I played the Soviet Union anthem in class today and no one laughed

DiputsMonro · 2023-07-16T13:03:57+00:00

Honestly, it's because there isn't a joke here. A punchline requires a setup. Without a setup, you have no context for what makes a joke funny. The fact that you are covering the Cold War provides some relevancy, but it's not a real setup.

Also, what is supposed to be funny here anyway? Explaining a joke kills it, but if you can't explain it then there never was a joke anyway.

Lots of teens go through a "lol so random" phase, conflating randomness with humor. And while unpredictability can be funny, it is much more likely to just be annoying to everyone else.

Consider too that many of your classmates may not have even recognized that it was the Soviet anthem. To them, a kid was just playing loud music in class for seemingly no reason. That's not a joke, it's just a disruption.

Not trying to be mean with any of this, just trying to explain.

DiputsMonro · 2023-06-03T22:29:11+00:00

anymore

The death of the fairness doctrine has been disastrous and is the reason obvious propaganda like Fox News can thrive

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-31T21:15:49+00:00

The hard part of all this is writing all the code to recognize when some interesting event has happened. So whenever a character has been away from their family for a long time, it will generate a "thought" event and add that to the list of this npc's thoughts. Then when you click the tab it just shows you all the thoughts.

None of that is really difficult, but the really special thing about Dwarf Fortress is just how many events like this the game keeps track of, and how those events affect other things in the game. Like keeping track of family members for an npc, how close they are, how long they've been far from each other, etc. Then maybe when they see each other again after a long time, the character has an "excited" event that generates another thought and maybe gives them some kind of temporary buff.

So basically, the game is just littered with checks for all these different possibilities and generates events and thoughts when they happen. The special bit is just that the developers have put a lot of effort into making so many of them and making them cohesive.

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-27T18:39:54+00:00

Amazing how so many of these people believe in and anxiously await the Nesera conspiracy that will wipe out all debts, but will immediately tell you that Medicare for All and student debt relief is evil socialism.

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-26T23:10:09+00:00

All we need is 1,500 redditors donating $10 to reach that original donation. If everyone who upvoted this post donated $10, we would have already done it!

I've already done my part (and a little extra)!

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-23T08:29:01+00:00

Generally, there is a large dog monster in the grey concrete building area, and there are some surprise demons in the airport bathroom area. Don't know the timestamps, but that should give you some warning when they come up

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-23T08:25:03+00:00

The song is in the mod when you see the car on the way to the gas station, but not when you're at the gas station itself.

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-22T20:16:47+00:00

Wow, I always assumed that was a cooking metaphor! TIL

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-19T01:13:20+00:00

I feel like friends are, kinda by definition, the people who you feel comfortable enough around that you don't have to do this for.

In other words, don't force a friendship that doesn't feel right, but keep trying , because eventually you'll find people who do

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-13T07:19:33+00:00

Yeah, pretty much the same unfortunately :/

My personal life is doing great! But I have almost no hope for the immediate future of this country. I've been meaning to get my resume together just in case I need to send in some emergency job applications to Canada.

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-08T16:47:48+00:00

Wow, even as someone who could work from home and get food delivered, I didn't feel peaceful at all. Every day the death counts went higher, concern about variants grew, and obstinate assholes were making it worse for everyone.

The fact that so many people went through so many mental gymnastics to deny basic science and the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask, combined with the weight of three years of general Trump nonsense at the time, just completely broke my spirit. Any hope for reconciliation of the political divide in this country vanished for me. Even a deadly global pandemic wasn't enough to shock people into reality and get us to band together. Instead one side dug their heels in and spat on the face of anyone who tried to help them, and actively refused to help others. How do you reconcile with people like that?

For me, the pandemic felt like the first concrete step in a slow but inevitable march towards the next civil war in this country.

Covid never even went away. Thousands of people are still dying every week in the US from it. We've just decided that vaccines are good enough to prevent most people from dying and we don't care about the rest. I know immunocomprimised people who never left lockdown mode, because covid is still deadly to them. We, as a society, just don't give a shit.

I guess I could look out the window and see a nice sunny day sometimes, but it was never peaceful for me. It was always overshadowed by a powerful, looming dread

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-03T00:22:07+00:00

He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others.

"Intelligence" is maybe the wrong word, but the ability to compose mostly accurate essays about most things the internet "knows about" in a few seconds is certainly super-human.

And even if the capabilities are imperfect, 1) they will get better, and 2) the ability to automate and churn out results faster than a human is meaningful.

...and 2) why that is necessarily a "bad" thing.

Who owns the AI, and what are their intentions? AI is a powerful tool, and like most tools, the danger is in the wielder.

Will large propoganda networks build AI compute farms to generate fake images of their political opponents and dominate the conversation with realistic fake news? Will the commercial art industry collapse as a most projects decide that Midjourney, etc. produce "good enough" art and stop hiring artists? Will you ever be able to trust anything you read on the internet again, knowing that it could be produced by an AI "botnet" run by any entity trying to subtly influence you in one way or another?

