https://youtu.be/5dGY0_pgkv8

They’ve made several of these, but my fave is the CGTN video with Bald Eagles versus Persian Cats.

Why watch the night sky when you can watch these new exciting ads on your phone?

I think you’re right. It’s a bit of a dance with the devil as far as your own abilities are concerned. If we could have exoskeletons that would make us 40x stronger, would our bodies atrophy in the same way, and would we accept it?

And yet, I wouldn’t argue against the objective utility of an exoskeleton.

Well, I think to most of us, language is extremely closely tied to our actual thoughts. So verbal expression is at the very least part of the thinking process.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just not faced with the abuses of LLMs the way you are? I don’t regularly experience people who clearly skipped the effort and just let an LLM do the thinking for them. (It happens, and it’s problematic, but at in my experience it’s rare.) And it’s possible that it’s just because my bubble haven’t caught up yet.

I find it really difficult to engage with this because it’s so obviously motivated by fear. And to be clear, there’s a lot to be afraid of with LLMs and generative AI, because the avenues for abuse are vast. However, the utility is also immense, and I really do find it an incredible curiosity that to so many Lemmy users generative AI is just bad, as though it can’t really do anything properly.

We live in an age where China spits out cute propaganda cartoons about the Iran war almost in real time, at a much faster pace than South Park in its prime, and you can’t be a little bit amazed? Where the fuck is your sense of wonder, man?

And I get it, mediocre people use AI to do dumb shit and it’s infuriating, and evil corporations use it to compile kill lists, and if we let it take away our ability to write creatively, to compose new music, to write new code, then we atrophy perhaps the most important part of ourselves and we’ll live in a poorer world as a result. But that’s an us problem in the end, not a tech problem. If we want to avoid a future like that, we’ll have to accept the fact that LLMs are here to stay and figure out how to reconcile that fact with a better future.

I do not agree with this at all. Some of the smartest people I know have severe dyslexia. And those are not just extremes, all of us exist on a spectrum where we have strengths and weaknesses, and not all of us can be literary geniuses.

The fact that capitalism promotes mediocre bootlickers to positions of power has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology. Of course it will be exploited by these exact same people - all the more reason why we shouldn’t give them a monopoly on what’s genuinely a transformative technology.

This is a bit alarmist I think. It’s about how you use it. If your prompt is “please write a funny story about a bunny” you’ll get slop. If you write a full-ass Wikipedia article and ask it to simplify and punctuate long passages for increased legibility you can get valuable feedback.

Yes, Iran understands this. Iran is in full, single-minded cancer removal mode. You beat cancer or you die.

Greece has one of the largest commercial fleets in the world. Likely the companies connected to these ships made a deal to be able to pass. It could depend on their destination (let’s say it’s Japan) as well.

Sweden is not about to produce a 5th or 6th gen fighter. Gripen is most likely the end of the line. The next step for Sweden is drone warfare.

$200B is nothing, because with the petrodollar they can just print more. But losing the petrodollar would collapse the US so fucking fast. Petrodollar means sustainable trade deficit, it means they can export all of their crises and let the manufacturer countries (Europe, Japan, China) eat the inflation as they print money. No petrodollar means rapid collapse.

Gripen can also sneak up on, out-manoveur and take down F35s btw.

That Europe is the big loser here is a given. Which is why Europe really should get involved, today. But I don’t think that the US is able to protect the rest of OPEC, at least not short-term. They are incredibly fragile and their infrastructure is exposed.

I think that the point for the US is to disrupt China. So that’s the point, mess up the Middle East so that China has no reliable source of oil. Next, make a move on Taiwan. I think that China understands this and will get involved.

Honestly I believe Iran would accept:

• Full sanctions relief
• Return to IAEA inspections
• Pinky-promise not to attack again
• Fake reparations program spread out over 30 years

The alternative is:

• The US is evicted from the Persian Gulf
• The US fucks off from Iraq, and Iraq gets an Iran-friendly government
• Bahrain gets regime change
• All goods through the strait are now controlled by Iran

The worse/better alternative is:

• Pipelines and refineries in the Arabian nations go boom
• All US/Israel trade through the Red Sea is blocked
• US is starved out of Djibouti
• Iran gets a nuclear weapon and says they’re going to “test it” on Tel Aviv unless Netanyahu sucks a donkey dick on OnlyFans

Choose wisely, pedophile scum

Approximately 10% of global trade according to the UN.

They also export fertilizer. You know, the stuff that makes food.

Hah, you swapped insomnia for reading-induced narcolepsy. Neat!

Yep. Doctors and randos alike will keep telling you to just try harder. Fuck that.

Read a book. Work some more on your project. Go for a run. Don’t try to sleep.