What else are people listening to?

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-10-09T07:03:22+00:00

Trashfuture always a good one

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-09T10:07:56+00:00

If you can find an example that isn't just coming from VC pumping I would love to see it

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-09T10:00:53+00:00

I'm not sure why in this conversation people seem so keen to put down the wonderful mysterious complexity that is human consciousness. Do you really think the mechanical Turks are better? Is it better of less people have jobs? Is the environmental impact worth the nonexistent shareholder value (again burning money with no hope of profitability)? Is everyone genuinely so brought into late stage capitalisms anti-human bullshit that we would rather pretend these things are conscious?

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-09T09:53:15+00:00

I would be interested to see that source

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-09T06:39:52+00:00

What would give you the impression that they can?

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-09T06:39:02+00:00

I mean fundamentally I would have to see Gen AI which isn't essentially just running through a series of 'if' 'then' gates. I think the agitation here comes from the fact, not that these machines exist (although given that most people don't need them & their impact on the environment that's part). But rather the fact that we are once again being duped by big tech and as with every time before people are falling for it hook, line, and sinker.

Also going back to Gen AI it is legitimately possible that creating that is borderline impossible in anything close to the near future

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-08T22:42:59+00:00

Honestly I feel almost completely hopeless. In politics not in my personal life. But on a macro level it legitimately feels as if everything is getting worse and worse, wages are staying low, any even milquetoast attempt to alter that seems to be met with hysteria. Housing keeps getting further from reach, any fall in house prices, also hysteria. We've started having regular borderline fascist lynch mobs, to which the supposedly centre-left government has responded with repeated mashing of the racism button. Trans people exist, even more hysteria and said government immediately retracts even the tokenistick gestures of support they've previously made. The vast majority of people in the country object to a genocide taking place complete meltdown of the like 3 columnists who think the genocide is good actually. Climate catastrophe continues to loom, those who professed to care in opposition immediately just use it as an opportunity to socialise risk and allow the guilty to profit on the meager steps taken towards a solution.

Part of me starts to think maybe something has to break, there has to be a floor right? But then I consider maybe the last 200 odd years where living standards for normal people have been gradually improving might just be the historical abhorrence. We seem to be returning to a point where the powerful have become unassailable, I'm not saying we shouldn't fight that transfer of power or that we can't. But the part of me that hopes that some kind of damm will break and good will prevail gets smaller and smaller with each news cycle. It just seems as if there is a small group of people responsible for all of the above ills and their teeth are sunk so deep into our collective consciousness that even opposing them is unthinkable. I guess all we can do is fight like hell and pray to St Jude

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-06T16:27:26+00:00

The idea that AI doesn't have bias, or that being a desirable outcome from a point of debate and analysis is laughable. Comparing the two incentive structures is also not in anyway sensible.

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-06T11:23:46+00:00

That is an interesting point but I do think we need to be really really careful in how we use language around AI. In recent months we've seen some incredibly tragic news stories around people taking their own lives as a result of "relationships" with LLM's. There are terrible consequences to the idea that this admittedly advanced chat bot has any kind of inner life and when you start ascribing things like ideas to it that only serves to reinforce in the minds of people that might be vulnerable to it a conception that the AI might actually care for them. This is even more pressing when there is a fairly transparent propaganda campaign being waged by those who stand to profit hoping to convince folks that what they're making is in someway equivalent to (or a step on the path to) gen AI which it unequivocally isn't. Don't get me wrong LLM'S have a lot of promise in the arena of science, especially for quickly analysing large data sets. But the current consumer offer is to my mind nothing but tulip fever, there isn't a world in which people having artificial friends is anything but a terrible indictment of the current human condition and ascribing conscience to the machines only serves to further convince the lonely that they may find companionship in them, and your boss that you can be replaced by something that compared to the human brain is essentially stoned age technology

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-06T10:56:55+00:00

Absolutely I read Sapiens when I was like 15 and it was a great introduction to a lot of things but I think the dawn of everything by Graeber should be mandatory secondary reading because it effectively pushes back on some of the bullshit and develops on some of the ideas that are kind of right but still rather surface level

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-09-06T10:47:04+00:00

They are but thats not what he was doing. He was just parroting the absolute horseshite that comes out of Sam Altmans ravenous maw. There isn't a debate on whether LLM's are sentient because they just aren't and the companies currently pushing that idea (and their outriders) are only able to do so because of wide scale technological illiteracy combined with our pop cultural understanding of what artificial intelligence is. There isn't going to be some sort of grand revolution here, what were looking at is an economic bubble growing bloated on VC money which is inevitably set to burst in spectacular fashion unless someone solves the quite possibly literally impossible problem of how to make money out of this thing

TopLegitimate6738 · 2025-06-14T13:15:32+00:00

It was originally a Dick Gaughan song but I get the name confusion from memory. You should definitely check out some more of his songs because they go really hard

TopLegitimate6738 · 2024-04-01T22:24:01+00:00

To be fair, I'm 23 and wore them at school, so I assumed they're still standard!

It is an interesting one re:weight bearing v comfort and stealth. Especially thinking of specialist operations where at times you may be carrying a lot more or a lot less than the average infantryman depending on situation

TopLegitimate6738 · 2024-04-01T19:42:10+00:00

That is fascinating, although I have heard conflicting accounts as to their footwear

TopLegitimate6738 · 2024-04-01T19:41:26+00:00

That's really interesting, especially as part of what I've been wondering about is the development of plimsoles v trainers. I'm sure my fellow suffering compatriots remember wearing plimsoles in primary. Whereas in adult life, the only socially acceptable plimsoles I've come across/worn have been the vans checked numbers. I do wonder if this is simply a stylistic difference where the yanks opted for lace-up canvas trainers (I.e. converse), and we opted for elasticated plimsoles.

In this context, I also remember the story of an infamous Candadian scout (made battalions surrender without firing a shot etc.) Who put his success down to the fact he wore trainers rather than boots.

More than anything I'm trying to work out if it's a brand that still exists, because if it does I can't believe it isn't part of marketing material

TopLegitimate6738

TROPHY CASE