merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Anon listens to the radio 2 hours ago:
Also, this announcement but first: “You’re listening to another ad-free power-half-hour on KKKK”, with that ad for the station repeated every 10 minutes.
- Comment on Viewers like you 2 days ago:
Even before that there was Walter Cronkite, then Peter Jennings.
That was back in an era where everyone watched the same “influencers”. The good part of that was that for the most part, these influencers were rigorously fact checked so the people who watched them agreed on the same set of facts, and those facts were more or less true.
On the other hand, there were times when these “influencers” were biased or even hid the truth. The bias was often something they even had trouble noticing. Like, they all believed communism was a big threat, or that police were trustworthy. As for hiding the truth, sometimes when a politician got in trouble the news would drop the story because of their deference to power. They’d also sometimes try to repeat whatever the government said as truth without checking it, or not investigate bad things the government was doing overseas because they saw that as being patriotic.
Overall, I think it was better when everybody agreed on most things, even if sometimes the news / “influencers” were biased. At least it meant that the government was more or less functional. At least it meant that people were relatively civil with each-other.
- Comment on Dolph is prime human 5 days ago:
The quote in his online biography about his modeling career is a bit more detailed:
Dolph took up modeling at the famous Zoli Agency to make some extra cash. ‘A bit too tall and muscular for a model’s size 40’,
Wow. Can you imagine a bigger ego boost than being turned down to be a male model because you’re just too tall and muscular?
Being perpetually exhausted because your celebrity girlfriend keeps bringing back too many girls for the group sex session is a close second though.
- Comment on Dolph is prime human 5 days ago:
Ha! It makes it sound like you’re saying that young black kids are self-important dickheads and that’s why he’s a good role model.
But, yeah, I know what you’re trying to say. Despite his social media presence, the image that kids generally see is a very positive one. He’s a somewhat stylish (in his own way) guy, who clearly has personality, and is a very accomplished scientist. I just cringe any time he comments on something not related to astrophysics.
- Comment on Dolph is prime human 5 days ago:
Yeah, but look at why he quit:
However, while preparing for the move to Boston, he was spotted in the nightclub where he worked in Sydney and was hired by Grace Jones as a bodyguard, and the two became lovers.[18] He moved with Jones to New York City, where he dabbled in modeling at the Zoli Agency but was described as “a bit too tall and muscular for a model’s size 40”.
It’s not like he said “this is too hard for me”, it’s more like he said “wait, I can have this other life instead?”
- Comment on Dolph is prime human 5 days ago:
Not the same with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
I’m not his biggest fan, but I fully respect his scientific credentials. He has a PhD from Columbia. He published at least a dozen papers. There’s no question that he’s a scientist, a manager of scientists, as well as a science communicator.
The problem is that his success seems to have destroyed his humility. It’s not that he brags about being so incredibly smart. It’s more that he doesn’t ever seem to sit back and say “hey, maybe this isn’t something where my contributions won’t be appreciated”. I think his science communication is doing more good than harm. I think he’s a great role model for little black boys who think all scientists are white, or that they’re all stuffy nerds with no personality. But, I think he’s at his best when he’s in a show where there’s a script and an editor. On social media and on free-form podcasts, he comes off as a know-it-all ass.
- Comment on >:( 6 days ago:
NASA says there are only 5 dwarf planets in the system. But, it’s all pretty arbitrary. The line between planet, dwarf planet and asteroid are all pretty fuzzy.
An alien civilization looking at the Sol system might say that it’s only got one planet, Jupiter. Everything else is so much smaller that they’re not really significant.
Another logical cut-off would be that planets had to be bigger than any moons in the system. If we went by that standard, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus and Mars could all still count as planets, but Mercury would get ditched because it’s smaller than Ganymede and Titan.
