ar.al🌻
What’s sad is realising you live in a world where every exaggerated analogy you used to make a point is actually happening:
Having Google in schools is like having McDonalds in nutrition class. (I find out that McDonalds does, in fact, sponsor nutrition classes in US schools.)
Having a surveillance capitalist sponsor a conference on free and open source/human rights is like having an oil company sponsor a climate conference. (Forget sponsoring, turns out head of #Cop28 runs an oil firm.)
🤬
Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅
@mdhughes Nice. I suspected the classics wouldn't have missed it. =)
I just realized it's basically the Pearl Harbor story in highly idealized and sanitized form.
The answers there were (1) probably (2) no matter (3) strong maybe (4) no, see Eisenhower's military-industrial complex speech and what happened next
OTOH the idealized subgalactic civilization managed to stop themselves once. Maybe they could do it again.
... can we do it?
I guess I can truly say "we" as my birth nation has pretty much joined NATO now.
Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅
Sci Fi story prompt:
Humanity overcomes its tendencies for boundless expansion and colonization.
We go as far as Mars and Alpha Centauri, some orbital habitats, but then we calm down and find harmony with our cosmic environment. We're multiplanetary, we're looking long-term at what to do when our sun goes bad, and we have some probes looking further out, purely for science and curiosity.
We've found some neighbors who are equally at peace, we have cordial relations.
Now we or our neighbors find signs of a colonial, extractive force in the galaxy, inevitably growing in our direction. It's an existential crisis and humanity removes its inhibitions. Do we have to become a galactic superpower to keep ourselves safe from galactic superpowers? What if our neighbors disagree? Is it ethically defensible? Will we know when to stop?
Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅
@DLink I'd call that "we are alone" in terms of intelligent life.
DLink
@sundogplanets I was listening to a piece on NPR the other day talking about the mitochondria, and that the endosymbiosis between it and cells was such an unlikely event that if there is other life in the universe, it's probably microbial.
Does that count as homeostatic awakening? It's not that they've moved to a lower energy state, it's that they never got the energy to become larger in the first place without something like the mitochondria.
Prof. Sam Lawler
Today I'm talking about the Fermi Paradox in my astro-for-physics-majors class (and I'll talk about it again on Friday in my astro 101 class).
It's a really simple question with completely terrifying/mind-blowing implications, first asked by Enrico Fermi (who, ironically, was one of the Manhattan project scientists...)
Our universe is 13.8 billion years old, our Galaxy is at least 10 billion years old, other planets are surely much older than Earth, with more time to involve intelligent life.
Prof. Sam Lawler
2.b The absolutely most depressing option: there are other civilizations, but technologically advanced civilizations just don't last very long, so the chances that we'd overlap with another civilization nearby and notice their presence is super unlikely.
Prof. Sam Lawler
2. There are other civilizations out there, but they don't travel. This could be because it's just too hard (our furthest probe has traveled something like 0.004% of the distance to the closest star). Or maybe the drive to explore/colonize is a human trait and other intelligent life wouldn't have that drive.
Prof. Sam Lawler
4. The only civilizations that survive long-term are the ones that realize that exponential growth is unsustainable, and completely reorient to a lower-energy state. This would make them undetectable to us.
(I talked about this idea, called "Homeostatic awakening," a few days ago, with lots of interesting comments: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/111478947136600731)
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
Robert McNees
@cigitalgem Why are they being trained on data sets with confidential information??
Gary McGraw
#ML systems can leak confidential data in their training set even with a very silly attack. This is a direct and clear #MLsec issue that applies well beyond the #LLM case
NYbill
Putting it back to original. (Not sure who put the new tuners on. But, it's nice they left the originals in the case )
Qasim Rashid, Esq.
EIon Musk’s Wealth
2009: $.6B
2023: $249B
Jeff Bezos’s Wealth
2009: $6B
2023: $153B
Mark Zuckerberg’s Wealth
2009: $.6B
2023: $105B
Federal Minimum Wage
2009: $7.25
2023: $7.25
Billionaire tax rate: 8.2%
Worker tax rate: 13%
Pay workers.
