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- Comment on Evidence 8 hours ago:
97% was reported by earlier small surveys, but I think the most rigorous and widely reported survey of scientists was Harris Interactive in 2007.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Scientific_consensus_on_climat…
That was followed up in 2010 by a survey of specifically climate scientists, whom hit 97-98%.
The ‘concensus’ has been constantly challenged in conservative media and circles so there have been many such surveys / meta-analyses continuing over the years and it’s been hitting 100% for the last several years. If any idiot ever parrots “science doesn’t work on concensus” my usually response is something like, “no it doesn’t, but when an entire field of scientists have determined a theory to have vast evidence-based backing its considered settled. The only thing that would change that is significant contradictory data being presented, yet instead every year we’re measuring huge volumes of data that confirm the concensus.”
- Comment on Still trying to figure it out... 1 day ago:
Sure is. Like Cliff said, it’s a Western Pygmy Possum (from social media source).
Pic from Wikipedia :
- Comment on Teenage Jehovah's Witness can receive blood transfusion, judge rules 1 week ago:
The judge would never make a legal argument that “religious propaganda had reduced a person’s legal capacity” as it would have wide-ranging implications and would be challenged (and overruled) in short order due to freedom of religion laws.
The hospitals legal team appealed for an order because the kid was effectively killing themselves and they have a duty to do no harm.
This prompted the health board to go to the Court of Session to seek an order which would allow its doctors to administer the blood transfusion up to two weeks following the child’s procedure.
Its legal team told Lady Tait that such an order was necessary because blood loss was an “inevitable consequence” of the operation.
The judge deemed that weighing the child’s personal beliefs and medical risk it was in their best interest to allow the order. That is their justification and it follows other case law examined, there is no legal need for them to deem the kid incapable of making the decision. It’s only made the news because religious people making dumb decisions about their health is a common public interest story.
Lady Tait also wrote about cases examined by English courts, before concluding that in the context of the case brought before the court, it would be in the best interests of the child that the order be granted.
- Comment on Teenage Jehovah's Witness can receive blood transfusion, judge rules 1 week ago:
Sounds like a slippery slope fallacy. Just because a judge has carefully weighed that this is in the 14 year olds best interest now, does not at all mean more dire decisions against personal rights will be made in future.
I’ll worry if the courts ever start making decisions that go against the childs best interest.
The judge said they’re ordering this because there would not be time to solicit the court for an order if a transfusion does become necessary, and risk of death would be significant.
I’m fine with letting adult religious zealots bleed out if they’re too god-brained to accept help, but for a 14yo I think it’s pretty reasonable to save them from themselves so they can live to have a fully-developed brain.
- Comment on Recommendation for Android File Manager 1 week ago:
I use Fossify FM for most on-device stuff, thumbs up from me too.
If I need to copy/move files between my phone and my NAS I use Ghost Commander as it has SMB support and the dual-panels make moving between devices easier to grapple with visually.
- Comment on Positivity 😇 2 weeks ago:
Thanks for that, they have a bunch of silly fun stuff on Giphy and found there original comics from your info.
- Comment on Positivity 😇 2 weeks ago:
Why is this cropped and scrubbed so that we can’t see who the original artist is?
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 2 weeks ago:
4chan users love playing Schrodinger’s Racist, so we’ll never know for sure.
I just treat racism as racism, unless it is set up with the most obvious irony or sarcasm beforehand - this ain’t, seems like a genuine whine at their real situation.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 2 weeks ago:
Also called it Obongocare which made me immediately lose any empathy to them for the racism, but it is 4chan I guess.
99% likely they vote Republican based on the attitide also, which is the root cause of a lot of their complaints (min wage, shitty employee protections, expensive Internet [almost certainly one of the monopoly ISP areas], has to rely on a car because public transit is socialism).
Yeah, the Democratic party sucks by and large for many other reasons, but id rather live in a D city than an R one any day of the week. /end obligatory response to “but Dems”
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 3 weeks ago:
It is absolutely predefined - if you make the same moves it will give you the same results, every time. Same as playing ChessMaster 2000 from 1986.
