AnIndefiniteArticle

Thank you.

Ok, but what if we leave the minerals in the ground and preserve the world’s most fertile and productive agricultural land instead of poisoning it with mining runoff?

https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complicated-legacy-of-rare-earth-mining/

https://earth.org/rare-earth-mining-has-devastated-chinas-environment/

https://climatecosmos.com/climate-science/the-impact-of-rare-earth-mining-on-the-environment/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1557/s43577-022-00286-6

Chernobyl was bad enough… It’s like they want humanity to starve.

Well, if you wake up at midnight with five hours of sleep in you, then you’ve got a few hours to yourself before sneaking in the last three before the day starts.

deleted by creator

https://archive.md/AY2qI

Well, in cases like that you might want a lock. Or a straightjacket.

I’m not saying anything has to be built or installed, just rigged/signposted in physical reality and negotiated as social reality

I’ve seen enough scifi to know that (ant)arctic research stations ought to have a quarantine area so that ill crewmembers can be compassionately kept alive separated from those they might harm while still having access to life support in a hostile environment.

Ontario has already ripped up a $100-million deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring Starlink’s high-speed internet to rural and northern communities and remote First Nations.

Article claims it’s already happened!

Rocket League is 100% sport.

It’s a flash game. Your browser downloaded it from here and played it in ruffle.

Word to the media: don’t bother us with this shit until they have a working idea on how to monitor and regulate the shit so we can all have flying cars and not just one dude’s stupid prototype. The hard thing isn’t making a car that can fly. That shit is relatively easy. The hard part is figuring out how air traffic would work if everyone was up there. It’s already a PITA and there aren’t a helluva lot of planes compared to cars.

If they’re all automated and coordinating, NASA has put a lot of effort into researching how to coordinate a swarm of airborne agents with diverse goals.. I’d imagine that these prototypes have gotten further development and a reality-collision as drone systems have been deployed and evolving in the Ukrainian theatre. The tech for this might actually finally be ready.

steam locomotive

rolling down the track

Rapists being targeted first often occupy prominent cultural/economic positions and replacing them all in a big wave is expensive and and inefficient and creates chaos.

Not to mention that the chilling and balkanization of social networks in the wake of “drama” can lead to repeated crises of their own.

A metoo movement has good intentions by trying to get us to address our highly problematic sexual relations. It can be rather sexist (refuses to grapple with problematic women), and it often leaves behind a cratered and broken social environment that is a breeding ground for misinformation, bigotry, abuse, ostracism, and violence.

A metoo movement responds to our pervasive and severely problematic sexual norms by elevating them to a crisis level. The crisis causes action to take place, which is seen to some as a relief because finally something is being done! But this crisis mentality is punitive, destructive, and only serves to exacerbate the root causes of sexual misconduct.

So, yeah. A metoo movement is absolutely a crisis caused by poor sexual norms bubbling up into a problem with serious impacts and wide reach across a society.

Try asking one to write a sentence that ends with the letter “r”, or a poem that rhymes.

They know words as black boxen with weights attached for how likely they are to appear in certain contexts. Prediction happens by comparing the chain of these boxes leading up to the current cursor and using weights and statistics to fill in the next box.

They don’t understand that those words are made of letters unless they have been programmed to break each word down into its component letters/syllables. None of them have been programmed to do this because that increases the already astronomical compute and training costs.

About a decade ago I played with an LLM whose markov chain did predictions based on what letter came next instead of what word came next (pretty easy modification of the base code). It was surprisingly comparably good at putting sentences and grammar together when working at the letter-scale. It also was horribly less efficient to train (which is saying something in comparison to word-level prediction LLMs) because it needs to consider many more units (letters vs words) leading up to the current one to maintain the same coherence. If the markov chain was looking at the past 10 words, a word-level prediction has 10 boxes to factor into its calculations and trainings. If those words have an average of 5 letters, then letter-level prediction needs to consider at least 50 boxes to maintain the same awareness of context within a sentence/paragraph. This is a five-fold increase in memory footprint, and an even greater increase in compute time (since most operations are at least of linear order and sometimes more).

That efficiency hit would allow for LLMs to understand sub-word concepts like alphabetization, rhyming, root words, etc. The expense and energy requirements aren’t worth this modest expansion of understanding.

Adding a General Purpose Transformer just adds some plasticity to those weights and statistics beyond the markov chain example I use above.

I think you mean Great and Powerful!

And the follow-up act to that bookworm.

It’s preparation.

Now that human craft have finally made it back to the moon for the first time in decades, human beings and development are set to follow.

I disagree with this point.

I used the internet extensively as a minor to socialize and find friends and to be exposed to viewpoints different from those of my peers. If I only had my peers to socialize with, things would have been much worse off for me. I found kind and supportive influences as a minor that kept me away from the hate/conservatism/fascism that many of my classmates descended into. I learned about the world and gained skills that made me a more well-rounded person. I even met up in person with thousands of strangers and had a grand time.

I see the gatekeeping of minors from internet spaces and worry about the impact that would have had on me and my development as a young person. If I hadn’t been welcomed as a minor online, I would not have been welcomed anywhere.

That said, I stayed the hell away from corporate spyware like facebook and twitter that only serve to reinforce existing problematic systems, expose people to the toxic IRL social environments that they may otherwise be trying to escape, and amplify the kind of hatred and bigotry that I personally was evading.

I miss the old internet where kids were safe. I don’t think that the solution is to ban kids; the solution is to ban platforms and profiteering incentive structures that create unsafe environments. The kids are the canaries in a coal mine. If the canary isn’t doing well, you don’t just ban it and keep digging: you get the hell out and find somewhere else to be.