Iconoclast
@Iconoclast@feddit.uk
- Comment on What are you doing for digital estate planning? 17 hours ago:
There’s nothing in my email/computer/bank account that anyone else needs access to. When I go it all goes with me.
- Comment on War attention priorities 2 days ago:
People like conflicts that in their mind are easily divided into good guys and bad guys so that they get to pick a side to root for. When it’s people killing each other that look and think alike it’s much harder to make up one’s mind about what to think about it. Much of the discussion isn’t even about the conflict itself anyway but rather just people taking the opportunity to announce allegiance to a particular group or ideology.
- Comment on Why are lemmings so touchy about downvotes? 2 days ago:
There are only upsides to going into your settings and hiding downvotes entirely. It’s pure masochism to have people’s boos broadcast to you in real time.
- Comment on why do we punish people when nothing bad happened ? 1 week ago:
If everyone started driving 10 kph over the speed limit we’d see a significant uptick in the rate of accidents. That is just a fact.
We don’t want that so we’ve set limits that still get you where you’re going as fast as possible while keeping that particular stretch of road relatively safe. To enforce those limits we’ve decided that if you get caught going over you get punished for it. Not for driving fast per se but for breaking the rules you agreed to in order to be allowed to drive there in the first place. Fining you even when you didn’t get into an accident is just carrying out the threat so that it keeps its credibility.
spoiler
Also, as a related sidenote: I don’t believe in free will so in a way punishing people even for murder doesn’t really make any sense since in my view they could not have done otherwise and simply can’t help themselves. I view a situation like that in a similar way to a bear mauling a person in the woods. What sense does punishing the bear make? It’s a bear for crying out loud - what did you expect it would do? However, we’re not bears. People regularly get the urge to similarly maul another person but most of the time they don’t because they know they’ll get in trouble for it so in that sense the punishment makes sense. Not as a punishment per se but as a deterrence to protect others. If you did a bad thing despite the deterrence the only tool we have left is to lock you in a facility so that you don’t harm anyone else. It’s like shooting a bear that wandered into a neighbourhood. It’s not to punish it for doing so - it’s to protect innocent people.
- Comment on Would it be possible to make a network wide AI blocker? 1 week ago:
You’re fighting a losing battle. This is like asking “how do I block all online content that I don’t like?”. You don’t. You either stop watching the moment you don’t like what you see or you’ve just got to leave the internet entirely and you’d still keep seeing increasing amounts of AI-related things in the real world.
AI is here to stay and it’s only going to get much more prevalent.
- Comment on When every candidate you supported loses the election 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think I’ve seen a political bumper sticker even once in my life. I don’t know if it’s exclusively an American thing but it clearly isn’t a Finnish thing. You’re lucky to spot a bumper sticker, let alone a political one.
- Comment on Would SpaceX continue to be immoral without Musk? 2 weeks ago:
Starlink satellites are at 550km and without boosting they fall back to earth in 2 to 5 years. New ones are being put at 480km where the orbit decays only in few months. The oldest ones are already falling back to earth and burning up in the atmosphere.
- Comment on How com the ad industry make so much money? 4 weeks ago:
Most advertising is about building brand recognition. It doesn’t matter whether you buy their product or not - the fact that you can name the company whose product you’re not buying means the ad worked.
- Comment on How com the ad industry make so much money? 4 weeks ago:
I run a local renovating bussines and word of mouth is more than enough but advertising is what got it all started.
- Comment on How com the ad industry make so much money? 4 weeks ago:
I started my own bussiness 3 years ago and 99% of my customers discovered me via an ad. Clearly not all people hate all ads. I don’t know how you imagine anyone to find out about a new product or service otherwise.
- Comment on Is there anything I can do about the humming of an LED? 5 weeks ago:
My bathroom ceiling light was doing that also when it was installed. Then they replaced the power supply to a different kind and it stopped.
Though in this case the electician bought a wrong kind power supply - it didn’t come with the light fixture.
- Comment on Capital of Estonia after a visit from Swedish football fans 5 weeks ago:
600k residents in the city area and 1.1 million in the metropolitan area. All inbred shrimp smuggles.
- Comment on Capital of Estonia after a visit from Swedish football fans 5 weeks ago:
This and players pretending to be injured on the field is why of all the sports in the world football has by far the worst reputation in my mind.
- Comment on What would a super hero A.I. be like ? 5 weeks ago:
In the best case scenario where none of the bad things we worried about happens and everything turns out better than expected we’d eventually find ourselves in the precence of what is essentially and Oracle or “God”. Any question that can be answered it could answer and every problem that has a solution it could figure out. It would be better than all of humans at everything.