What’s funny is that we’re still using the name “planet” which comes from “asteres planētai”, meaning “wandering star”. For the Greeks what mattered wasn’t the size or the mass, it was how bright they were. That meant that a tiny object near the sun like Mercury (Hermes) got the name planet, because despite being tiny, the fact it’s close to the sun means it reflects a lot of light. And Jupiter (Zeus) and Saturn (Cronus) got named not because they’re so big, but because they’re big and far away from the sun, which means they reflect sunlight in a similar way to the much smaller inner planets. Earth’s moon might have been given the name “planet” if it had been a lot smaller and/or further away.
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 1 week ago:
And only then?
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 1 week ago:
Maybe tens of thousands of years ago, but 2000ish years ago 60ish was old age. The main reason life expectancy has gone up isn’t that old people didn’t make it to 50, it’s that young people didn’t make it to 2. If a couple has 5 kids, 3 of them die as toddlers and the other two make it to 70 the average life expectancy is about 30, but that doesn’t mean living past 30 is unusual.
Also, tens of thousands of years ago there was an ice age, but for the last 10k years light-skinned Europeans still had normal summers and worked in the fields.
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 1 week ago:
I don’t either, but my nose isn’t hairy and it would burn to a crisp outdoors.
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 1 week ago:
On the other hand, what bullshit is it that my stupid human body can’t survive being outdoors without medicinal cream. My ancestors would be ashamed.
- Comment on My parents wanted serotonin, so they had a baby. now i am forced to wage slave for the worst of us. 1 week ago:
The whole thing is pretty ridiculous. You don’t get to consent to being born. You don’t get to consent to having who you have as parents. And, legally they get to make every important decision about your life for 18 years.
Even if you have parents who actually loved you and showed it, who aren’t abusive, who did the best they could, you’re still stuck in a relationship you didn’t get a chance to consent to. Even “good” parents often mess up their kids by trying to live their lives through those kids. Like, parents who are failed athletes trying to push their kids into sports. Or, parents who miss having little kids around trying to guilt their kids into providing them grandkids.
And then there’s the whole expectation of taking care of the parents when they get old and sick. Yes, I get it, they changed their kids’ diapers when they were young. The kids are just returning the favour. But, those kids never had a choice. The parents (for the most part) chose to have kids, and chose to do that work. The kids never agreed to the terms and conditions that said they had to help out their parents when their bodies started failing.
Suicide is selfish, but ultimately, it is your life. It’s unfair that other people get an opportunity to tie all kinds of strings to you before your brain has even developed enough to understand the concepts of live and death.
Then again, we’re just animals. We only exist because a machine which exists to propagate its genes turned out to be effective at propagating its genes. Nature is brutal, and even if we don’t always admit it, we’re still part of nature. There’s nothing fair about it. It just is.
- Comment on Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week 1 week ago:
We should’ve gotten a 4-day work week decades ago
Then you should have burned down Chicago decades ago.
The 5 day work week didn’t just happen because workers deserved it. It happened because they went to war.
- Comment on the seven deadly companies 2 weeks ago:
Wait, you’re saying that The Hellbound Heart isn’t the original? Next thing you’ll be trying to convince me that Pope Greg is innocent of plagiarism, because he actually didn’t steal from Se7en.
- Comment on the seven deadly companies 2 weeks ago:
I bet you also think the original “A Christmas Carol” was the one with the muppets.
- Comment on the seven deadly companies 2 weeks ago:
That’s only 6 companies.
- Comment on (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ 2 weeks ago:
Who’s consenting?
- Comment on (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ 2 weeks ago:
The alternative isn’t “nothing”, it’s getting precious cultural artifacts out of high risk countries where there’s a high likelihood of the artifacts simply being destroyed.
- Comment on (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ 2 weeks ago:
The only opinion that should matter is that of the people the artifacts belong to.
Which people? The government? So in Afghanistan it’s up to the Taliban? If you don’t trust that the government of a country represents the will of the people, then how do you determine what the people want?
