The only social media I really use is Lemmy. I have instagram strictly because that’s where my sibling’s meme group chat is and they don’t want to move. I don’t use it for anything else.

Wait are there really not like automated fucking machines connected to the internet?

Like no one has tried making vr porn and integrating it with some kind of mechanism/robotic arm or something?

If something like that hasn’t been made humanity has surprised me and also I think I have an invention or two to design and patent lol

Edit: Looked up “internet connected vibrator” and yeah they definitely exist. Looks like some “Long Distance sex toys” are capable of being operated by/through the internet (imagine seeing a sex toy show up while scanning through local iot devices lol).

So yes, it appears it is possible (though I’d imagine uncommon) for people to use the internet directly to masturbate.

This is kind of how my life felt before I got medicated for ADHD. Not being able to do things even when they’re super easy (or worse when they are things you want to do but you just can’t get yourself to do them for no fucking reason) is called Executive Dysfunction, and it is the ADHD symptom I probably suffer from the most. Good news: meds can help with this.

Now, I still feel unmotivated sometimes even on my meds, and general hopelessness from the meaninglessness of existence is ever present.

However, just the ability to plan and to start tasks without having to spend hours building the motivation is amazing. I just do things when I think about them even when I don’t want to. Like I’ll say, “I have time to put of this work and play video games” and then before I even start playing I decide I might as well do the task first.

I still don’t get pleasure out of completing tasks, but being able to complete and keep track of tasks means that eventually I reach a point where I don’t have any more tasks to do in the moment, and that peace is incredible.

It’s so nice not being anxious all the time about all the tasks I need to do because they’re just done.

Also, meds actually help me sleep soundly and like regularly to the point I don’t really need an alarm. Despite that, they don’t make me feel sleepy during the day. (I should note I also take melatonin before bed so maybe it’s like the combination that leads to perfectly regular sleep idk)

Anyway, if I were you I might look into talking to a psychiatrist to see if you have ADHD.

PS: tip for anyone with ADHD meds, if they give you meds that don’t work for you, don’t be scared to ask for a change. Methylphenidate made me super anxious, killed my appetite, and wore off fast. Adderall doesn’t have any noticeable side effects and works well.

I read that “Prickly muffin” and now I’m debating on whether I should or should not watch Bojack Horseman again

Valid point, though I’m surprised that cyc was used for non-AI purposes since, in my very very limited knowledge of the project, I thought the whole thing was based around the ability to reason and infer from an encyclopedic data set.

Regardless, I suppose the original topic of this discussion is heading towards a prescriptivist vs descriptivist debate:

Should the term Artificial Intelligence have the more literal meaning it held when it first was discussed, like by Turing or in the sci-fi of Isaac Asimov?

OR

Should society’s use of the term in reference to advances in problem solving tech in general or specifically its most prevalent use in reference to any neural network or learning algorithm in general be the definition of Artificial Intelligence?

Should we shift our definition of a term based on how it is used to match popular use regardless of its original intended meaning or should we try to keep the meaning of the phrase specific/direct/literal and fight the natural shift in language?

Personally, I prefer the latter because I think keeping the meaning as close to literal as possible increases the clarity of the words and because the term AI is now thrown about so often these days as a buzzword for clicks or money, typically by people pushing lies about the capabilities or functionality of the systems they’re referring to as AI.

The lumping together of models trained by scientists to solve novel problems and the models that are using the energy of a small country to plagiarize artwork also is not something I view fondly as I’ve seen people assume the two are one in the same despite the fact one has redeeming qualities and the other is mostly bullshit.

However, it seems that many others are fine with or in support of a descriptivist definition where words have the meaning they are used for even if that meaning goes beyond their original intent or definitions.

To each their own I suppose. These preferences are opinions so there really isn’t an objectively right or wrong answer for this debate

The term “artificial intelligence” is supposed to refer to a computer simulating the actions/behavior of a human.

LLMs can mimic human communication and therefore fits the AI definition.

Generative AI for images is a much looser fit but it still fulfills a purpose that was until recently something most or thought only humans could do, so some people think it counts as AI

However some of the earliest AI’s in computer programs were just NPCs in video games, looong before deep learning became a widespread thing.

Enemies in video games (typically referring to the algorithms used for their pathfinding) are AI whether they use neural networks or not.

Deep learning neural networks are predictive mathematic models that can be tuned from data like in linear regression. This, in itself, is not AI.

Transformers are a special structure that can be implemented in a neural network to attenuate certain inputs. (This is how ChatGPT can act like it has object permanence or any sort of memory when it doesn’t) Again, this kind of predictive model is not AI any more than using Simpson’s Rule to calculate a missing coordinate in a dataset would be AI.