Tax Billionaires.
Save our economy.
maya 🧙♀️
I want a typographic convention for paraphrasis. ~”Not the thing that was literally said but my approximation of it, but also clearly marked off as reported speech.”
maya 🧙♀️
update: “[the approximation]” has been working great, thank you to all who commented and helped me get here
Evan Prodromou
@joelving we have a good primer on the W3C wiki. I am writing a book for O'Reilly. There are good materials on the web. Developing for other standards does everyone harm. Anyone who is stuck is welcome to ask me personally. If your only choice is developing for another standard or doing nothing, do nothing.
Peter Toft Jølving
All the people criticizing competing decentralized protocols owe it to the #ActivityPub-community to work *hard* on making the spec implementable in a straightforward and incremental way.
"Build for ActivityPub or you're harming us all" is unreasonable for anyone to say given the ambiguity of the spec and the effort required to implement it in its current form.
Evan Prodromou
@joelving there are dozens of AP implementations. Clearly, it's not impossible to implement. It can and should and will be easier. That's no argument for undermining this network. The premise is flawed and the conclusion does not follow.
Peter Toft Jølving
@evan
I know that's what you think, and I very much disagree.
There are good materials and while they help, they do not make it anywhere near straightforward to build for the Fediverse.
Building for specific implementations is easier, but that kinda defeats the purpose.
CurtAdams
@ExtinctionR Not going to respond directly to denialists, but I find it amazing that some people still at least pretend to believe that dumping hundreds of billions of tons of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere will not - trap heat.
Krux-22
Varit på en fest med kliniken. Så jävla alkoholhetsigt av vissa. Skitjobbigt. Drack väl tre glas vin under kvällen som iaf jag känner av. Men mer än så blir fasen bara jobbigt. Inte roligare… och dagen(arna) efter blir pest.
Vissa kvinnliga kollegor beter sig på ett sätt som skulle innebära ett allvarligt snack med chefen om de vore män. Är sjukt påfrestande helt ärligt. De gör också så man ej kan prata med de man vill prata med. De kommer direkt, klämmer sig in mellan och säger konstiga saker
Spherae
@wolfgangcramer @gianluca_grimalda And in my experience most do not try their best. Colleague of mine flies twice every month on a route with a good train connection.
Spherae
@wolfgangcramer @gianluca_grimalda As a researcher I find it hard to refuse to fly. But it has worked until now. Strange, because we as scientists should lead by example.
Wolfgang Cramer
@spherae @gianluca_grimalda Yes for some it is possible to stop flying, and for others less so. We would make a lot of progress already if everyone did what he/she can do.
Wolfgang Cramer
Petition: Climate researcher dismissed because he didn't want to fly: Dr. Grimalda should be allowed to continue his research! https://innn.it/klimaforscher-entlassen
Nowhere Girl
The big threat of "AI" isn't it taking over the world, it's it wasting enormous amounts of water and electricity to make a handful of people rich because they cashed out before the suckers.
You know, like crypto.
Rebecca Watson
on the one hand I’m very excited for an Alien tv show costarring Timothy Olyphant. On the other hand, the only revealed plot point makes me want to burn Hollywood to the ground. 🤷♀️
Dan Gillmor
Linda Yaccarino, the deadbird site's hapless "CEO", has ensured that she'll be remembered not for her genuine prior achievements but rather for her sad tenure as Musk's highly paid sycophant.
Her pathetic memo to the staff -- calling Musk's insane go-fuck-yourself interview "profound" -- demonstrates the depths to which people will sink when they tie their own fate to the whims of powerful sociopaths.
DJM (freelance for hire)
What's on TV today?
Elizabeth Tai :verified:
I am watching, with great interest, at my neighbour's formerly pristine, blue swimming pool turning into an interesting ecological experiment. It is probably creating mutant lifeforms as we speak, and I have a feeling they will take over the world. 🖖
Elizabeth Tai :verified:
@waffles haha yes the houses in Malaysia are often colourful like that
waffles 🧇
@liztai The colour of the houses on the left are so cute!
Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅
Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅
No opinion.
António Who Terres
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