Quit reddit 5 years ago. Had a 12 year old account then.

Thread asked for early examples of racism against a certain group, by my country. I dug up such examples and translated them into English. The examples included slurs. Got permabanned for using slurs, no appeal.

Apparently I should have included a racism trigger warning in a thread asking for examples of racism, although the mod admitted that that wouldn’t have saved me either.

This is a site which was notorious for indulging in gore with videos of people being killed by the way. Bunch of weirdos.

That’s not why I deleted my account though. The last straw was when CIA thinktanks made a hostile takeover of all Middle East and geopolitics subs, forcing a Washington agenda to manufactor consent for war. The Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq subs were riddled with ex-military Americans and the mods were literally paid thinktank gooners. They were quite open about it too.

That’s one of the most infuriating things. Like, you get tons of posts on your frontpage that you did not choose. At some point you engage with some unhinged statement, trying to reason with the lonely wayward person that said something horrible or sad. You are now shadowbanned from multiple large communities, so no normal users will see your posts and you won’t even get notified that this action has been taken against you.

Yeah they make hair products.

Alright you know what, I’m not going to argue. You do you.

I just know that I’ve been underwhelmed with conventional search for about a decade, and I think that LLMs are a huge help sorting through the internet at the moment. There’s no telling what it will become in the future, especially if popular LLMs start ingesting content that itself has been generated by LLMs, but for now I think that the improvement is more significant than the step from Yahoo→Google in the 2000s.

Edison was a problematic person to say the least, but he was an inventor and he did not come from wealth. I think that nowadays it’s pretty much known that he was an asshole that attached his name to inventions that he had very little to do with, but at least he did contribute some things. Elon Musk is a con-man through and through.

This is obvious when you think about it even a little bit. You can’t buy safe streets.

What’s the point of being ultra-rich when you have to step outside into Phnom Penh and watch how toddlers collect scrap?

I think you’re underselling it a bit though. It is far better than a modern search engine, although that is in part because of all of the SEO slop that Google has ingested. The fact that you need to think critically is not something new and it’s never going to go away either. If you were paying real-life human experts to answer your every question you would still need to think for yourself.

Still, I think the C-suite doesn’t really have a good grasp of the limits of LLMs. This could be partly because they themselves work a lot with words and visualization, areas where LLMs show promise. It’s much less useful if you’re in engineering, although I think ultimately AI will transform engineering too. It is of course annoying and potentially destructive that they’re trying to force-push it into areas where it’s not useful (yet).

They probably mean that Moroccanoil (an Israeli-owned company that makes hair oil) is a main sponsor of Eurovision.

Grotesco could easily win Eurovision if they ever cared to enter. So many of their songs live rent-free in Swedish people’s heads and this is hardly even top 10.

If you need to wash something with hot water but don’t like the steam, mix it with cold water before applying.

Hell yeah Connections is incredible.

No it doesn’t. She’s blaming social media for actually getting the truth out there. She’s been at the center of US politics for decades, in the White House for a lot of the time. She’s just panicking because the narrative that she’s been part of pushing is crashing down.

Misinformation is a problem, yes. And traditional media also reports misinformation. Here is how responsible actors react to misinformation.

to engage in some kind of reasonable discussion, it was very difficult because they did not know history, they had very little context

I don’t need context to know that it’s wrong to rape an autistic prisoner to death. I don’t need context to know that it’s wrong to bomb cattle and fields in order to starve a population. And why should I listen to Hillary fucking Clinton, the single cause for why open-air slave markets could open in Libya. Fuck her and fuck Bubba too.

Hey now. Despite everything, Edison was an actual inventor and actually a self-made man. Musk doesn’t have shit on Edison.

Immigration leads to far-right nutjobs threatening politicians so they leave their positions?

Right. So you just outed your specialized interest in a fringe issue. The thread is about female politicians leaving the limelight, and you just had to force a connection to your pet theory of how the world works, didn’t you.

Nevermind that the reason they leave is almost always threats from far-right nutjobs.

Yeah but the tide is turning, at least in Sweden and it seems in the US as well. It’s decreasingly socially acceptable to shame people into going alone with war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and it is especially ugly to use accusations of bigotry to promote bigotry.

I can see the ridges that cut across each segment in the rings of a fingerprint. And the fibers that make up the threads in a piece of cloth.

The thing is that we do not really know what consciousness is or how it arises. So I think we need to be careful when we decide how it does not arise, or what “true” consciousness is.

I think it is likely that consciousness emerges on the aggregate macro-level from processes that are simple on the micro-level. Such phenomena do lend themselves to be described or indeed understood best with statistics.

In particular, I think it’s a mistake to assume that consciousness can only arise by mimicking the exact functioning of a human brain. (Noting here that there is debate on whether other animals can be considered conscious with no clear cutoff or criteria). However I think that the criteria that you mentioned (continuous rewiring of neurons, oscillations of activity et.c.) could easily be added to an ML model, and I think those exact things will be added to ML models down the line.

Good video essay on the topic by Lindsay Ellis.

Incidentally I love that the video has raised $800k for Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.