Neural networks can be used to mimic human actions, and when they do, that fits the definition. But the techniques and math behind the models is not AI.

The only people who refer to non-AI things as AI are people who don’t know what they’re talking about, or people who are using it as a buzzword for financial gain (in the case of most corporate executives and tech-bros it is both)

I’m fine, everything’s fine…

I’m bored so let’s imagine an example. Enter a truly exotic organism: nuclear power life form. We don’t have anything like this on earth but we can imagine one just the same.

First we know we need a way to draw radioactive elements from whatever soil or rock we’re on. We want to maximize surface area for the transfer of ions so we’ll build tube like structures to absorb nuclear elements and transport them into our reactor organ. We’ll want to minimize the radiation leaks otherwise we’ll die so we’ll need a working fluid system and heat transfer chamber and a system for dissipating that heat and in the process creating chemical energy.

For the chamber we can build special structures to hold the “rods” with structures using fluid pressure to move the control rods (or surfaces) between them. The most optimal solution for waste disposal is to grow the rods from their base and then have specialized cells that travers the rods and wear them down at the ends, collecting material that has spent the most time in the reactor, and then have those cells leaving our body through a specialized opening. A similar process can ensure the walls of the chamber never become unstable due to neutron damage.

The solid portions of these structures will need to be strong but light and be easily removed by chemical reaction. We know this kind of structure is possible because it’s literally how bones work. Maybe there’s a more efficient chemical reaction to use like the production of silicate surfaces but I doubt it.

These rods will be relatively heavy and we want them to orient naturally otherwise we’ll be doing extra work so if we assume gravity exists, we’ll build the reactor vertically. We can then build separate rocky structures to support the chamber that don’t need changing as often.

Lastly we need a method for heat transfer, assuming there is an atmosphere, we could just use fleshy flexible membranes to do this. Assuming we are in a more viscous fluid that allows good heat transfer, we could pump the fluid through us to exchange the heat. Or in the absence of atmosphere we could build a specialized large surface area sheet that can radiate heat into space effectively. Again calcium carbonate works for this purpose but so would some metals or a wide variety of materials if we don’t need to worry about electromagnetic radiation from a star.

Water as the working fluid would be optimal as its incompressibility would give us better options for raising the control rods. Furthermore it’s one of the most common fluids in the entire universe.

We could deal with high pressure easily but low pressure would require a more rigid structure probably with a near spherical shape if we really want to maximize efficiency like life does.

Now the only thing left to deal with is reproduction. This is actually relatively simple if we don’t have an atmosphere or we have one that isn’t dense: build a smaller version of ourself with some starting plutonium, put it in a specialized channel, open the back of the channel to superheated water and let the expansion of steam yeet our child a long distance. That way it won’t compete with us for resources.

Sure likely the egg would need to be built with some odd shape to deal with the impact and to make sure some viable roots made it below the surface but that shouldn’t be too hard.

Anyway this has been a very fun little exercise, but more importantly, I created life that wasn’t at all based around life on earth (the mention of bones was a proof of concept, the idea of solid structures is definitely not just earth specific). It doesn’t need to exist in an earth like environment, and it mostly doesn’t look like life on earth.

There are probably some more organic ways to structure things besides rods, like interlocking spirals, but other than that everything else earth-like is literally just from applied physics. Not just the roots but even like pushing the fluid around would only be efficient if it was done like it is inside us. How will we push our fluid around? Through tubes that undergo peristalsis. That’s not because I think things have to act like humans but because humans are bound by physics and physically, that’s the best way to move large amounts of fluids in a body (assuming you can’t construct an optimized turbine  and compressor of course).

We definitely can never say we know what ALL aliens will look like, but it’s almost guaranteed that if there is life in the universe, some of it will look like the life we have here. And all of it will be designed the way it is because of its environment, an environment whose physics can be understood. We can and possibly already have thought up some life that isn’t on earth but is somewhere else in the universe.

While I agree about this being pretty on par for earth, you are wrong about us having no idea what aliens would look like.

I get that maybe you were using hyperbole but seriously if physics is consistent across the universe, we can make pretty good guesses. Also science fiction is definitely not just based on life on earth and I can provide an example.

First, life according to nasa is any self sustaining chemical system that can undergo Darwinian evolution.

Basically if a thing can make more of itself and those “children” have the chance to be at least slightly different from their parents, it is life.

Well guess what, the universe tends to disorder. There is only one way to be the exact self replicating thing you are. Ergo, given time, you will stop working unless you are able to fight entropy which requires the production of entropy (see the second law of thermodynamics).

