CIRCLE WITH A DOT

we the people want the funk

give up the funk

when you look too long into the abyss, the abyss looks back but that really isn't the problem, that's fine.

it's the bit where the abyss stares down at your chest and reaches out, extending its finger, to hover just over your sternum while going 'hey, you have something on your shirt'

it is important to understand: this is a trick.

If you look down the abyss will get your nose, while going "ha ha, got your nose"

it is vital that you do not let the abyss get your nose.

you know, i like warm weather, violent storms, and the smug satisfaction of being proven right. I like watching arrogance laid low. and right now, all the wrong people are facing selection pressure. And I have the darkest sense of humor i know.

so while i'd much rather live on a planet that isn't hurtling into climate chaos at the same time it is facing a global extinction event, there are still many things to be grateful for, know what I mean?

@futurebird (after seeing the edit picture)

oh, now i see. This is actually a different sort of pathetic insecurity that ends up being adjacent to self defense laws and weapons control restrictions.

Dunno how much of this you already know so if it gets splainey, please forgive it -

there's a whole class of things people carry because they're now afraid to go anywhere without some manner of self defense weapon. They feel naked and exposed unless they can strap up but some places won't let them. And of those weapons there are a subset that are designed to get around restrictions on carrying weapons around. most of those are designed to look like something with a peaceful purpose.

for example, if you are stopped by the cops and searched and they find a pocket knife, that could be bad. pbut if they find a pocket knife with an emergency glass breaker on the hilt, ah, you could have a peaceful reason to have pocketed it and taken it.

if you get in a road rage fight and you pull out a bowie knife from under a seat, there will be questions of premeditated violence. But with something like this doohickey there's room for doubt that you had it in the car for some other reason and just grabbed it when you thought you were in danger.

It's all this grey area thinking applied to the insecurity of young men... some of whom are worried about being hassled by cops, which is unfortunately a little easier to understand than when the college kids with disposable income buy the same thing 'just because'.

You will see things like 'emergency seatbelt cutters' marketed like this. If you look at them carefully, they're meant to be something you can clutch in your fist like brass knuckles or a kubotan. The intention is self defense in places where their preferred weapons would be prohibited. Of course some buy them without ever knowing.

@futurebird equal parts FOMO and disposable income

the EDC world isn't very subtle, it plays the 'real men are prepared for everything, you're a real man aren't you' card right alongside the 'cool guys have this' and 'it's made of the strongest best most prestigious materials, others will envy you'

and it's all performative is the thing, it's done to be seen. you get these boy-men tryna carry the contents of a Batman utility belt in their pockets, and after a while they mostly stop doing it except to take the pics

@winterknight1337 uhhhhhh Alphonse Mucha, the Chautauqua movement, making ice by boiling ammonia, the history of the merkin, the 1766 Nottingham Cheese Riots.... NYC harbor was once the world's preeminent oyster habitat... polish movie posters.... there, that's all i got rn

@wdormann I think we're at the point where it's an opiate of the masses.

I gotta say I'm looking forward to seeing people go cold turkey, especially those who have the habit of taking LLM output and pretending it to be their own acumen at work. Or those who use ChatGPT to craft forum rebuttals and such - when this tide goes out, we'll truly see who brought their swim trunks and who never had them

The illuminati are a myth.

The Illuminaughty, OTOH are not only real, they get together every Tuesday and Saturday. Just an absolute shag tsunami

@sudorandom does human DNA count?

the more news i hear, the more time I spend listening to HEALTH on earbuds

Drugs Exist

#nowplaying https://youtu.be/7ZS4_VWkcwU

@dalias @futurebird

if we are what marketers say we are, we're doomed.

I myself do not think they are the arbiters of reality, but I won't stop you if you do. It is certain that people constantly market 'smart' featured things as AI, when not even LLM features actual intelligence.

I have to say instead that I don't really GAF what they make of things, though, or what gullible people decide they must mean.

I think one can be two different things at the same time -- entirely skeptical of the current crop of businesses and products that are hyping the 'intelligence' of what they are offering for sale, and simultaneously cognizant that a true autonomic general intelligence will be a very different beast altogether.

@toolbear @futurebird

is it?

The author's point about perception is wonderfully post-modern and worthy of consideration about LLMs but I'm not sure it is applicable to the scale of AGI. It's also kind of hard to understand the scope of what they're saying AI is and isn't, underneath all the terms-based uncertainty.

Part of that is no doubt down to the idiosyncrasies of their prose construction -- i am loath to mock someone for writing unclearly in a non-native language but as someone who has both written and edited in English for a living I struggled a bit to elucidate what they were getting at.

True AI will only be so easily confused as being human to the degree that it intends to be deceptive but at the risk of dramaticising -- the difference between LLM and AI will be unmistakable.

@futurebird at the risk of dorksplaining a pedantic nonpoint, we really need to stop calling these LLMs AI. I agree that they aren't the next big thing. They also aren't AI.

the larger point i have in mind is that we aren't done with the AI phase, just one of its preliminaries.

slugging down fruit juice

#nowplaying Soul Coughing, Blue Eyed Devil https://youtu.be/a337K-dBrfw?si=h0JX-hxF8tMveSWo