to computers and what my family had at that age was one of those old imac computers that really did have the screen and the computer in the same device.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

And here I was thinking that whoever named that location just really hated that particular rock

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

Honestly I have mixed feelings on these guys. Like, sure, they absolutely did need to be jailed, because trying to overturn an election is extremely dangerous for the country and one cant set the precedent that one can get away with attempting it, but at the same time, these people were lied to, and if the things that they had been led to believe about the election being stolen had actually been true, I cant help but think that something like what was done might have been justified. It feels kinda messed up, then, that the people who had been led into this with misplaced trust and false promises are the ones getting the bulk of the punishment, and not the people who sold them on lies in the first place.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I understand that the kind of people that fall for this stuff tend to be horrible in other ways, don't get me wrong, but I guess I still find it hard not to find some amount of sympathy for anyone, even if I find them detestable. People aren't born being bigoted, and while it's absolutely understandable to hate people for thinking and acting that way, I certainly do myself, I'm not sure to what extent I can really see it being a choice. Like, what kind of person, who both understood what bigotry was and was not already in the grip of it, would actively choose it? I feel like those kinds of views are something one is taught, and once taught are difficult to unteach, because part of what they are involves suspicion against anyone that has a contrary message. Like the concept of garbage in ->garbage out that people use with computers, but applied to people instead.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

That should mean they don't go bankrupt though. If their service is vital, people will pay for it even if the prices rise. It would mean an increase in prices for goods admittedly as the stores try to recoup the increased logistics costs, but intuitively I'd imagine the financial impact on the end customer wouldn't be as much because they're paying for the road upkeep either way, just via higher taxes in the current state and via increased prices in the new one.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

That depends on if the tax is sufficient to cover the societal costs of driving that mile or not. Not every use of electricity degrades public infrastructure to the same extent, so if the maintenance burden an EV adds is more than what the electricity tax brings in, then additional taxes to make up the difference would make sense.

CarbonIceDragon , 3 months ago

I mean the supply and demand for the trucking companies. Shipping is a vital service, if it had high taxes, it would have to dramatically increase prices for their shipping service, but they shouldn't go out of business because everyone else would still pay those dramatically high prices, because they'd have to

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

I don't think the primary concern with things like this is the porn companies having access to that information (though it is of course a concern, especially given that no organization is immune to hacking), but rather that the government would have access to people's porn consumption habits, which presents both the same hacking risks but also the risk that some future government that decided to go after, say, LGBT people would have information that could potentially be used to identify those people at scale. Plus the risk that some unscrupulous member of government could use the information to blackmail critics or political rivals.

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

I'm not sure to what degree that this restriction is practically possible with the way the internet works though. You can probably make it work on big websites dedicated to that content, sure (there's admittedly still the issue of using VPNs to appear to be from a location without such rules, but given that these kinds of laws seem to be slowly becoming more common, maybe that won't be an issue forever), but children are curious about things kept off limits, and includes teenagers who may seek that content actively. As such, if there's a reasonably easy way to find that content, they'll find it, so simply gating big websites isn't enough. In theory, laws about the matter probably apply to more than just those sites, but consider: small websites based in other countries might just not care about foreign laws, any web service that allows user generated content (which is a lot of them) can potentially be used to share pornographic content, and some such web services are set up in a way that moderation sufficient to actually stop this is not realistic (say, discord servers secretly set up for sharing it, or fediverse instances too small to be notified by regulators, or based in another country, or with inactive moderation that doesn't notice what is being shared). As such, I don't think it's really realistic, short of a type of authoritarian control on any site that allows any kind of user uploaded content that would cause way more harm than what it tries to solve, to actually be able to stop minors from being able to access porn if they really want to. As such, I'd think that a better way of addressing concerns like them getting the wrong ideas about how sex works, or having unrealistic standards of appearance or such, is better sex-ed. When they grow up they'll be able to access this stuff anyway, so if one is worried about it giving incorrect ideas, it makes more sense to tell them that they're incorrect, and why, and what the reality of the matter is, rather than try a futile attempt to childproof the internet.

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

I mean, surely the solution to that would be to use curated/vetted training data? Or at the very least, data from before LLMs became commonplace?

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

This sounds like the sort of plan that sovcits would come up with, no offense

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyServesForLife

CarbonIceDragon , 4 months ago

Just untie the rope