EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

This is grounds for a class action suit

I’ve heard WD40 works on some glue residues. Couldn’t hurt to try it.

Making generalizations about people is a problem when the generalization is false or misleading, or is being used to make a false or misleading argument, which is often the case. If you’re wondering if a given generalization is problematic, odds are the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise you probably wouldn’t think of it as a generalization.

Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He’s a comedian, and he doesn’t have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he’s been criticized in the past it’s by liberals who are mad that he’s being critical of liberals. I’m not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.

If you already struggle with some form of mental illness, it’s probably best to assume that you’re being irrational, rather than ascribe any meaning to this particular thing. There is a lot of random stuff that happens, and you could project meaning onto any of it to create a narrative. Unless you have a good reason to believe that a specific person or group is messing with you (not just a vague sense of unease) then it’s very likely that it means nothing.

Properly-designed tools with good data will absolutely be useful. What I like about this analogy with the talking dog and the braindead CEO is that it points out how people are looking at ChatGPT and Dall-E and going “cool, we can just fire everyone tomorrow” and no you most certainly can’t. These are impressive tools that are still not adequate replacements for human beings for most things. Even in the example of medical imaging, there’s no way any part of the medical establishment is going to allow for diagnosis without a doctor verifying every single case, for a variety of very good reasons.

There was a case recently of an Air Canada chatbot that gave bad information to a traveler about a discount/refund, which eventually resulted in the airline being forced to honor what the chatbot said, because of course they have to honor what it says. It’s the representative of the company, that’s what “customer service representative” means. If a customer can’t trust what the bot says, then the bot is useless. The function that the human serves still needs to be fulfilled, and a big part of that function is dealing with edge-cases that require some degree of human discretion. In other words, you can’t even replace customer service reps with “AI” tools because they are essentially talking dogs, and a talking dog can’t do that job.

Agreed that ‘artificial intelligence’ is a poor term, or at least a poor way to describe LLM. I get the impression that some people believe that the problem of intelligence has been solved, and it’s just a matter of refining the solutions and getting enough computing power, but the reality is that we don’t even have a theoretical framework for how to create actual intelligence aside from doing it the old fashioned way. These LLM/AI tools will be useful, and in some ways revolutionary, but they are not the singularity.

I’ve been looking for an appropriate analogy for the current AI hype and this sums it up perfectly.

Good. No shade on Pocket Pair, they’ve obviously done something that resonates, but imo while Palworld suffers a bit from borrowing too heavily from Pokemon, the real issue is that it borrows too much from Ark. I’d like to see a similar concept executed with an updated interface, crafting system, and progression system. Ark is fine for what it is, but it’s ten years old and Palworld didn’t really make any improvements over the basic structure. It makes sense that they built it the way they did, given that their MO is taking existing component parts and putting them together, rather than designing from the ground up, but I’d like to see a dev team take the same concept and be more intentional about it. There’s a lot that could be done to improve quality of life and create an overall smoother experience, even just by implementing current best-in-class features.

This is surprising to read. Ukraine was never going to have enough ammo, weapons, or manpower to win the war, but I never thought the western media would run out of cope.

Anthropologists discover evidence of ancient subspecies of humans with gigantic, goose-like penises.

Are there any flat-moon conspiracy theorists? I feel like there’s way more evidence that the moon is flat. We see the same side all the time. If it were round, wouldn’t we see different parts of it? We’re supposed to believe that it’s a spheroid orbiting us at the exact rotational speed required so that the same side is facing us all the time? Be serious.

lmao imagine how deeply unserious you’d have to be to suggest that decoupling from China is even possible, let alone feasible or desirable. You’d have to have the discussion in full clown makeup while riding a unicycle.

Flawless. No notes.

Conspiracy nut jobs are eating today

If things don’t turn around for him, he might have to lower himself to try to get votes from non-Republicans.

violent images

I hate to be the one to tell you this, Seattle Times, but this is fetish content.

Mashing the buttons over and over trying to get the high score.

Evergreen headline.

The existence of time travel and the idea of a Temporal Cold War suggests that any given future is just one of many possible futures. The events in Discovery are canon, insofar as they did happen, but whether future Star Trek properties will take the Discovery future as a given is a more open question. Discovery was written very deliberately to avoid being constrained by canon, but that also means that the events are narratively very removed from the rest of the franchise.

My guess is that whoever ends up in charge of making the next chapter of Star Trek will want to establish their own timeline going forward for the same reason that the Discovery creators did, and they’ll largely ignore the easily-ignorable Discovery events, at least as relates to the far future. The alternative is either to set the next series in an even more distant future, which comes with its own issues, or setting it before the 31st century and having to write around a whole bunch of barely-established future canon that only applies to Discovery. I could be wrong, but it seems like the path of least resistance.

Ergolf Hitler