I guess the final problem for it to solve would be to figure out how to find meaning in a world where your contributions to it aren’t anymore needed and don’t matter.
- Comment on I know it's ridiculous to say, but why don't women from the continent of Africa date black American men? 1 month ago:
This race obsession of yours is so strange. This is like the 4th account from you that I’m blocking now.
- Comment on What's the thing you're supposed to be doing right now instead of scrolling? 1 month ago:
I should be out in the woods crawling already.
- Comment on How can AI act without initial human input? Does this show AI can have freewill or am I deceived? 1 month ago:
I don’t think that even humans have free will as in the ability to have acted otherwise and I don’t think AI would be any different. They too are bound by determinism exactly the same way. This isn’t even particularly controversial thing to say in a scientific context these days.
Every human action is a response to a prompt in a very similar way that it is for LLMs. We simply identify with that prompt because it arises in our own mind despite us clearly not authoring any of it. Nobody is able to pick their likes and dislikes and how bumping into these things in the world makes us behave. Anything anyone does follows from prior events and our genetic makeup. No action is taken in a vacuum.
If anything I see LLMs as a massive mirror being lifted in front of us. There’s very few things people criticize AI for that don’t just as well apply to humans. The ungrounded overconfidence in which they make claims about it is a great example.
- Comment on YouTube money for charities 1 month ago:
Yes. I regularly leave a 30+ minute video playing on the background as I fall a sleep partly for this reason.
- Comment on Is a black hole spherical? How come it looks different each way you view it like on it's side or up and down? 1 month ago:
That’s a picture of the glowing plasma orbiting right outside the event horizon and the black hole’s shadow in the centre - not a picture of the black hole itself.
- Comment on Is a black hole spherical? How come it looks different each way you view it like on it's side or up and down? 1 month ago:
Nobody has ever seen a black hole so I question the premise. The pictures we have aren’t of the black hole itself.
- Comment on Non-stick pans? 1 month ago:
Here’s so far the best seasoning method for cast iron that I’ve found after having tried multiple ones and not having too great of a success. It can’t be overstated how important it is to remove all excess oil. It doesn’t take much to ruin the results.
- Wash with soap and hot water.
- Dry thoroughly.
- Immediately into a 100 degrees C oven for 20 minutes.
- Heavy coat of oil. Canola oil works fine.
- Wipe ALL of it off. First with a cloth, then with a paper towel.
- Put back into the oven and let it warm up to 150 degrees C. Then take out and wipe with a paper towel once more.
- Back into the oven and let it heat up and bake at 250 degrees C for an hour.
- Let it fully cool after each layer.
- For the first treatment, at least 3 layers are needed. Five is even better.
- Comment on Non-stick pans? 1 month ago:
Cast iron lasts multiple lifetimes and only gets better as it’s being used so it’s not really even a competition in my books. It has its downsides but at least I’m not replacing it every 5 years or so.
- Comment on User destroys local habitat so they can walk barefoot beside "their" lake 1 month ago:
Why wouldn’t this be safe? If left unmaintained nature will reclaim this in few years.
- Comment on What is the difference between terrorist attack vs military strike if both kill civilians? 1 month ago:
The difference is intentions. The intentions of a terrorist attack is to cause terror in the civilian population.
- Comment on User destroys local habitat so they can walk barefoot beside "their" lake 1 month ago:
Boo-fucking-hoo. There’s tens of thousands of kilometers of overgrown shoreline like that in Finland.
Recreational outrage.
- Comment on Will the next president of America have to do a world wide apology tour for this administration? Kind of like celebs do when they get their ass in a sling. 1 month ago:
I don’t think it matters. The rest of the world has already learned that the US can only be trusted for four years at a time at best.
It’s not like people are going to start trusting Russia either once Putin is gone.
- Comment on people who take zoom calls in coffee shops are insufferable 2 months ago:
Why? What difference does it make if they’re talking to someone face to face compared to it being via video call?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
That doesn’t answer the question “what is intelligence” no more than a thermometer explains what is heat energy.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
you low IQ low T soy boy
I wasn’t expecting you to start insulting me over a disagreement. You could’ve made your point without going there. I genuinely have no idea what you hoped to achieve with that.
- Comment on If it were suddenly revealed that a significant number of questions posted in this comm were ai bots would that bother you? 2 months ago:
Not really for as long as people engaging in the comments were real people. Though, then again, if they all were bots too but I didn’t know and couldn’t tell, then I’m not sure what the harm there even would be. If anything, I’d only expect the engagement to be more civil.
