Iconoclast
@Iconoclast@feddit.uk
- Comment on I know it's ridiculous to say, but why don't women from the continent of Africa date black American men? 1 day 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? 3 days 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 week 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 week 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? 2 weeks 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? 2 weeks 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? 2 weeks 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? 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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? 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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. 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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] 3 weeks ago:
That doesn’t answer the question “what is intelligence” no more than a thermometer explains what is heat energy.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Take the test on a different day, or sleep more beforehand, or do a different test, and your IQ will change.
Not as much as people think. We’re talking around 5 points of difference - 10 at max. Broadly speaking, the results of a well-designed test are highly consistent over a long period of time as long as it’s measured under similar conditions. It’s among the most repeatable tests in all of psychology.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
IQ doesn’t measure intelligence
We don’t even have agreed upon definition for intelligence so that seems like a weird claim to make.
- The ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge.
- the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations
- the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)
- the act of understanding
- the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason
- It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information; and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
IQ tests are one of the most well-validated and predictive tools in all of psychology for measuring general cognitive ability, and they predict important life outcomes better than almost anything else in psychology. Feeling discomfort about the results doesn’t invalidate the test itself.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
I don’t pretend to know what they’re up to - I can’t read minds. I’m just pointing out that it seems suspect. You’re free to draw your own conclusions.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Mostly normal people just like you and me who simply grew up in different environments, had different experiences, and came to different conclusions about what the problems are and how to solve them. Like most people, they generally want safety, economic security, and a decent life for them and their families. Dismissing them as stupid is usually just a way of avoiding having to understand why they see things differently.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Here’s the post they just deleted. 3 month old account, 20 comments, 1300 posts and virtually every single one about the US.
They believe more guns means less gun violence
They think iOS is far superior to Android.
They require a super-majority in Congress to vote any law. They called this system the Fillibuster. This basically means that it’s impossible to vote anything at all. In Canada, you just need a majority of parliament to pass a law. Legalize abortion ? Simple majority. In the US, you need a super-majority. Why? Who came up with this stupid shit?
Why do americans have more constitutional lawyers than any other country? Why do americans say “It’s against the constitution” everytime something happens they don’t like? When a city reduces speed limits, a typical american answer in the comment section is “This is anti-constitutional”. What the fuck do speed limits have to do with the constitution?!!
Their politicians brag about sending billions of dollars of Israel every year. Supporting Israel is one thing. But this is an entirely different matter. How can politicians openly brag about giving money to a high-income foreign country?
They elected a felon who is enriching his family. He just told them “On day 1, I will fix all wars and all problems. Everything will be fine”. Why did they trust him?
What’s wrong with americans? Some of them are exceptionally smart, but they are the tiny minority. It seems that on average, they are dumber than the Chinese or Europeans.
- Comment on Why can’t we swap our minds today? 4 weeks ago:
Brain transplant is one of the rare occasions where you’d rather be the donor than the recipient.
- Comment on Blocking 4 weeks ago:
If the title has a repeating word you can use that for keyword blocking with uBlock Origin, though last time I checked it applies to usernames as well. This this wont block their comments but will block all posts from them.
feddit.uk##div.post-listing:has(span:has-text(/keyword/i))Just make sure to switch in your own instance.
- Comment on Are Lemmy and Mbin the same instance? 4 weeks ago:
There’s isn’t really such a place as “Lemmy.” Lemmy is like Email - you don’t have an email account, you have a gmail, outlook or protonmail account (in your case lemmy.ca account)
- Comment on How do I deal with children following me around in video games? 4 weeks ago:
Try DayZ instead. You can just shoot them in the leg and leave them be devoured by the zombies.
- Comment on Was Alex Jones right about anything? 5 weeks ago:
No he wasn’t.
Bohemian Grove turned out to be very much a real thing.
You don’t need to like or agree with him, but twisting the reality isn’t helpful. The question wasn’t what you think of him. That’s a subjective question. Whether he was right about anything is an objective one.
Nobody here is defending anything he has said or done so I have no clue where that rambling is coming from.
- Comment on AI banners: what owner sees vs what I see 1 month ago:
I’ve been here for over 2 years and it still remains unclear to me what the average Lemming stands for, but I sure know what they’re against. It’s just wild to me how much some people seem to build their identity around the things they oppose - that opposition sometimes seems to be the only thing people here have in common with each other.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
AI isn’t any one thing. It’s an broad term used in computer science to refer to any system designed to perform a cognitive task that would normally require human intelligence. The chess opponent on an old Atari console is an AI. It’s an intelligent system - but only narrowly so. That’s called “narrow” or “weak” AI.
It can still have superhuman abilities, but only within the specific task it was built for - like playing chess or generating language.
A large language model like ChatGPT is also narrow AI. It’s exceptionally good at what it was designed to do: generate natural-sounding language. What people expect from it, though, isn’t narrow intelligence - it’s general intelligence. The ability to apply cognitive skills across a wide range of domains the way a human can. That’s something LLMs simply can’t do - at least not yet. Artificial General Intelligence is the end goal for many AI companies, but LLMs are not generally intelligent. However they still fall under the umbrella of AI as a broad category of systems.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Assuming it’s technically possible - and I see no reason why it wouldn’t be - then as long as we keep improving our technology without killing ourselves in the process, it’s only a matter of time. We could get there in a couple of years or it could take a few hundred, but it seems rather inevitable from where I stand.
