Absolutely. I’ve gotten myself spun up about determinism before and eventually decided that I’m going to believe in free will for the time being. Much like theism is for many, the idea of free will is kinda comforting for me and it helps me cope with reality to feel like I (and everyone else) has agency. Plus, if I’m wrong it doesn’t really matter and I never could have been right at this point in my life anyway.

But we never could have designed it any other way (assuming no free will)

High humidity can cause them to go off as well. Used to use a cool air humidifier in our kids’ room at night and had to stop because it would eventually set the alarm off.

Jesus gets sad when you get DNA in Uranus, or so they say

Started on Friday… still coming in waves. I had a breakdown a few weeks ago… just pushed myself too hard for too long…it was probably building up for at least a year. Went to the VA (veterans affairs, for those not in the US, the VA is the sole source of health care for many veterans in the US), and they started making adjustments to my anxiety and depression medications which eventually precipitated into a ER visit. A few days later, they got me hooked up with the mental health clinic where I talked to a provider about going on short-term disability while we’re messing with my medication doses until I feel normal again. He says something along the lines “sounds like a good plan, sned me the paperwork.”

Queue up to Friday, I get a call from the insurance company saying they got the paperwork from the provider, and it recommends I go back to work. Now I’m out of PTO, disability is denied, and I’m trying to decide whether I lose my job or go back to work on while tettering between “extreme anxiety” and “drug-induced haze” from all the new prescriptions.

A faulty sensor…A faulty senso responsibility, amirite?

How science of everyone

For 50 years, science has been telling us that we’re well and truly fucked if we don’t do something about climate change. We didn’t. I don’t think the species is gonna die out (thought millions of other species will and are). You’re talking like we’re gonna be building a Dyson sphere (or swarm) in the next 20 years? Or colonize outer planets? It’s science fiction…at least for next few 100 years. We can’t rely on a deus ex machina save…we gotta take care of the planet we evolved to live on…if we aren’t strong enough for that, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere near K-II.

Role a d20 and d4. If the d20 result is less than the caster’s wisdom saving throw, collect <d4 result> lemonade (healing item). Otherwise, the caster must pass a constitution saving throw or become blinded and silenced from lemon juice in the face and mouth.

Fuck you buddy, we’re gonna cook ourselves first!

That’ll teach ya…

When you train an LLM on a strictly curated and verified dataset that is limited in scope, it will do a very good job providing you with information about that specific topic and should hopefully give you the “As an LLM, I don’t know about that…” speil for anything else.

When you let an LLM “do its own research” (e.g. train it on internet content) it starts telling you to put glue on pizza, eat a healthy number of rocks every day, and that you can run in the air as long as you don’t look down.

Maybe they really are already as smart as people. /s

Everyone I know who’s interested in raw milk probably has a few crates of ivermectin left over from the pandemic…should be plenty to keep them safe from the flu, too. /s

It’s all a joke

That irrelevant, any realistic depiction of children engaged in sexual activity meets the legal definition of csam. Even using filters on images of consenting adults could qualify as csam if the intent was to make the actors appear underage.

It’s not child sexual assault if there was no abuse. However, the legal definition of csam is any visual depiction, including computer or computer-generated images of sexually explicit conduct, where […]— (A) the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; (B) such visual depiction is a digital image, computer image, or computer-generated image that is, or is indistinguishable from, that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or © such visual depiction has been created, adapted, or modified to appear that an identifiable minor is engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

You may not agree with that definition, but even simulated images that look like kids engaging in sexual activity meet the threshold for CSAM.

Do you know a moth who’s good at conversation?

Per-swipe ads on phones. Free tier: every 5 swipes, regardless of app, full screen unskippable ads (content saved to devices locally so airplane mode doesn’t stop it). Then you pay more to increase the number of swipes you get between ads.

Nothing. It’s a pretty fantasy. Best I think we can hope for is a few monopolies busted up so some little guys can break into the market. That’ll buy us about 20 years until those little guys have become the new Googles and Microsofts and Apples, and then we start over. We need to entirely rewrite how we do antitrust assessments to account for both vertical and horizontal monopolistic behaviors (a vertical monopoly is a company that controls the entire supply chain where a horizontal one controls the market and customer base. Historically, the US has been more concerned with horizontal monopolies.) It’d be great if we could come up with a better measure of consumer choice that we currently use. If you have the choice between 2 ISPs but they both charge the same amount for the same service, you don’t really have a choice there…at least not a meaningful one.

I mean, you didn’t kill the dinosaurs. Or did you ಠ_ಠ

I mean, the equation isn’t wrong given that AI basically becomes a rounding error and can be safely ignored.

Jupiter says, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”