FaceDeer

As always, I must point out that president Camacho actually cared about Americans and when presented with a problem he was too stupid to solve he sought out the advice of smarter people to make use of in solving it.

President Camacho was a way better president than Trump.

I, too, started out on kbin and ended up migrating to an mbin instance. I sent Ernest some money via that Koffi thing he had and I don’t regret it - I hope he found the funds useful, whatever it is that happened to him in the end. He kicked off an alternative to Lemmy and that’s super important for a distributed decentralized system like the Fediverse, you can’t have just one client for it.

You’re fine with invasion of privacy as long as it only affects criminals.

I think you’ll find that once privacy is broken you’d be surprised how many people end up under that umbrella.

And ironically, it makes them quick to reject any attempts to make things better. Why bother attempting solution X when we’re all just going to die anyway? Eat, drink, and be merry!

The thing that bothers me a lot about this is how many people oppose even doing research into geoengineering. It’s like they fear the possibility that a solution will be found, thus disrupting the conclusions of doom that they’ve already come to and apparently found some kind of strange comfort in believing.

There are people literally rooting for human extinction in this very thread.

Whoever said the consequences would be “minimal?” I’m saying they won’t be apocalyptic. It’s not the literal end of the world, as so many people are fretting about. People are deciding not to have children because they think humanity’s going to go extinct in a generation or two.

I’m not saying the world will definitely be a “Mad Max inferno of devastation and death”

Well there you go, then.

By calling it the “coming dystopia” and “a 2.7°C hell” you’re starting this question off with a highly biased direction indeed.

The whole world isn’t going to turn into some kind of Mad Max inferno of devastation and death. Some parts of it will become less habitable, and there may be mass migration as a result, but most of the world is going to still be perfectly livable afterwards. It’s the disruption of shifting everything around that’s going to be the biggest problem.

However, I have now committed a heresy by saying climate change is not the Apocalypse, so this will get downvoted. The answers more in line with the “it’s the end of the world” narrative will be upvoted instead, people will have their fear reaffirmed (for fear leads to anger, and anger leads to dopamine), and ironically this may lead to less useful preparation in the long run that exacerbates the problem.

As if any bike lanes will remain in this scenario.

Your election results suggest otherwise.

Aha, a crime wave! Deploy the National Guard!

You’re welcome. I’m still dreading that someone will respond with a “but what about…” though. This is a debate that haunts me in so many other communities, I want to think I can escape it at least a little while. :)

I got so frustrated at one point that I had an AI make a song about it.

There are downsides to small-town life, though. Some of my views don’t match the ones that are prevalent here, so I either end up getting hammered with downvotes or self-censoring when certain topics of discussion come up. And unlike Reddit it’s not a big and diverse enough place that I can just go find a sub-community that is more tolerant.

But surely if all those people join the Fediverse and see my insightful comments they’ll change their views to align with mine, won’t they?

Well, alright, but I’m not going to argue about any of this.

The Fermi paradox basically says “based on what we think we know about how the universe works, we should be seeing obvious signs of alien intelligence in it. But we don’t, so we’re wrong about something we think we know.” The problem is that we don’t know what we’re wrong about.

It is common in various science fiction and space related subreddits for people to confidently sweep in and declare that obviously the reason that aliens aren’t around is <insert some vague shower thought here>. As if all the thousands of researchers working on these concepts were all just a bunch of idiots who hadn’t thought of whatever they’d thought of.

A common class of these sorts of shower thoughts involve assuming that every single alien species and culture, throughout all of time and space, conform to some particular notion they have of how aliens should think. Some sort of “prime directive” or Nirvana-seeking conscious refusal to go out into the cosmos to colonize new solar systems, or conversely some kind of pessimistic self-destruction that everyone dives into without exception. I try to explain why these sorts of explanations don’t work well, I question their basis for making these assumptions, and I usually get some form of “oh, so you’re saying you know how all aliens are going to think and behave?” Shot back at me. Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what I’m saying.

Another common theme is the “nothing will ever be possible in the future unless we’ve already done it now and have an economically practical example” approach, usually to try to argue that space travel or colonization is impossible. The other day I had someone who ultimately argued that it was impossible because steel would evaporate over time in a vacuum, so building spacecraft that lasted longer than a few centuries couldn’t be done. I pointed out the examples of billion-year-old metallic meteorites and he dismissed them because “meteors don’t need structural stability.”

I try to address these arguments rationally, with math and references to actual research, but end up butting into a position of pure faith. It’s incredibly frustrating. As befits the topic.

No. I get enough of this in the subreddits and communities where it comes up naturally, I’m not going to get into a debate about it here in a thread where the subject is specifically how annoying it is to debate this stuff.

So glad to see another reference to this guy’s work in the wild.

As an amusing side note, the original term of copyright in the first law that established it (the British Copyright Act of 1710) was a flat 14 years, with a mechanism that allowed you to apply for only one extension of an additional 14 years. So most things would be 14 years, and whatever select things were particularly valuable or important could have 28 years. Under Pollock’s analysis this is just about the perfect possible system. So by sheer coincidence this is something that we got right the first time and ever since then we’ve been “correcting” it to be less and less optimal.

I’m not a deep expert on LLMs, but I’ve been following their development and write code that uses them so I can think of two systemic approaches to “solving” the strawberry problem.

One is chain-of-thought reasoning, where the LLM does some preliminary note-taking (essentially talking to itself) before it gives a final answer. I’ve seen it tackle problems like this by saying “okay, how is strawberry spelled?”, listing out the individual letters (presumably because somewhere in its training data was information that let it memorize the spellings of common tokens) and then counting them.

Another is the “agentic” approach, where it might be explicitly provided with functions that allow it to send the problem to specialized program code. Eg, there could be a count_letters(string, letter_to_count) function that it’s able to call. I expect that sort of thing would only be present for an LLM that’s working in a framework where that sort of question is known to be significant, though, and I’m not sure what that might be in the real world. Something helping users fill out forms, perhaps? Or a “language tutor” that’s expected to be able to figure out whatever weird incorrect words a student might type?

There are also LLMs that don’t tokenize and feed the literal string of characters into the neural network, but as far as I’m aware none of the commonly-used ones are like that. They’re just research models for now.

There are so many people who are fundamentally wrong about what the Fermi paradox means, and proceed to present their shower thoughts about “what if everyone just, like, decides not to colonize the universe” as if they were profound or novel insights.

Do you realize you can unsubscribe and even block it from appearing in your feed?

I am envious of people being born today. Barring advances in medicine that are uncertain to come in time, they’re going to see a lot more of the future than I am.

Sure, there might be rough patches in the timeline ahead. There have been rough patches in the timeline behind us, too. I don’t feel sad for people born right before World War I, for example.