And, again, which people? Is a totem pole in a museum in Canada the property of the Canadian people? Or is it something that belongs to the Haida people, and it doesn’t matter what other Canadians want? If it is up to the Haida, it is up to the Council of the Haida Nation, or is it up to the band the original artist belonged to?
What about a Tatar artifact found in Donetsk? Who gets control over that? Is it the Russians since they occupy Donetsk? The Ukrainians because they used to occupy it? Do you have to study the blood of various Ukrainian people to figure out who has the most surviving Tatar DNA?
- Comment on (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ 2 weeks ago:
if a museum feels under threat
If you run a museum in Afghanistan and are afraid that the Taliban is going to execute you unless you destroy some blasphemous statue, are you going to risk your life to send the artifact to the British Museum, or are you just going to destroy it? Yeah, some heroes will definitely risk their lives, but most won’t.
- Comment on Checkmate, Round Earthers 🌍 2 weeks ago:
If you were standing on the Liberty National Golf Club in New Jersey about 2km from the Statue of Liberty (height 93m), from the bottom to the top it would be about 2.5 degrees.
If you were looking at the Eiffel Tower at 6000 km away from NJ, and the earth were flat, the Eiffel Tower (height 312m), from the bottom to the top it would be about 0.003 degrees from bottom to top. If you could line it up so that you could see the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower at the same time, the Eiffel Tower would appear to come up to the first 10 cm of the Statue of Liberty’s base. That’s actually a little bigger than I would have expected, but still tiny.
I wonder if, even with binoculars, someone could even resolve something that small. Ignoring everything like ocean waves interfering, vegetation getting in the way and atmospheric interference, my guess is that it would be just too small to be seen from that far away without some ultra-powerful telescope.
- Comment on YouTube "search results" 3 weeks ago:
It’s like it just gives up after about 8 results. “These 8 results don’t contain what you want? I give up. Here, just watch one of these videos instead.”
Screw you, just show me the rest of the results, I swear it’s in the top 30 results.
- Comment on YouTube "search results" 3 weeks ago:
You search for “blah”, Google gives you a bunch of bad results, and serves up 5 ads. Nothing matches what you want, so you search again “blah but not foo” and you get another 5 ads. If search were good you’d only see 5 ads, but because it sucks you get 10 ads.
If Google had real competitors, bad search results might mean people would give up and use a competitor’s search, but because they have a search monopoly, they can enshittify their results and show even more ads without losing users.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 3 weeks ago:
So could tulip bulbs, for a while.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 3 weeks ago:
Can you explain the difference between understanding the question and generating the words that might logically follow?
I mean, it’s pretty obvious. Take someone like Rowan Atkinson whose death has been misreported multiple times. If you ask a computer system “Is Rowan Atkinson Dead?” you want it to understand the question and give you a yes/no response based on actual facts in its database. A well designed program would know to prioritize recent reports as being more authoritative than older ones. It would know which sources to trust, and which not to trust.
An LLM will just generate text that is statistically likely to follow the question. Because there have been many hoaxes about his death, it might use that as a basis and generate a response indicating he’s dead. But, because those hoaxes have also been debunked many times, it might use that as a basis instead and generate a response indicating that he’s alive.
So, if he really did just die and it was reported in reliable fact-checked news sources, the LLM might say “No, Rowan Atkinson is alive, his death was reported via a viral video, but that video was a hoax.”
but why should we assume that shows some lack of understanding
Because we know what “understanding” is, and that it isn’t simply finding words that are likely to appear following the chain of words up to that point.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 3 weeks ago:
But no “r” sound.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 3 weeks ago:
Oh yeah, I forgot about how they add a “v” sound to it.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 3 weeks ago:
You can even drop the “a” and “g”. There isn’t even “intelligence” here. It’s not thinking, it’s just spicy autocomplete.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 3 weeks ago:
How do you pronounce “Mrs” so that there’s an “r” sound in it?
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 3 weeks ago:
And people are trusting these things to do jobs / parts of jobs that humans used to do.