• 18 Posts
  • 267 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure what the point of this is.

    I didn’t know who this specific woman is, but it doesn’t sound like any of this is a secret. For instance, it is public knowledge that Qatar has provided financial aid to Hamas, and serves as a go-between for Israel and the US. Netanyanu famously defended his practice of facilitating these cash transfers.

    Also, this all seems sort of secondary when Israel – the US’s close ally – is beginning an extermination campaign in northern Gaza. It’s hard to really discuss any other issue in the midst of what has become a macabre genocide in full view of the international community.



  • I think his intense commitment to getting Trump elected makes more sense when you consider this article.

    His enormous wealth is largely stored in the form of Tesla stock, and that stock has been valued based on the belief that it isn’t a car company, it’s a robotaxi service currently selling the hardware to finance the software development. The value – and his wealth – can persist indefinitely as long as investors continue to accept that premise, no matter how long delayed. But if something tangibly undermines that premise, Musk could conceivably lose the majority of his wealth overnight.

    The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency is probably the greatest threat to his wealth. He doesn’t worry about competitors or protestors or Twitter users or advertisers. They’re all just petty nuisances. But the federal regulator over roads… that is his proverbial killer snail. And I think fully capturing the entire federal regulatory state is his strategy to permanently confine that snail.

    More than anything else, I think that’s what is motivating his radical embrace of fascism.






  • This is so exciting. I worked in a lab where we were trying to do this, and so I was very aware what a gold rush we were in. I’m so glad to see that it’s actually happening.

    This is truly a watershed moment in science. This is going to mark a major turning point in cellular medicine from theory to commonplace care. Eventually, this will end the pharma industry’s insulin cash cow.

    But it’s even bigger than that. Because once we can engineer cells that produce a natural product, the next step is to engineer cells that produce synthetic medicines. Antidepressants, birth control, hormones, weight loss drugs, boner pills… The frontier is huge, lucrative, financially disruptive for pharma companies and life changing for patients. This is a big moment in history, and we all need to be fighting harder than ever to end for-profit healthcare. Otherwise we’re going to end up with subscription licenses to our own bodies.




  • Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t familiar with this channel, not I’m liking it.

    I just read that this guy was part of Nebula and was forced out. It’s remarkable that he’s forced out for speaking openly and defending his beliefs when Isaac Arthur is tolerated despite having much more onerous politics but having them in secret. Smh.


  • Andy@slrpnk.netOPtoMemes@lemmy.mlMastermind
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    2 months ago

    Amen. It drives me fuckin’ nuts anytime – in business as well as in sci-fi and general discussion – when people envision a society made perfect because it’s run by a genius computer.

    For pretty much every challenge society faces, the major obstacle is not that we’re unsure what to do or lack the intelligence to solve. We already have all the solutions, it’s just that our decision making systems are completely disinterested in employing any of the solutions that we already have.

    It’s like, if you could get everyone to agree to listen to a computer, why not just skip the computer and get everyone to agree to listen to a combination of popular will and expert advice? Popular will and expert advice are like the supercomputer that runs society that we already have.




  • This article doesn’t really answer most of my questions.

    What subjects does the AI cover? Do they do all their learning independently? Does AI compose the entire lesson plan? What is the software platform? Who developed it? Is this just an LLM or is there more to it? How are students assessed? How long has the school been around, and what is their reputation? What is the fundamental goal of their approach?

    Overall, this sounds quite dumb. Just incredibly and transparently stupid. Like, if they insisted that all learning would be done on the blockchain. I’m very open minded, but I don’t understand what the student’s experience will be. Maybe they’ll learn in the same way one could learn by browsing Wikipedia for 7 hours a day. But will they enjoy it? Will it help them find career fulfillment, or build confidence or learn social skills? It just sounds so much like that Willie Wonka experience scam but applied to an expensive private school instead of a pop-up attraction.


  • I feel like this is a pretty crass joke to make.

    A good friend of mine found a body a few months ago. It’s a pretty shitty experience. And it’s actually a lot like what OP describes. A sense of foreboding and suspicion combined with a conviction that these thoughts are foolish. And an uncertainty whether to check or to alert someone or to just try to forget it.

    Op, I’d report it and ask them to please follow up with you and let you know. It’s probably nothing, and you’ll feel better once you know it was nothing, and that you did the responsible thing in having it dealt with.







  • I will also add that I think in the long run, as we try to figure out how to differentiate between humans and machines, the only real reliably solution I see is to focus on elevating the individual. Having people with long histories validate their reality by living and documenting it.

    I don’t upvote something that I’d be ashamed for someone to see I upvote. I might make an exception for pornographic content, but even with that, if it’s pseudononymous in that it’s not attached to my personal public life, I don’t mind if someone can trace through and see what a specific account I use for those purposes has liked and disliked.