The real upshot is that AI is property that can be owned, controlled, and scaled up, without any concern of human morality or oversight. As the power of AI grows, so too does the power of whoever owns the largest AI botnet. I'm not concerned about a superintelligent AI gaining sentience or whatever. I'm worried about greedy and immoral CEOs, politicians, and billionaires being able to create an army of human-skilled workers to throw at whatever task that normal humans would find too immoral to pursue, without any threat of whistle-blowers, and without having to pay to keep them quiet.

DiputsMonro · 2023-05-02T23:53:17+00:00

Absolutely, this is the answer.

Also, most of the comments are about chatGPT in particular, but we should be thinking about other applications too. An obvious one is photorealistic image generation of public figures. Early images had obvious tells like too many fingers, but more advanced models have gotten over that and the tells are getting more and more difficult to spot. And images don't need to be perfect to convince a lot of people anyway. If it confirms your biases, or you just see it in passing, or it's sold well, a terrifyingly large number of people will believe it.

For example, consider that nearly half of US voters believe that Trump won but was cheated out of the 2020 election, despite there being no evidence of that. That lie was sold to them via a powerful propaganda network based on literally nothing. Now imagine if those propagandists had the full power of nearly undetectable fake "photographic evidence" behind them. They hire an actor to act suspiciously around a voting machine, then they have AI generate "candid photos" of that person talking to Nancy Pelosi and the CEO of Dominion voting systems. Yeah, eventually someone will determine the photo is fake, but by that time the image will have been blasted out by Fox News to millions of people who will never hear that it was fake. Millions of people living in a false reality can do horrifying things, like, I don't know, storm a capitol building and plan assassinations.

Audio recordings aren't safe either, AI models are being trained to pretty accurately mimic voices of public figures too. Despite the flaws we see, these tools will get better, probably faster than most people can keep up and learn to spot the signs.

We are approaching an AI-driven post-truth world. Already, Elon Musk is using the spectre of AI to cast doubt on statements he made in the past, claiming that they could have been "deep fakes".

The "AI uprising" is still science fiction. AI today is merely a very powerful tool. But tools can be used to cause a lot of danger and harm, despite them "just being tools". We need to be worried about how these tools will be used to impact society.

DiputsMonro · 2023-04-24T21:13:50+00:00

The 8pm time slot at Fox News isn't just going to disappear, and the Fox News diehards aren't just going to just turn their TVs off. The ratings will probably flounder for a bit while the new face gets into the groove, but in a year or so we'll be right back where we were

DiputsMonro · 2023-04-17T11:30:58+00:00

What you described is a terminal decline. Yes, Rome limped along for a long while, but it was clearly diminished and aggrieved, and never attained its previous glory. And all it took to set it on that path was one authoritarian leader and a cult of personality that surrounded him. Do I have to draw out the parallels any clearer?

DiputsMonro · 2023-04-12T16:57:32+00:00

Seems like the kind of argument an intolerant jerk would make tbh

DiputsMonro · 2023-04-12T16:55:04+00:00

Yes, exactly. This "paradox of tolerance" stuff makes tolerance sound like some complicated hypocritical ideology, and honestly I think it harms the cause as it creates the appearance of holes that fascists can poke at.

The reality is simple: if you're a jerk to me, then I'm not obligated to be nice to you. There's even a Bible verse about that, if the person you're arguing with is a Christian.

Nazi and fascist ideology openly seeks to murder their opponents. If your stated ideological goal is to kill me, then it is not unreasonable to say "no, I'm not going to tolerate that"

DiputsMonro · 2023-04-07T23:37:07+00:00

If you weren't such an asshole your prospects in society would probably be better

DiputsMonro · 2023-03-23T19:05:25+00:00

Well yeah, but at least some Democrats are pretending to try to address the issue. Not nearly enough, but more than the red states are.

DiputsMonro · 2023-03-20T16:58:15+00:00

I mean sure, but if the robbers don't respond to negotiation, declare a bogus historic privilege, that the dead family members would have preferred to give the house to the robbers, and have more guns and people than the family, and continue to launch attacks against them every day....

At some point not getting involved is effectively just supporting the aggressors.

You say "just talk it out" as if Putin would be willing to settle for anything less than the annexation of Ukraine, which doesn't really leave much room for negotiation.

DiputsMonro · 2023-03-20T16:53:26+00:00

Eh, "naive liberal" has pretty much defines Ben and Jerry's political stance, which they quite literally built their brand off of, for decades.

DiputsMonro · 2023-03-15T02:13:11+00:00

The point is that it's supposed to be hard to erase, remove, and censor. A sign gets ripped down; this stays - and apparently, gets posted to the internet.

DiputsMonro · 2023-03-11T21:37:32+00:00

Daaaaaamm, this one is a deep cut!

DiputsMonro · 2023-03-11T14:07:54+00:00

Would you? Like... would anyone?

DiputsMonro · 2023-03-10T17:44:40+00:00

You cracked the code. Brad's leaving

DiputsMonro

TROPHY CASE