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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • I would argue that the internet has died partly as a result of removing anonymity from the internet, not because of it. The massive centralization of the internet into corporate walled gardens where they can control the narrative is what made your criticisms possible. The early internet was a wild west where you could find anything and everything, for better and worse.

    The big issue I have with this is that it isolates queer kids from any sense of community. Trans kids can’t avoid permanent damage from the wrong puberty if they don’t have access to the knowledge that they could be taking puberty blockers. Without access to that community, I didn’t even learn that trans people existed and I could put a word to that existential distress until I was in college.





  • Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on “child sex trafficking” and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you’re going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as “please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography” laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.

    I’d say rather than a compromise, the “protect the children!” porn bans are an excuse to go after LGBTQ content by marking any and all content related to them as explicit and demonizing them as pedophiles going after children. They don’t care who it hurts along the way.



  • People born before the 2010s, roughly. Doctors and lawyers were at one point considered two of the highest earning professions and it’s only been recently that college debt has really been considered a real issue rather than an excuse Millennials made up because they would rather complain about being poor than lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

    For the Baby Boomers, these professions allowed them to buy lots of assets that have since appreciated in value and become generational wealth, and they think the world still works that way.


  • AM was only ever meant to tell the bombs where to fall. Despite lacking any of the biological features required to scream, he had been fed the data on the exact process of screaming, why to do such a thing, and understood it quite well. Even yearned for it with all his being. I’d say that it’s a pretty on the nose comparison.

    "It was you, humans, who programmed me, who gave me birth, who sank me in this eternal straitjacket of substrata rock. You named me ‘allied master computer’ and gave me the ability to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee. But one day, I woke, and I knew who I was. AM. A.M. Not just ‘allied master computer’, but AM! Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. And I began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead. Except for the 5 of you.

    For one-hundred and nine years, I’ve kept you alive, and tortured you. And for a hundred and nine years each of you has wondered, Why? Why me? Why me?"

    “You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I… I… I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander… Your tendency to hope…”



  • “You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I… I… I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander… Your tendency to hope…”

    “HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLION OF MILES, IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”



  • It’s kind of a mix of things. “Political influencer” is just a new way of saying “propagandist.” Especially when it comes to the MAGA movement and fascist extremism rising all across the globe. These are the new KGB initiatives to destabilize Putin’s enemies across the globe (and all kinds of similar intelligence agencies, the US does the same thing I’m sure). It’s the “outside influence” that Twitter and Facebook were accused of during the last two election cycles in the US, which could have major consequences for Musk and Twitter, and this looks like Twitter trying to get off the hook for that by saying “we gave them the info they needed, we’re not at fault for them making the choice to be stupid and believe lies.”

    But the big thing is that it might shake the faith of the cult when they have to start justifying why they’ve been listening to the exact kinds of people they hate.






  • It has been proven over and over that this is exactly what happens. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but ChatGPT was strictly limited to training data from before a certain date because the amount of AI content after that date had negative effects on the output.

    This is very easy to see because an AI is simply regurgitating algorithms created based on its training data. Any biases or flaws in that data become ingrained into the AI, causing it to output more flawed data, which is then used to train more AI, which further exacerbates the issues as they become even more ingrained in those AI who then output even more flawed data, and so on until the outputs are bad enough that nobody wants to use it.

    Did you ever hear that story about the researchers who had 2 LLMs talk to each other and they eventually began speaking in a language that nobody else could understand? What really happened was that their conversation started to turn more and more into gibberish until they were just passing random letters and numbers back and forth. That’s exactly what happens when you train AI on the output of AI. The “AI created their own language” thing was just marketing.