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Cake day: November 8th, 2022

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  • Really not the right take to say “we lost the Election because of Muslims not voting for Kamala”.

    • It was not just Muslims who did not turn out to vote. It was a large list of different demographics. Some demographics were explicitly shown to having turned out more in order to vote for trump. Of any demographic, Muslims and Arabs were the groups who had probably the best reasons not to vote (islamophobia on both sides and our nation actively propagating a genocide of Arabs regardless of the political party in power)
    • While we’re focusing on the demographics which did or didn’t show, it’s still a massive issue that the majority of Americans don’t vote, period.
    • focusing on this failure as a point of anger and choosing only to blame a group you have no control over has zero value. You either need to either put your eyes forward to prepare for what comes next, or analyze what you could have done better in order to improve your own actions for next time. If there is ever a time for stoicism, it is now, right before the oncoming crisis.

  • That is why state government elections are so important right now.

    • States all need a representative voting system implemented. Ranked Choice, STAR, it doesn’t matter, just get something that’s not a single ballot practice.
    • Each state also needs it’s electoral college distributed to top candidates proportionally, by either direct vote count or by counties won. This at least somewhat neutralizes the effects of gerrymandering.

    Better systems can come later, this should be a top priority for going forward. As it stands the American public doesn’t stand a chance at being represented and that needs to change first before other fixes can actually come about.


  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAm I insane?
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    17 days ago

    Eh, if you have the money, it’s probably fine.

    My current weird things:

    • Switched from my normal time zone to UTC on all my clocks.
    • Chose to study Esperanto instead of a more practical language because of its past of hopefulness
    • Plan on switching to a 13-month calendar in the future (is going to require modifying the opensource calendar I use to allow the change)
    • Switched to barefoot shoes not for health but the diminished cost in materials.
    • changed my keyboard to a dactyl manuform for the hell of it.
    • changed my keyboard scheme to Dvorak now.
    • changed my videogame control scheme from wasd to dcxf to accommodate the keyboard (in Dvorak that’s exku).

    We’re all alittle eccentric. Some of us more than others.








  • Alright, I see what you’re saying now. We’re on the same page.

    As an additional thing regarding AGI, I think it should be noted that ‘human-level’ and ‘human-like’ are importantly distinct when talking about this topic.

    In reality, if an AGI is ever created, it will most likely not be human-like at all. Humans think the way we do out of an evolutionary conditioning for survival, a history an AGI will not be coming from. One example given by Robert Miles is a staple making machine becoming an ASI, where it essentially would exist solely to make as many staples as it could with its hyperintelligence.

    We mean to say that this AGI is a ‘human-level’ intelligence in that it can learn to utilize abstractions and tools, be able to function in a large variety of environments without intervention or training, and be able to learn in a realtime fashion.

    Obviously, these criteria for any AI shows just how far away we are from achieving anything right now.these concepts are very vague and the arguments for each one’s impossibility or inevitability are equally vague and philosophical. It’s still mostly just stuffy academics arguing with each other.

    One statement I agree with, though, comes from the AI safety collective: We don’t know what we’re doing, and we should really sort that out. If any of this is actually possible and we accidentally make an AGI/ASI before having any failsafes or contingencies, it could be very bad.


  • I am not bait-and-switching here. The switchers were the business-minded grifters which made the term synonymous with LLMs and eventually destroyed its meaning completely.

    The definition I gave is from the most popular and widely used CS textbook on AI and has been the meaning used in the field since the early 90s. It’s why videogame NPCs are always called AI, because they fit the conventional CS definition, and were one of the major things it was about the most.

    As for your ‘1’, AI is a wide-but-very-specialized field and pertains from everything from robots to text autocomplete. If you want the most out of it, you need to get down into the nitty gritty and really research the field.

    On a Seperate note, while AI safety, AGI, and the risk of the intelligence explosion are somewhat related to computer science’s pursuit of AI systems, they are much more philosophical currently, and adhere to much vaguer definitions of AI, Such as Alan Turing’s.


  • IIRC, within computer science, which is the field most heavily driving AI design and research forward, an ‘intelligent agent’ is essentially defined as any ‘agent’ which takes external stimulai from a collection of sensors in some form of environment, processes that stimulai in a dynamic fashion (one of the criteria IIRC is a branching decision tree based on the stimulai), and then applies that processing to a collection of affectors in the environment.

    Yes, this definition is an extremely low bar and includes a massive amount of code, software and scripts. It also includes basic natural intelligences such as worms, ants, amoeba, and even viruses. One example of mechanical AI are some of Theo Jansen’s StrandBeasts



  • This convo has gone on for centuries at this point. The Brain in the Jar, the teleportation conundrum, Thesius’ ship, it’s all already been covered over and over. people like you still keep crawling out of the woodwork thinking you know better than every philosopher that already waxed over this problem ad nauseum.

    Your ‘continuous self’ is just as worthless as a concept. The idea that your ‘sense of being the same person’ is being held together by being apart of your plumbing just as much of an illusion. It’s worthless.

    To elaborate, you are not the brain. You are the observer, the thing which exists as a byproduct of the brain’s processes, perhaps even a process yourself within. There’s also plenty of times when you will lose time other than sleep, like concussions, getting blackout drunk, panic attacks, and after those times you have no memory of making decisions or acting in your own accord, but you were. You, the observer, were absent while the brain kept working. So where were you?

    You act as though you’re sure you are still the same observer as the one who went to bed. That is completely unsubstantiated. You may have just been born into your body when you awoke today, and will only have until your body falls back asleep again before you cease to exist, replaced by another process that thinks itself is you, another observer.

    And if ‘you’ one day woke up in a digital world, like our own, it’s you’d be none the wiser, because your self is simply a collection of processes and memories. It’s arbitrary. It’s all dust. There’s not some special ‘continuity’ that keeps you alive somehow.