Basically all living things MUST take in some form of energy and output it in a more disordered form. Every living thing must eat and every living thing must produce waste.

Now this doesn’t have to be in the form of chemical energy. It should be possible to create an organism that can sustain itself by taking in quanta of high frequency light and emitting more quanta of lower frequency light.

However, that is strictly to stay alive which is only part of the definition of life and not even the real important one. The important aspect of life is that it can reproduce itself and equally important: reproduce itself not always exactly the same.

Building a copy of yourself requires more elements and moving any amount of mass requires applying a force (newtons laws). Now you could simply sit around and let diffusion bring nutrients to you. In which case you either need to be a machine that simply slowly build itself by chance, or you could be a cell with a semipermeable membrane that uses ion channnels to create an electrical potential across said membrane to facillitate your acquisition of those building blocks and outcompeting the former kind of life. Which one is more likely? So which one will become more complex and possibly large enough to be seen as an alien life form and not alien bacteria?

Anyway if you do work via diffusion, you’ll want surface area but you don’t want volume because force over distance is energy, so bigger than necessary means loss of energy, means getting out competed. This forces life which relies on diffusion alone to become more round shaped though it’s not a big loss since that’s how most simple membrane materials want to be anyway.

Now if you eat something, you need a way to turn that food into work you need done. This means you need to have (or parasitize) some chemical machinery that takes food and does something useful. If you need to replicate yourself then you also need a machine or machines that create more of each part of you. In most cases specialization of machines reduces waste, so a living thing will produce little units that each do specific tasks rather than a single protein that does everything because that’d would require more order and thus more energy. Instead the cell becomes a little factory that does the same stuff in a way that doesn’t require perfect rigid order because that’d be a waste.

Ta da, we have earth like life. If it’s beneficial for these units to work together, they will. Maybe they’ll merge into a single cell like thing like slime mold. Maybe one will use the other like a mitochondria. Maybe they’ll stay separate but signal each other as a colony. Maybe multiple colonies will combine to form something like a man o war jelly fish. Maybe a cell will be able to differentiate itself later allowing it to form a more complex multicellular organism with different systems specializing for specific tasks.

This is where structure becomes a diverse thing, but see we already know what a living thing needs and these structures will be built to facilitate those. You need a system for acquiring food and possibly a separate one for removing waste. And you need a system for reproduction.

All life needs this and we’re familiar with it because that’s how life on earth works.

Now depending on what energy you eat, things get a lot more diverse but they follow from physics so we can predict them.

You eat light from a directional source? Then you want broad structures that face that source.

You need nutrients from diffusion? Then you want a network of tubular shapes to maximize surface area and minimize volume.

Need to trap prey? Build a net, build a harpoon gun, grow prehensile limbs and claws to grab them. Trap them with slippery walls or sticky substances. Immobilize them with venom or vapor and then enclose them for digestion. Grow legs or other methods of propulsion and get after them. Grow fangs to stop them from getting way.

All of those things are things life on earth uses. Because they’re the options that work and guess what: they will work anywhere else in the universe.

Are your oceans made of ammonia? Maybe kerosene? Who cares. If there are life forms in it that are small, filter feeding will be the optimal strategy for life. If there are big ones then direct predation with teeth will be efficient.

Need to move through a fluid? Fins will be the best option. Need to move through a really viscous fluid? Spiral propulsion systems like flagellum with be the way to go. Have to move along the ground and can’t propel yourself by the means above? Well you’ll develop a foot of some kind to use friction to move.

If physics is at all consistent across the universe, there will be similarities between life across its entirety because that’s what life is. Life is optimizing physics, optimizing energy/resource use to reproduce more life. Sure maybe there are weird situations we don’t have here on earth so we don’t have life adapted to that but that’s the entire idea behind science fiction.

Amazing game. I have a bit of a rant to go on about certain a character’s actions.

Y’know, ch-choose a movie or… Or we can watch some interdimensional cable if you want.

We now return to “Nintendo 69.”

Nintendo, oh, what are you doing to me? Oh, Nintendo, oh, Nin…

Or we can watch whatever, y’know.

This has stirred deep, long forgotten memories in me

“Scary door” from Futurama

It’s a play on the twilight zone and it’s quite something.

“A casino where I’m always winning? This must be heaven!” “A casino where I always win… I must actually be… IN HELL!”

“No Mr. smith. You’re not in heaven or hell. You’re on an airplane!”

“Help! There’s a gremlin destroying the plane! You’ve gotta believe me!”

“Why should I believe you?! You’re Hitler!”

For those interested: The Scary Door