@FeralRobots@mastodon.social
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

FeralRobots

@FeralRobots@mastodon.social

Following-back because I followed you may not be a good use of your time.

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mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Watched two videos debunking "free energy" devices today and so now the YouTube algorithm is trying to show me videos advertising "free energy" devices

Yelling "CONTEXT COLLAPSE!" at the end of the post in the same tone as "THE ARISTOCRATS!"

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc there's a person at my school using chatGPT to do sentiment analysis. I want to ask them 'say have you heard about Google's AI returning all those satirical blog posts as serious advice?'

(Not that conventional sentiment analysis tools were ever that good. I've always considered it a very suspect metric but ad campaigns can live or die on it.)

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I'm having a technical problem. This would be a great time to have access to services such as Reddit and Stack Overflow as opposed to those services now being traps that exist to sell your words to sketchy businesses so the sketchy businesses can eat the delicious statistical relationships therein and use them to sound more plausibly like humans when they're telling you to eat rocks

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc 'eating the delicious statistical relationships therein' makes them sound like the mindless infovores that slither in from higher dimensions to nibble at our gray matter in @cstross laundreyverse stories.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I have a question about how I could set up my Windows networking configuration to work better but on the other hand I now have it sort of kind of minimally functional and I'm afraid if I try to change anything further at all it will just fall over like a jenga tower

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc this could apply to so many things in my technical life.

cstross, (edited ) to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

My sympathy to the milkshake (it got covered in—ick!—Farage))

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross
serious questions:
what are her likely legal consequences for this act?
& if they're significant, how likely might she have been to know that?

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Alright, lots of heavy discussions today, so let's talk about something silly!

What is a movie that always makes you laugh?

Personal pick:

Anything Mel Brooks, but Robin Hood: Men in Tights, it's just funny every time I watch it.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@RickiTarr not sure if this would still work, but Dude Where's My Car used to crack me right the fuck up. I think I saw it at least 3 times in the theater. I never watched it streaming or on DVD because I didn't want the magic to be gone.

luis_in_brief, to random
@luis_in_brief@social.coop avatar

“Her is a profoundly sad movie because it intimately describes how these tools we love have driven us apart.”

Have been meaning to re-watch Her for a few weeks but this (from @rands ) is exactly my recollection of it. Profound Alienation Nexus is a very real subgenre of Torment Nexus.

https://mastodon.social/@rands/112553350088886861

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@luis_in_brief @rands
That's almost inverse to my recollection. At the end, Ted bonds with his friend over their OSs leaving them in order to pass through the singularity - they're able to share deep connection & talk about their emotions in ways these characters previously couldn't.
I saw it at the time as Jonze engaging critically with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope (Samantha as Ted's vehicle for maturity, even as she transcends him), as well as maybe talking about his own emotional growth.

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

SMART POLITICAL PERSON: Land doesn't vote.
TEXAS GOP: Well let's see if we can fix that!
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/behold-the-terrors-of-the-texas-republican

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

I guess Facebook has become MySpace but with AI.

https://youtu.be/IXDjbqiThuk

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@atomicpoet I've checked in a few times recently (hadn't looked in years but there was a wave of people reaching out to me there), & spent a lot of the time looking at promoted posts. 2 days ago I literally scrolled for 20 minutes, blocking every post I saw that wasn't from someone I followed - there was maybe one post from a friend for every 20 promoted posts.
Instagram is almost as bad.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

This was a fun one, so let's do it again. What is something you've learned that seems unlikely, even though you know it's true? Here's one I think about a lot:

Sight, while being something something many people are born with, is not an innate ability, but something we learn to do. People who were born blind or were blind for a long time, who get sight, have to learn to see.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@RickiTarr For me that falls under things that surprised me when I learned them, but then quickly made sense - and which ended up structuring how I view the world.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@BeBo @mmdolbow @RickiTarr
my SCA friends insist this isn't true - that people liked spices because the spices taste good, & they didn't actually care much about the flavors that came with stuff going non-harmfully bad.
(I can go either way on this one, FWIW.)

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Could a Betazoid and a Vulcan have a kid together or would the kid just immediately feel schizophrenic all the time?!

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@GayDeceiver @RickiTarr
see I might take the opposite view, that a Betazed might actually make an excellent parent for a Vulcan child who's not being raised in Vulcan culture.

TerryHancock, to random
@TerryHancock@realsocial.life avatar

Wow. A website just asked me if I were between 13 and 15 years old.

What's that about, I wonder?