It may narrowly fit into the broad definition of ‘AI’ (like, since the 70s) but that’s not what’s being discussed in this thread.
Believe what you like though.
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 3 weeks ago:
I agree it’s great at writing and frame-working parts of code and selecting libraries - it definitely has value for coding. $1500 bil value though, I doubt.
My main concern there lies in the next gen of programmers. The work that ChatGPT (and Claude etc) outputs requires some significant programming prior-experience to allow them to make sense of the output and adjust (or correct) it to suit their scope and requirements of the project. In additions it’s taking away the entry-level work that junior devs usually do and have cleaned up for prod by senior devs - and that’s not theory, the job market is dying now.
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 3 weeks ago:
When people say “I fucking hate AI”, 99% of the time they mean “I fucking hate AI™©®”. They don’t mean the technology behind it.
To add to your good points, I’m a CS grad that studied neural networks and machine learning years back, and every time I read some idiot claiming something like “this scientific breakthrough has got scientists wondering if we’re on the cusp of creating a new species of superintelligence” or “90% of jobs will be obsolete in five years” it annoys me because its not real, and it’s always someone selling something. Today’s AI is the same tech they’ve been working on for 30+ years and incrementally building upon, but as Moore’s Law has marched on we now have storage pools and computing power to run very advanced models and networks. There is no magic breakthrough, just hype.
The recent advancements are all driven by the $1500 billion spent on grabbing as many resources they could - all because some idiots convinced them it’s the next gold rush. What has that $1500 bil got us? Machines that can answer general questions correctly around 40% of the time, plagiarize art for memes, create shallow corporate content that nobody wants, and write some half-decent code cobbled together from StackOverflow and public GitHub repos.
What a fucking waste of resources.
What’s real is the social impacts, the educational impacts, the environmental impacts, the effect on artists and others who have had their work stolen for training, the useability of the Internet (search is fucked now), and what will be very real soon is the global recession/depression it causes as businesses realize more and more that it’s not worth the cost to implement or maintain (in all but very few scenarios).
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 3 weeks ago:
I know you’re meming, but in Civilization (as in most games), you’re playing against predefined scripts and algorithmic rules that the computer opponent has, as well as having cheaper costs for resources than the user at higher difficulty levels - because it cannot compete with a skilled human player at that level (it literally cheats).
No LLM, no neural network, no deep learning… not ‘AI’ in the modern sense that’s being discussed here.
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 3 weeks ago:
… And NVMe SSDs, and large HDDs.
I bought a Crucial P310 MVMe 2TB card barely three weeks ago for the already-inflated price of $132.58 (not on sale).
The exact same card from the exact same retailer is now $225.13.
70% increase in 21 days.
That’s the average amount of inflation we’d have in eighteen years.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot shuts down after reproducing the gesture of its human operator removing their headset 3 weeks ago:
They’re actually shot in the head when their shift is over and they remove the headset - to prevent leaks of Optimus being a charade.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot shuts down after reproducing the gesture of its human operator removing their headset 3 weeks ago:
I’m sure we’ll see, “the AI was trained on human operator recordings - which unfortunately included headset removal actions, Tesla is now working to filter that from the model”.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot shuts down after reproducing the gesture of its human operator removing their headset 3 weeks ago:
My optimist: surely Musk will not be able to get away with being caught in this obvious lie.
My realist: he’s gonna get away with it again.
- Comment on Anon is a fan of GabeN 3 weeks ago:
Their policy was that if a game was activated on your account then you were not entitled to a refund. The fact that they pulled some games from the store due to significant complaints about those individual titles (or at publisher request), and subsequently decided to make an exception to refund that particular game for some people does not disprove that their standard policy was ‘you are not entitled to a refund’.
- Comment on Anon is a fan of GabeN 3 weeks ago:
Hmmm. Everyone takes Steam refunds for granted now. But until late 2015 they refused to do refunds for any kind of game purchase, even if the game was literally unplayable by buyers - until they were dragged through the courts by the ACCC and fined, with similar legal demands happening from the EU around the same time.
