mountainriver @ mountainriver @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought

The part of data centers using to much water is apparently old emails.

What I'm on about? I think the english term is "damning with faint praise". If this is the best that can be done, which I am arguing, there isn't much use to it.

The latest one is an outlier, in that it doesn't have a voice over, so it isn't a radio play. Most of the other ones I have seen has a voice track that tells the story. They are also more dreamlike which matches the prediction of what kind of story can be told from one of the comment threads here (from one of the pivot videos about VEO).

The latest one (and the only one to gone viral) is actually interesting in that he is trying to tell a visual story, but with the medium he has chosen he can't have a novel character as protagonist really, or dialogue, which is why it is limited to a very simple story.

I'm interested in why it is so limited, because I think that tells a lot of the limitations of the technology as such.

Not a sneer, but I recently saw Ari K's AI generated video of Trump in his golden ballroom. It's quite good, here is the channel: https://m.youtube.com/@AriKuschnir

Looking at his other videos, he is a talented story teller. Most videos are about two minutes, has numerous short shots of a few seconds and a voice over or music connecting the shots. So presumably he generates the shots, splice them together and puts the soundtrack over the it. Most of the short stories are dreamlike. To the extent it has characters it's famous people (getting their comeuppance), so even though they look a bit different in each shot, it's easy to keep track.

I think it's interesting because by doing what can be done with the tools, it illustrates the limitations. In the hands of a good story teller you essentially get an illustration for a short radio play (and the radio play needs to be recorded separately, and you can't show actors talking). Because of the bubble and investor bux, it can right now be done on a shoe string budget.

But that's all! Are illustrated radio plays replacing feature films? No, so this remains a niche use case. And once the investor bux dries up, potentially an expensive one. Not something to build a billion dollar industry on.

The most well documented genocide while it is happening. First livestreamed genocide. If you can't see this genocide happening, then you could never see a genocide until afterwards.

Of course they can't figure out what is going on, using their own eyes is not in the interest of the oligarchs they serve.

Joining the war on teen pregnancies on the side of teen pregnancies to bring back the ideal past of - check notes - the 1990ies in the US.

(At least a cursory look points toward teen pregnancies in the US peeking some time in the 1990ies.)

Most medical careers work well internationally, in principle. Something to keep in mind is that language proficiency may be a stated or unstated prerequisite for employment, in particular if you have contact with patients. If you work with the machines (lab technician, etc) the language may be of less importance. Or at least, so I have heard. Relevance depends on your country of choice and your pre-existing language skills, of course.

To bad attempt number one didn't work well. Better luck with attempt number two.

general-purpose simulators which simulate conversations that agents, oracles, genies, or tools might have

Good formulation, but in the spirit of the article I would say "might have had". Being per definition trained on existing material they can produce likely imitations of conversations that already exists. One would suppose the value of a conversation between oracles and geniuses would be to produce something new, on effect text that is more than the statistically likely output.

Good article, thanks for linking it.

Historians like to use "state capacity" as a term for what a state is capable of doing. The government leader might want to build a great bridge, and might order it done, but depending on which state in which era it might not be a thing that is possible to execute.

I didn't think we would see a powerful state like the US so willfully destroy its state capacity (except for violence), but here we are and “everybody who knows how to access the money got fired”

I hadn't read HPRick and Morty, so thanks for that!

Lots of gems about wizard fascism. I liked this part:

"It means, oh golly oh gee, that uh, one day science will discover space travel and cryogenics and then we'll all be, uh, immortal space gods with our own private stars, Professor!"

Harry hated how inarticulate he sometimes sounded outside of his own internal monologues, which were much more elaborate. One of these days he would have to sit down and write down his internal monologues in a coherent sequence.

For those that (like me) is out of the loop and don't get it, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:

In one of the advertisements that was particularly controversial, Sweeney says that "genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans [or genes] are blue". Another voice then declares "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans".

FWIW, I think he's wrong in the causation here. During the heyday of the British Empire history was one of the high status subjects to study, and they wrote it in very plain language. Physics on the other hand was seen as mostly pointless philosophy, and in the early 19th century astronomy was a field so low in status that it was dominated by women.

I would say the causation is money giving the field status, and lack of money hollowing out status. Low status makes the untrained think they can do it as well as the trained. You had to study history and master it's language to make a career as a colonial administrator, therefore the field was high status. As soon as money starts really flowing into physics, the status goes up, even surpassing chemistry which had been the highest status (and thus also manliest) science.

If one wants to look at the decline of status of academia, I recommend as a starting point Galbraith's The Affluent Society, that goes a fair bit into the post war status of academia versus business men.

I think the humanities were merely the weak point in lowering the status of academia in favour of the business men.

One of the products was removal of unwanted hair. You radiated and the hair just fell off! How practical!

To be fair to the radium people, I don't think the correlation between radiation and cancer was established until the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still one could see hair falling of as a warning sign of sorts.

Depending on how AI-pilled your boss is, maybe you could just "ask the AI" if it is being used. If the magic eight ball says "yes", then it's being used, and everybody should be happy.

Can it really be that stupid? Was he just prompting it wrong?

Going through work email I saw a link o an article about Quantum-AI. It was behind paywall, and I am not paying for reading about how woo+woo=woo^2. What do you do when your bubble isn't inflating anymore? Couple it with another stale bubble!

Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.

Not surprised. Making Hype and Criti-hype the two poles of the public debate has been effective in corralling people who get that there is something wrong with the "AI" into Criti-hype. And politicians needs to be generalists so the trap is easy to spring.

Still, always a pity when people who should know better fall into it.

Does moral cowardice matter in someone teaching about ethics? Yes, just as much as physical cowardice matters for a life guard. (The other way is fine.)

Does he express his ideas and teachings as something that it would be good if people did, but he totally wouldn't if it causes himself a smidgen of inconvenience? If he didn't, we now know that he was lying. Which matters if your moral framework cares about truth.

If you have to read his works for some reason, do it with open eyes and try to figure out who and what he is lying in service of.

My argument is that if he hasn't spoken out on Gaza, if he hasn't urged people to do what he thinks would be the best way to stop the genocide, then he is either a fool who can't see what is in front of him or a moral coward who can't act on his convictions.

Either way it makes him a poor ethics philosopher. We can be pretty sure that unless he himself is an experienced life guard, he would in fact not dive in to the river to save the child.

There is a genocide going on right now in Gaza. Has Singer, the great utilitarian, said anything about how the common man should act to stop it?

Is it more effective to protest or block ports or destroy weaponry? Do we have a moral obligation to overthrow governments supporting genocide, in particular if that government is in our country? If we come across one of the perpetrators of the genocide do we have a moral obligation to do something?

Or are these all to uncomfortable questions, while the donation habits of the middle class is comfortable questions?