And nooticing is nooice

And that’s the punchline

The art is awful and the jokes are either literal nonsense or annoyingly simple. Same kinda stuff being said in this thread. Same reasons anyone dislikes a comic. Just doesn’t resonate. I can’t say why people decide some stupid shit works for them and other stupid shit doesn’t.

I’m not even sure this counts as drama. These people are addicted to wallowing in negativity. Gives me r/questionablecontent vibes, a subreddit about a webcomic where people purport to hate it but continue reading it every day just so they can get mad about it.

Like, I strongly dislike the Far Side, but despite how frequently it gets upvoted I don’t go into every comment section to talk about why. I just blocked the sub and scroll past it when it shows up in other subs. The behavior in these threads is pathetic.

AI is a flawless technology and they’ll have fixed it by next month for sure this time

They also care about ruining trans people’s lives in any way possible. I’m sure there are plenty of transphobes who simply haven’t thought the bathroom thing through, but don’t forget the other reason they’d be happy to put passing trans men in women’s bathrooms: it forces them into an impossible decision. When an angry mob drags a trans man out of the women’s toilet, you think they’re going to listen to protestations of being AFAB? If anything, that’d just rile them up further. So a when someone is faced with the decision of choosing either the room they’re least likely to be noticed in, or the one the law technically assigned to them, they may instead choose to stay home. They may even start considering detransitioning. This is a feature, not a bug.

I recently read a neat little book called “Rethinking Consciousness” by SA Graziano. It has nothing to do with AI, but is an attempt to describe the way our myriad neural systems come together to produce our experience, how that might differ between animals with various types of brains, and how our experience might change if some systems aren’t present. It sounds obvious, but the simpler the brain, the simpler the experience. For example, organisms like frogs probably don’t experience fear. Both frogs and humans have a set of survival instincts that help us detect movement, classify it as either threat or food or whatever, and immediately respond, but the emotional part of your brain that makes your stomach plummet just doesn’t exist in them.

Humans automatically respond to a perceived threat in the same way a frog does–in fact, according to the book, the structures in our brains that dictate our initial actions in those instinctive moments are remarkably similar. You know how your eyes will automatically shift to follow a movement you see in the corner of your vision? A frog responds in much the same way. It’s not something you have to think about–often your eye will have darted over to the point of interest even before you realize you’ve noticed something. But your experience of that reaction is also much richer than it is possible for a frog’s to be, because we have far more layers of systems that all interact to produce what we call consciousness. We have a much deeper level of thought that goes into deciding whether that movement was actually important to us.

It’s possible for us to continue to live even if we lose some parts of the brain–our personalities will change, our memory may get worse, or we may even lose things like our internal monologue, but we still manage to persist as conscious beings until our brains lose a large number of the overlying systems, or some very critical systems. Like the one that regulates breathing–though even that single function is somewhat shared between multiple systems, allowing you to breathe manually (have fun with that).

All that to say the things we’re currently calling AI just don’t have that complexity. At best, these generative models could fill out a fraction of the layers that would be useful for a conscious mind. We have developed very powerful language processing systems, at least in terms of averaging out a vast quantity of data. Very powerful image processing. Audio processing. What we don’t have–what, near as I can tell, we haven’t made any meaningful progress on at all–is a system to coalesce all these processing systems into a whole. These systems always rely on a human to tell them what to process, for how long, and ultimately to check whether the result of a process is reasonable. Being able to process all of those types of input simultaneously, choosing which ones to focus on in the moment, and continuously choosing an appropriate response? Barely even a pipe dream. And even all of that would be distinct from a system to form anything like conscious thought.

Right now, when marketing departments say “AI,” what they’re describing is like that automatic response to movement. Movement detected, eye focuses. Input goes in, output comes out. It’s one small piece of the whole that’s required when science fiction writers say “AI.”

TL;DR no, the current generative model race is just tech stock market hype. The absolute best it can hope for is to reproduce a small piece of the conscious mind. It might be able to approximate the processing we’re capable of more quickly, but at a massively inflated energy expenditure, not to mention the research costs. And in the end it still needs a human double checking its work. We will need to develop a vast number of other increasingly complex systems before we even begin to approach a true AI.

I’m probably just old but it’s always faster to type :) than it is to find the 🙂, same goes for every emoji really.

Also they convey slightly different emotions

You’re responding to a Nazi. Reread their comment, they’re saying all the people being illegally arrested are rapists and murderers

it literally happened to me but ok

I have a feeling that AI will be cancelled pretty quick.

I thought so too, but ChatGPT was released more than 2 years ago and people still seem to give its “opinion” weight…

I did a quick install of windows (last year I think?) and it sorted everything into a onedrive folder. documents, pictures, videos, downloads, all that stuff, looked normal from the file explorer, but was sneakily placed into a onedrive folder. it went something like c:/users/me/onedrive/. didn’t realize what it had done until like 2 days later and it gave me some popup about not being able to upload. i don’t even have a onedrive account; it just decided that was how it should be done. no idea what, if anything, it actually uploaded.

now if i have to install windows i have a script from privacy.sexy i run before doing anything else. havent had that happen again yet. still, probably best to assume anything on a windows machine is not private.

I’m just surprised it seems to actually be in c/users instead of a OneDrive folder

It definitely depends. I was at one of the protests on the 17th and there were several of us wearing gear and open carrying.

Make sure you microwave the can first

Doesn’t even have to be your instance, just whatever instance the community is on.

It’s not fascist to oppose intolerance. You are attacking people’s core identities; their right to exist. It’s not an attack on you when people defend themselves from you. We’re not discussing our favorite movies here. Some other examples of harmful lies:

“People with dark skin are dumb”

“Women are too emotional to make their own decisions”

“Poor people don’t deserve clean air, water and food”

“Being queer is a mental disorder”

“Many children grow out of gender identity disorder once they reach a certain age” (seriously, this is totally made up. Less than 5% of people do this and many of those only detransition because of the hate they encounter)

Climate change is hotly contested too. That doesn’t mean the people contesting it have any valid points. People who are actually invested in evidence-based research, not those trying to cobble together post-hoc justification for their fear, have a general consensus that giving children a basic understanding of what is and isn’t sexually appropriate makes them much safer. And if a child asks whether it’s okay to like either gender, it’s easy to simply answer “yes.”

When that opinion is deeply harmful, is directly contrary to all scientific evidence, results in actual groomers (not trans people) being able to take advantage of ignorance, and is generally used by bigots as a wedge to repress sexual education well beyond teen years–yeah this is the response you get

Just to be pedantic, the “let alone” turn of phrase is meant to imply that the second thing has a higher standard. So in this case it should be corrected to “this wouldn’t hold up in a Victorian age court, let alone a modern one.”

I think it’s possible to pasteurize eggs

For sure it’s possible. Like you said, they do it for eggnog. I used to work for an ice cream company and we’d do it by thoroughly whisking them and then slooooowly stirring them into a hot mix of cream and sugar and whatnot. Not totally sure how you’d do it for this but I’m sure there’s a way; maybe if you’re getting the butter hot you could use that? But also not sure what benefit eggs would impart here. Maybe an extremely subtle flavor but as far as I can tell their purpose in cookies is their structure, which isn’t all that relevant for an edible dough.

Browning the butter is an interesting idea, I might try that. I worry it could reduce the moisture content though; the reason I add extra is to make up for the lack of moisture from eggs and there’s already so much, I wouldn’t want to add even more butter or oil lol. Maybe I could straight up add water but then I usually freeze it and idk if that would be a problem long term