EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

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

that’s just how the internet really works, Things come down, nothing lasts forever.

While this is true, I think a lot of people are surprised that this is the case. For a while, I think there was a sense that the internet was essentially a permanent record, with storage and bandwidth always getting cheaper and bigger, but the reality is that cheaper and bigger doesn’t mean free or unlimited, and so there would inevitably be a point where you couldn’t just store everything and have it available forever. It makes sense once you think about it, but then the question becomes about what gets saved vs what disappears, and why. That’s where there’s fertile ground for conspiracy theories and speculation.

There’s also a really interesting conversation to be had about what we ought to expect in terms of what data and content we do want to archive long-term, and then what kind of infrastructure is required to maintain that. This article is less illustrative of what China is or isn’t doing and more of the issue that we don’t have a clear set of parameters or any long-term precedent for digital content storage, which is exacerbated by the fact that most of the infrastructure is privately owned. Those owners have no real obligation to archive anything except to the extent that it maximizes their profits or shareholder value, which isn’t a great way to decide what does and doesn’t make it into the ‘record’ so to speak. Somewhere along the line, there will be a need and a demand for a more robust public effort to curate and archive internet content.

This is happening on every part of the internet. A lot of old content is disappearing for a variety of reasons. I’m guessing that this is one of those things where they take a phenomenon that is not unique to China and explain how it’s bad when it happens in China because China bad.

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.

Basically fearmongering about China doing what the West has been doing for the last century and is still doing now. Debt-trap imperialism, loss of sovereignty, the crafty Chinese being schemey and underhanded, etc. The headline is all that really matters, these articles should be written by robots at this point.

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.

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.

Looking forward to seeing this very real Russian sonic weapon. It’ll be interesting to see how it works, who designed it, how long it’s existed (which it definitely does). It’s a little worrisome that the Russians were able to keep it a secret so successfully. We don’t even have a theoretical basis for how it works, and yet they’ve managed to not only build it but also deploy it in multiple locations for literally years. Anyways, I hope they eventually find a way to combat this very serious and not at all made up threat.

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.

The question doesn’t necessarily rely on a post-communist society. Assuming so just makes it easier to answer by eliminating some obvious objections, like that they’d have the global financial system forced on them or inevitably become dispossessed and marginalized, all the things that exposure to capitalism does.

The question I have is more about whether there are conditions where non-contact becomes the more ethically dubious position. It seems clear that they don’t want visitors, but if they were suffering greatly or faced existential danger, it would get a lot harder to maintain a non-interference position as you start recognizing that interfering can’t possibly be worse than death.

I wonder, in a hypothetical scenario where we achieve global communism, would it still be appropriate to maintain no contact? Let’s assume for argument’s sake that we can get around the practical issues like disease, would we not owe them some form of consideration? As it stands, I feel like contact with the rest of the world would only make their lives worse and probably end their civilization as they know it, but if we had a far more just and equitable society, would refusing to engage start to resemble a form of chauvinism? Or at least neglect?

I’m honestly not sure what the answer is, or if I’m just wrong and the answer is simpler than I’m making it out to be. I feel like it’s easy to argue for no contact, for a variety of reasons, but is there a point at which non-interference starts to look like a form of captivity?

Evergreen headline.