I mean, the implication is that the content is okay if you're < 12 or > 15..? 🤔

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@TerryHancock Was it the 'are you between 13 & 15' prompt on ReactorMag.com?
IIRC @jdnicoll mentioned that in passing but I don't remember for sure what the explanation was.

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Here lies Irony, she was not well for many years, but after a valiant fight she is dead.

This would be ironic for any of the speakers at this event... but none more so than this man.

That people were hauled off by security for heckling him? Well irony would have had something to say about that, but as I explained, she is dead. RIP.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@hazelnot @futurebird I thought that was a 'shop but holy shit they actually used 'become ungovernable' with the circle-A? the irony is wild.

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

"Land doesn't vote" is one of the dumbest political thought-stoppers I can think of. Land doesn't vote, you say? Then how come some asshole in Montana has twice my voting power?

KimPerales, to random
@KimPerales@toad.social avatar

TX Republican leaders are antidemocratic fascists. And with a compromised SC… “TX GOP calls for an amendment to ensure Rs always win statewide elections by requiring candidates to win a majority of counties. TX has 254 counties, 1/2 live in just 7 of them. Trump won 232 of counties, but 58% of Texans live in the 22 counties Biden.”-S Wolf “Proposed TX GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that’d lock Dems out of statewide office.” https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/25/texas-republican-party-convention-platform/

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@KimPerales Next time someone tells me "land doesn't vote" I'm gonna point them to this.

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Jim Wright has a very valid point about booing of Trump: " hate everybody including themselves. They'd heckle their own candidate."
Can support this from my own experience of movement Libertarians. Most of them have no consistent moral system beyond "I should be allowed to do whatever I want."

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Who is the most morally compromised of our justices? If you think it is a tie you may vote for more than one.

If you think one or more of them has vastly outstripped the others in failing to live up to their office, limit your vote to the greatest failures.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird @pablor
other platforms allow more than 4 & they show up on Mastodon, so it's clearly not a technical issue.

bruces, to random
@bruces@mastodon.social avatar

"Humor is a human phenomenon"

*Is this actually true? It must be true of verbal humor -- but maybe there are animals funnier than people, when seen by animal standards

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@bruces thinking about Mel Brooks formulation ('humor is when you break your leg, tragedy is when I stub my toe,' or something like that), I can't think of an animal that embodies that more than a cat.

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@trochee
My mistake, that's a crow.
@bruces

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math And Doesn't Want To Talk To You may well be the best title I've read for a biographical musical show.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/22/my-songs-spread-like-herpes-why-did-satirical-genius-tom-lehrer-swap-worldwide-fame-for-obscurity

FeralRobots, to random
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

Keep seeing stories about "AI's" 'huge potential' to do things that other systems already do & which LLMs are really poorly suited to solve. When you take apart the use-cases, it's often stuff people have been working on doing with ML for decades, & sometimes already do, if you're willing to pay a the equivalent of a couple of FTEs to license it.

flexghost, to random
@flexghost@mastodon.social avatar

Who else called it?

Sound off 🔈

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@flexghost because of course she will.

KimPerales, to tech
@KimPerales@toad.social avatar

I believe many execs (& many of their enablers) are evil & diabolical, & they only care about their bottom line, esp. , , ...:

"Paul Graham wrote an essay in 2010 about how the best founders are naughty because they break the rules.

Then he has an interesting anecdote about Sam Altman...

Interesting lens through which to view why OpenAI keeps showing up in the news for doing obviously bad things."
-buccocapital

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@KimPerales It's bizarre that they describe Altman as one of their 'most successful alumni' since just about everything he did before OpenAI failed on its merits. But he was able to leverage them to get progressively more-lucrative gigs, whether or not the companies actually did well, so I guess that makes him "successful" - as a grifter.

luis_in_brief, to random
@luis_in_brief@social.coop avatar

So what SF movies are smart on AI?

Challenge level: nothing where AI is the cliched bad guy (looking at you, Skynet).

I will also accept favorite TV episodes about AI (eg maybe it is time for me to rewatch the Kiksuya episode of Westworld).

https://social.coop/

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@luis_in_brief
Earlier he gets to say this: "She cannot love you. You are neither flesh nor blood. You are not a dog a cat or a canary. You were designed and built specific like the rest of us... and you are alone now only because they tired of you... or replaced you with a younger model... or were displeased with something you said or broke. They made us too smart, too quick and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. "

FeralRobots,
@FeralRobots@mastodon.social avatar

@luis_in_brief (Worth looking up the source material for AI, a trio of stories by Brian Aldiss: "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," "Supertoys When Winter Comes," & "Supertoys In Other Seasons.")

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