Dunno if I’d call that, “never abused their power to the disadvantage of customers”.
- Comment on Anon is a fan of GabeN 3 weeks ago:
The EU definitely helped. I’ll add that this was actually kicked off by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in 2014. They took Valve to court over their insistence that they can ignore Australian Consumer Law rights - in particular that if a product is ‘not fit for purpose’ then the buyer is entitled to a full refund, with respect to games. Valve offered no possibility of refund at the time. The case dragged on, but Valve eventually lost and was told to pay several million in fines, they appealed it to the High Court of Australia in 2016 - and lost also on appeal.
The judge was pissed at Valve, and wrote in their ruling:
“Valve’s culture of compliance was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if [legal] advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.
Valve are generally a very positive force in gaming, but they’re definitely not the saints that OP image text implies.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
“Pretty sure it’s a type of bigotry I just invented to suit me”.
People are downvoting because they can’t read it and this is an English language forum. They’d do the same to commenters posting everything in latin - it’s not helpful to post like this in this community, which is why repeat offenders become downvote magnets (or just blocked).
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
People would also downvote if comments were being posted in latin or mandarin on an English language comminity: its unreadable to most of the participants and thereby negatively contributory to the discussion.
- Comment on mmm... tastes like chimkin 5 weeks ago:
Yes. The other person said they were “carnivorous” though. Giant tortoises are not carnivorous.
Horses are also not carnivorous even though they do eat meat on rare occasions to survive.
Words mean things.
You’re also wrong about horses. Put a steak on the ground in field of plentiful grass, horses will ignore it until it’s rotted away to nothing. They do not just eat stuff outside of their regular died because its risk free and easily obtained.
- Comment on mmm... tastes like chimkin 5 weeks ago:
Carniverous? All living giant tortoise species are herbivores.
Now who’s stupid.
- Comment on No Black Friday deal for loyal/previous customers 5 weeks ago:
I have a paid Proton account and yet I still pay for AirVPN for years because of 1) how good their service is for torrenting 2) how cheap it is at black friday every year.
- Comment on It's always about dat math 5 weeks ago:
Figuring out which local restaurant does and doesn’t currently deliver (which would change on a daily basis) was one of the main problems.
Your local food delivery places make changes to if they do delivery or not on a day to day basis? Do you live in a warzone? This is nonsense.
Also I don’t want to call or talk to people, so every restaurant would need it’s own system to take online orders. Doesn’t seem realistic.
TFW too scared to dial 9-11 because would have to speak to someone. dies
‘Big brain’ indeed.
- Comment on It's always about dat math 5 weeks ago:
Food delivery apps (Uber eats, Deliveroo, Menulog, etc) are just another silicon valley scam ‘fixing’ a problem that did not exist.
The restaurants get stung for ~30%, yet are pressured to have a presence on the apps lest they lower thier market prescence, the gig worker delivery drivers get paid poorly and have no benefits, and ultimately the costs get shoveled onto the consumer impacting the highest year on year increases in fast food on record.
Opt out. Buy from places that have their own deliver service. Actually walk or drive or public transport to the restaurant and eat out - no waste from the delivery containers. Fuck the tech bros, we had fast food and delivery working just fine before their shitty apps arrived.
- Comment on be a friend to the animals 1 month ago:
You mean like complaining on the Internet about a throwaway joke in a webcomic?
The Friends dig was just a utilitarian punchline for the comic to add some comedy to the informative nature of the first panel. I dunno why people take things to heart so much when there really are so, so many better shows than Friends. The comic doesn’t even say that Friends is bad, just that there’s better. Show viewing options have expanded and improved a lot since 1994.
- Comment on be a friend to the animals 1 month ago:
Some people don’t mind sharing the land they have with them. Especially as the land available to wildlife decreases year on year.
Personally I’ll take insects and native rodents over sterile trimmed grass any day, especially for the front yard which doesn’t even get used aside from a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ style lawn and garden manicure unspoken competition.
