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Silentiea

@Silentiea@lemm.ee

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Silentiea ,
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Sorry, in what way is that like this? Like, she put up flyers to advertise her porn after she got sued by the government for advertising porn?

Silentiea ,
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They seriously haven't updated the rulebook? It's been a quarter century!

Silentiea ,
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Don't try to be what the world thinks "girl" means. Just try to be you, and let the world be what it's gonna be. There's enough pressures on women in society already, let alone on trans women. Don't try to carry all of that yourself.

There will be people who put you down regardless of how you present, so again, just try to be comfortable as yourself. If that means you wear a ladies tee one day a week and nothing else changes, so be it. If it means you look and present exactly as you did before, but now you know yourself better: great. And if it means you dress up more eccentrically than lady gaga and scare people away, well... You do you.

But don't let everybody else tell you that you can't be comfortable as yourself, because they're wrong.

Silentiea ,
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I've heard it both ways.

Silentiea ,
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That was kind of the wildest realization for me.

Like, "oh, wow, I'm actually a girl... Huh."

"Oh, HOLY FUCKING SHIT, I'M A LESBIAN!? IS THAT ALLOWED!?"

Silentiea ,
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I wish more people in my life understood that. Like, most do and are supportive, but the ones who don't...

I could pretend it wasn't true, but I can't un-know this about myself, and so however it looks from the outside, my life will never quite be what it was before. It's like I've learned an Eldritch secret about the world: nothing has changed, but somehow everything is different.

Silentiea ,
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Thanks for this.

Unfortunately, in order to succeed in distancing myself from them, I have also had to increase my distance from a bunch of my family that are supportive. My family is really connected, and one of the two main offenders is my dad, so making more distance with him means going to fewer family get togethers.

And the other main person is my wife and my daughter's other mom, and that's another relationship where adding distance is difficult to impossible...

Silentiea ,
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Yeah. I have a gay sister, and she's been out since long before I even put the pieces together about myself, let alone came out.

She was the first person I came out to in person, and I haven't really talked to her about the being gay part of it, but come to think of it she probably realized right away that me being trans also implied lesbian. Not that it stopped me from feeling like I was somehow intruding on her space by even thinking of myself that way...

Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis (www.theverge.com)

Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis::Google says it’s aware of historically inaccurate results for its Gemini AI image generator, following criticism that it depicted historically white groups as people of color.

Silentiea ,
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The complaint listed in the text was that it "refused to generate white people in any context", which was not the author's experience, hence they shared screens of their results which did include white americans

Silentiea ,
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Real intelligence simply doesn't work like this

There's a certain point where this just feels like the Chinese room. And, yeah, it's hard to argue that a room can speak Chinese, or that the weird prediction rules that an LLM is built on can constitute intelligence, but that doesn't mean it can't be. Essentially boiled down, every brain we know of is just following weird rules that happen to produce intelligent results.

Obviously we're nowhere near that with models like this now, and it isn't something we have the ability to work directly toward with these tools, but I would still contend that intelligence is emergent, and arguing whether something "knows" the answer to a question is infinitely less valuable than asking whether it can produce the right answer when asked.

Silentiea ,
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But you don't really "know" anything either. You just have a network of relations stored in the fatty juice inside your skull that gets excited just the right way when I ask it a question, and it wasn't set up that way by any "intelligence", the links were just randomly assembled based on weighted reactions to the training data (i.e. all the stimuli you've received over your life).

Thinking about how a thing works is, imo, the wrong way to think about if something is "intelligent" or "knows stuff". The mechanism is neat to learn about, but it's not what ultimately decides if you know something. It's much more useful to think about whether it can produce answers, especially given novel inquiries, which is where an LLM distinguishes itself from a book or even a typical search engine.

And again, I'm not trying to argue that an LLM is intelligent, just that whether it is or not won't be decided by talking about the mechanism of its "thinking"

Silentiea ,
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I mean there's magnetic tape. It's not, like, usable. But it's also none too volatile if stored properly.

Silentiea ,
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They're not even, they're measured in bits per second. That's like saying temperature is measured in calories.

Silentiea ,
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I mean, you can make a smallish one as long as you don't live anywhere that gets too hot or cold.

Silentiea ,
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Storage are measured in bytes because data are stored in that form, with an individual bit being meaningless but a single byte often being significant. Network throughputs are measured in bits per second because the time-density of data is the significant thing there, not the total number of bytes transmitted.

There are 8 bits in a byte and there are 9 degrees Rankine in every 5 degrees Celsius, but if I told you the temperature for tomorrow in degrees Rankine, you would still think me weird for saying it that way and you might wonder what I was hiding.

There are almost always dozens of units we could use to describe something, but it's okay to call it out when someone says something unusually as the original headline did.

Silentiea ,
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The original comment in this thread was about how the article lists the capacity of this experimental disk in bits, and posited that bytes are the usual unit to use.

The next comment was about how networks are measured in bits.

So my replies since then have been about two points, first that bits are still inappropriate to use here even if networks use them, and second that networks use bits per second, which is a different unit than bits.

That's kind of like saying kilometers are measured in kilometers per hour, but a drag strip is a quarter mile

It's more like saying speed is measured in kilometers per hour rather than kilometers (point 2) while also saying that the country we're talking about measures distance in miles usually (point 1).

Silentiea ,
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I have heard someone say in all seriousness that it's still murder to abort an ectopic pregnancy (which would just kill the mom and 'child' if allowed to continue)...

Silentiea ,
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I mean the odds aren't very different for the kid after the procedure. Why can't God save them after? Not even /s, why don't they ever have an answer for that? If we're relying on a miracle anyway, why would an infinitely powerful god need such constrained circumstances to make it work?

