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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • After the SORA AI reveal today I’m starting to see that luddites have a point. I don’t think we’ll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I’ve seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I’ve seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.

    But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don’t even know how to use a phone. I don’t see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.


  • “we all saw this coming in 2016 with Hillary Clinton but y’all let that go ahead and it didn’t work so we’re in this mess now. Biden barely worked in 2020 and he’s a liability for 2024. it feels like y’all don’t even care and would rather trump in any any sort of progressive candidate. notice how the republicans never try this strategy and still win even when the fundamentals run against them and only get worse. candidate voters like => turnout is a simple formula. taking your voter base’s votes for granted because of flawed game theory and trying to reach for people who aren’t gonna switch doesn’t work well. and the voters you’re losing aren’t the ones who are politically engaged enough to argue politics on the internet. they’re the ones who don’t bother showing up to vote unless they see someone they like because otherwise what’s the point? they think. and they’re not even wrong to feel that way. give people something to vote for and they’ll vote. shame them like this and they don’t.”

    Oh yeah dude I did that, I voted for Clinton in the primaries over Bernie. I chose Biden because I wanted to make concession to the far right and not because the other option was literally Donald Trump. 🙄 stop projecting your beliefs about Biden voters onto me.


  • I feel like that fatalistic attitude is too commonplace. That it’s inevitable that fascist takeover, although Biden is not my favorite in any way, shape, or form, I would still have anything other than a fascist takeover with popular support. I feel like that kind of defeatism only sets us up for failure like in the Francoist revolution. Spain’s left was so bitter that they really couldn’t join together when the shit hit the fan.

    Chin up man, of course we will join on the barricades if that happens. Don’t let them live in your mind so much, let them “minecraft” in your mind.







  • Yeah I’ve done a tiny bit of AI stuff for what I do (biology) and I think it’s very sus they can build such a strong model out of data which costs lots of money. The reason the algos in my field of biology are so strong is because the NCBI has the genomes of everything that’s be sequenced FOR FREE, because obviously you don’t want people patenting genomes and it should all be free for science, etc.

    Which begs the question how the a start up that started out as a non-profit get that much user data and keep costs low? I know you can buy user data and I’m not sure how much it is to buy a bunch of google docs from a data broker, but if you buy from hackers who just data breached or used some illegal crawler you can probably cut that to prices a nonprofit could afford.








  • There are a few great Chinese single player games out there like amazing cultivation simulator, but they are all indie games. The Chinese government restricted how Steam works in China so I have no idea how indie Chinese games are getting out there, if at all.
    https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-china-launch/
    I played a little Genshin after it first released but was put off by the underage characters being portrayed sexually. The sad fact of the matter is that its a great game made with passion, and many Chinese games have a “”“lolicon”“” issue. I tried the game Mahjong soul after getting into Mahjong from Final Fantasy, and it has the same issue.
    And when I say “”“lolicon”“, I mean kids as young as 11-13, maybe even younger. it’s disgusting. Otakus seems to run the industry there as far as I can tell, or at least what makes it to the west because to know real stuff about Chinese culture you have to be at least kinda a weeb for Chinese stuff. I got into Xianxia from my love of manga which lead to Manhua. The Xianxia scene has a lot of problems but “”“lolicon””" hasn’t been one of them.
    TL;DR The chinese video game industry is run by otakus, at least for whats made it into the west. The worst part is that HoYoVerse WAS an indie developer whose motto was “by otakus, for otakus” they aren’t hiding what they are about, but unfortunately have become #1 for pandering to the lowest possible denominator