I mean, art supplies, even if its just pencil and paper, generally cost money and dont last forever, so someone out there is charging for kids doodling. Unless theyre drawing in the dirt with a stick I guess.

I get that sentiment, but consider: there are orders of magnitude more people in the US than Greenland. As such, if Americans go into communities for Greenland to demonstrate to them that we don’t all support Trump in such a way, the result would be less a “little thing” and more the people actually using that community getting bombarded with Americans apologizing for the actions of other Americans in a space meant to be for Greenland. I’m not from there and so can’t say for sure how that comes across, but I at least imagine that were I from Greenland, I’d probably find this far more annoying than reassuring.

Part of it, I think, is that a random person apologizing on behalf of an entire country is rather pointless. It doesn’t benefit that other country at all (in a personal sense a genuine apology might provide reassurance that the apologizer doesn’t intend to repeat some offense, but a person apologizing for an entire country, that they don’t control, can make no such garuntee, same as apologizing on behalf of an unrepentant stranger would be pointless). The only thing it really does is make the person apologizing feel slightly better about what is going on.

In a pure debate sense, this would be true, even an unpopular or suspicious person is still capable of making a valid point. It should be considered, however, that internet arguments are not formal debates. They can at times use the form and language of them, but most people are not skilled in that kind of formalized arguing, and most people are not arguing in an actual attempt to use the debate to identify stronger vs inconsistent positions (rather than just trying to push people towards ones own ideas or to put down ideas one finds reprehensible).

Now, I dont personally tend to find much point in looking through profiles, it takes too much time for little benefit in my view, but it can sometimes tell you if an account is not worth the time and emotional investment to interact with, or if it has signs that it might not be. The nature of social media is such that there are always far more user’s trying to get your attention, than you have attention to spare. As such, if theres even a notable red-flag that an account isnt worth the time and potential frustration to engage with, it can make pragmatic sense to move on (depending on how much one is willing to put up with, I guess).

From that perspective, telling other people what it was that seemed like a red flag to you lets them consider if that thing makes that account worth their time or not, without them having to find it too, and therefore potentially does those other people a favor. That sounds a bit harsh (at least to me) because plenty of things others might consider suspect, like a new account, cant always be helped (everyone starts off new after all), and being ignored, or having other people call out that thing as a reason they might want to ignore you, is frustrating, but that’s just the nature of giving massive numbers of people the ability to talk to everyone else; most people wont want or have the time to listen to you, and you’re not entitled to their time, however unfair their reason for dismissing you might be.

Big cats are, after all, big cats

The edges of the hair look like hes been cut and pasted over a different background to me, so maybe he is from that?

It seems to me there are two scenarios: you’re burying a body legally somehow (the question never specifies a human body, so it could be a dead pet, and even if it is human, maybe that person had specific wishes and you’ve done whatever paperwork that might take, idk) in which case the answer is surely yes. Or, you’re doing it illegally, presumably to dispose of the body, in which case I have to question why you’d bury it somewhere that, if found, will immediately implicate you as a suspect.

I mean, that doesn’t really fix it if you have an actually omnipotent diety though, because that diety would be responsible for, well, everything, to include what the results of rejecting that diety would be.

Personally I’d say no, the government of mainland China has it’s well known authoritarian tendencies, but it’s still much better than a warzone or area under foreign military occupation would be, in the hypothetical case where the Taiwanese government gained the military capacity for this somehow, and Taiwan and the mainland have had decades for cultural divergence to occur, some extremely transformative decades at that, so close as they might still be, it would still be a foreign invasion for china at this point.

You know, I kinda wonder what niche subcultures from way back when looked like. Sure, they thrive with the internet, but they cant be an entirely new thing surely?