Silentiea ,
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I thought the exact same thing. Always fun to find a new way my brain can be tricked.

Silentiea ,
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Pretty much any optical illusion that involves "random" patterns actually involves pseudorandom noise, just like adversarial generative networks use tailored pseudorandom noise to fool the discriminator.

Silentiea ,
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Also I never really thought of it that way, but now I'm imagining all of those "the ai thinks this is a bus" things as alien optical illusions.

Silentiea ,
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In star Trek, they use sonic showers.

Silentiea ,
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He literally said

I wonder if there was an element of racism that went into ignoring the reviewer's concerns?

So...

Silentiea ,
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I mean "made it past"...

The 2 reviewers both brought up the images as weird, and the journal published anyways, so...

Silentiea ,
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Happens to all of us from time to time.

Are there any genuine benefits to AI?

I can see some minor benefits - I use it for the odd bit of mundane writing and some of the image creation stuff is interesting,, and I knew that a lot of people use it for coding etc - but mostly it seems to be about making more cash for corporations and stuffing the internet with bots and fake content. Am I missing something...

Silentiea ,
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As long as everything gets thrown it's still brute force, but the reason they use ai for it is because it can throw a lot more a lot faster.

Silentiea ,
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Trouble is the best way to regulate it isn't clear. If the new tool can do the job at least as well and cheaper, just disallowing it is less beneficial to society. You can tax its use until it is only a little cheaper, but then you have to get people to approve of taxes. Et cetera

Silentiea ,
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This, tbh.

Let's get a ubi or something going

Silentiea ,
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Exactly. It can generate those base-level ideas much faster and worth higher fidelity than humans can without it, and that can see us at the hobby level with DND, or up at the business level with writers rooms and such.

The important point is that you still need someone good at making the thing you want to look at and finish the thing you're making, or you end up with paintings with too many fingers or stories full of contradictions

Silentiea ,
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Train it to learn how to use it's limbs and eyes to climb over obstacles, open doors and detain or kill people. We could replace police with them. Super agile robot cops with no racial bias or other prejudices. Arresting people and recording their crimes. Genuine benefit.

I got as far as ai cops and became sceptical. Like, yeah, sure, but what you're describing isn't just a robot being controlled by an AI, it's also the ai making decisions and choosing who to pursue and such, which is a known weakness right now.

And then you let them kill people.

Silentiea ,
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I was with it until it said let's train AI robots to kill people, and then use them to track every face on the planet and use that data to "identify threats"...

OP wants a robot overseer, but also wants it to be a police state.

Silentiea ,
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But the point is that you don't use it to make the campaign or write the book. You use it as a tool to help yourself make a campaign or write a book. Ignoring the potential of ai as a tool is silly just because it can't do the whole job for you. That would be a bit like saying you are a fool for using a sponge when washing because it will never get everything by itself...

Silentiea ,
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"don't feed the trolls," they said, but did she ever listen?

No, I guess I didn't...

Silentiea ,
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So AIs are force multipliers. Got it.

Silentiea ,
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But... Methane is fossil fuel?

Scientists develop game-changing 'glass brick' that could revolutionize construction: 'The highest insulating performance' (www.thecooldown.com)

Scientists develop game-changing 'glass brick' that could revolutionize construction: 'The highest insulating performance'::The team of scientists developed an aerogel glass brick, which is a translucent and thermally insulating material.

Silentiea ,
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You just have to go touch grass first.

Silentiea ,
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Seriously, could the party of "small government" get out of my business, please?

Silentiea ,
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I just wish the push and pull of politics didn't have to be played as a zero sum game. I wish someone could take the initiative and just...

I think both parties in America sing pretty loud about "law and order." I haven't heard that cry particularly loudly from either side over the other. I don't think I've heard anyone who claims to be a Democrat saying the end goal is "small government" but I have heard it from Republican voices.

Honestly, I would really prefer if we were in a system that enabled more parties, so we didn't have "parties" that did such contradictory things as the current ones...

Silentiea ,
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That's ... What is it made of? Raw sodium? How is there nothing they can put on it to seal it from corrosion?

Silentiea ,
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Don't you talk about my cat that way!

Silentiea ,
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The trouble is that those same conspiracy eaters aren't the only ones at risk from the conspiracy. Immunocompromised people are out at risk when the percentage of people going unvaccinated increases. They are worth saving, and the mechanism of saving them is saving the conspiracy eaters.

‘What do you mean, the tower is gone?’: thieves steal 200ft structure from Alabama radio station | Alabama (www.theguardian.com)

‘What do you mean, the tower is gone?’: thieves steal 200ft structure from Alabama radio station | Alabama::Small radio station forced to go silent after ‘unbelievable’ theft of giant tower, which would cost over $100,000 to replace

Silentiea ,
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Wow I'm glad they had that little addendum after the headline telling me this happened in Alabama, I was worried that it might be my local Alabama radio station.

Silentiea ,
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Hey, just because companies always choose (and get away with) "make more money by cutting costs" instead of "attract more customers with lower prices" doesn't mean they have to ...right?

Silentiea ,
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How would you implement that? Like, how do you propose to impose a tax on the company that they can't just pass along to the customer?

Silentiea ,
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How would that law work? Unless you're setting the price as a matter of law, how could you ever prove that a price rise was because of the tax and not "other economic factors"?

Silentiea ,
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What are you and Dianey doing to children?

Silentiea ,
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By making up more costs.

More seriously, by evaluating what you could be making by letting someone else run the streaming service and pay you for the rights, instead. It's still a pretty imaginary number, but it does come from something real.

Silentiea ,
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Also, for a business other than Disney, licensing fees for the content they show can be a pretty large cost that needs a lot of subscribers to offset.

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