I sometimes find it interesting to contemplate how best to treat swear words. One the one hand, the thing that seems most obvious to me is to just say “theyre just words to express frustration or anger at something. Those are real and valid emotions, and its silly to treat expletives like theyre morally wrong to say somehow, or like its a bad thing if children learn them, etc.” On the other hand, part of the appeal to using them is that they feel at least a bit taboo, allowing a sentiment like “I feel so upset with this situation that I’m going to break this social rule to show it”. If theres no taboo at all, which you get when they’re used all the time and entirely casually, they no longer serve that purpose very well and people start looking for new things that feel a little bit transgressive to say. Which paradoxically implies that there isnt a point in saying them unless youre not “allowed” to say them, except they cant be too offensive to say either or they’ll feel disproportionate and rude.

The thing with comparing sci-fi AI to modern LLMs is that virtually no science fiction AI that I know of actually acts the way LLMs do. They tend to be good at things modern AI is bad at, like logical reasoning or advanced math, but bad at things that AI can already do, like generate images that at least look like they could be human art, or write text that appears emotionally charged. They also tend to be directly programmed in ways that a singular (usually genius, but still) individual can pick through and understand, rather than being trained in a black box sort of manner that is very difficult for a human to reverse-engineer.

That isnt surprising, sci-fi writers arent oracles after all and just having AI of some kind probably makes a story more realistic than just assuming the technology never gets invented even far into the future, but in my view these kinds of sci-fi AI are basically a different, hypothetical technology going for the same end result. As such, I dont really expect even a very advanced iteration on what we have will look like star trek AI, any more than modern cars tend to fly or run off miniature nuclear reactors the way sci-fi of decades ago saw cars of the future. I dont think it will look like skynet either. I do think we might get some interesting science fiction in the coming decades exploring what a very advanced version of the technology we do have might end up like though. It probably wont be terribly accurate either, but Id bet it will be closer than works where the basis for extrapolating AI tech is “what if the calculator could talk and think”.

I mean, if were talking about efficiency tools for artists to use rather than straight up automatically generating the assets (not sure what those tools would be at the moment, but I’ve not been following what the AI industry actually releases for awhile because it’s always seemed a bit useless), then the result should be an increase in the output of those artists rather than replacing them with statistical amalgam.

The nature of deep dish pizza aside, doesn’t cheeseless pizza predate the kind with cheese anyway?

So, what you’re talking about (the past and future appearing different to different observers) sounds like a different concept to what this comic was about; if im understanding your meaning, that’s something that comes up from relativity, and as such has a bit more grounding to it than any position on if other points in time exist somewhere else along a “time axis” already or if the future is truly unwritten. Either position on the nature of time will result in a universe that looks exactly the same from our perspective, and therefore can only be speculated on, but relativity makes physically testable predictions that can be experimentally verified. I can’t really explain it adequately as I only understand the basics myself (though from what I know, nobody ever actually observes the future, its more that different observers see the time between connected events compressed compared to others).

Autocomplete claims another victim

I overheard one of my coworkers yesterday telling someone else that companies making everything into a subscription service was a result of the country “becoming more communist”. I don’t know where to even begin with that one.

This sounds like an idea called “eternalism” or “block time”. I tend to suspect it might be the case just because it requires assuming fewer unique properties for the time dimension that aren’t shared by space dimensions, but obviously that’s not really evidence for it as such. It can be an interesting idea to think through the implications of though, whether true or not.

On the one hand, sure, the people there should watch out for the possibility that the US or similar tries to get a government satisfactory to them installed if the current one falls.

But on the other hand, it’s not like there’s any mechanism, in a revolution, to collectively declare “you’re not allowed to support us” and have it stick. So if all it takes for a revolution to be illegitimate is the US to declare itself in favor, then the US has the power to delegitimize any revolution it wishes without recourse, which doesn’t make much sense.

While I suspect a lot of lemmy would say yes just by virtue of having both socialist politics and an anti-AI stance, strictly speaking I don’t think AI inheritly has anything to do one way or the other with socialism (though the way and by whom it is owned probably would be different), so really that would depend more on how the culture of a given country treated that tech than it’s economic system.