nednobbins
@nednobbins@lemm.ee
- Comment on Using Ubuntu may give off a hipster vibes to the average PC user, but within the Linux community its has the opposite effect. 5 days ago:
Thank you! I can finally fill the void that vibeless OSes have left in my soul.
All joking aside, it does raise a good point.
There are many things that can be objectively analyzed and it might not be a good idea to choose them based off of vibes. When you’re designing those things it’s still a good idea to take vibes into account because people will ignore all that and put googly eyes on their 3-D printer.
- Comment on Using Ubuntu may give off a hipster vibes to the average PC user, but within the Linux community its has the opposite effect. 1 week ago:
You pick your OS based on vibes?
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 3 weeks ago:
Only a little.
Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.
The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.
This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.
Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: “good time not see” But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
Covering the second half:
I hadn’t heard of Elsagate and had to look it up. How does AI factor into that? As near as I can tell Elsagate started with some random guy making disturbing videos and mislabeling them as child-friendly.
I’m a good bit older than you so my nostalgia doesn’t take me lead me to any of the title you mentioned. For the most part it’s stories that aren’t covered by anyone’s IP. My childhood had a lot of folk tales recited from memory. Those stories were fairly common but there would be regional variation and most tellers would put their own twist on the stories (for example, when my Aunt told the story of the Seven Kids she would do a particular squeaky voice when she got to the part where the wolf swallows the chalk (in her version it was always chalk). That’s actually quite close to how LLMs work. She heard various versions of that story throughout her life, then she repeats it with some other bits that she incorporated from the rest of her life. I do the same thing when I retell the story to my children. It’s basically the same story my Aunt told but I translate it into English and add some modern slang.
What would stop an AI from writing Scar into the Lion King? If you told an LLM to, “Write Hamlet but have all the royal family be Lions,” it’s likely you’d get some evil lion version of Claudius.
There were a lot of homosexual coded villains in older media. There were also a lot of films where all the black people were bad guys, all the Asian people were goofy servants and all the women were housewives or prizes. The general consensus today is that those choices were horribly discriminatory. If AI manages to avoid that sort of behavior it would be a good thing.
The flip side is also that artists can just as easily slip hateful material into otherwise reasonable art. Human history is full of unethical choices. Even if the AI itself doesn’t have ethics the people using it can be held to the same ethical standards as the users of any other tool or medium.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
OK. With that change we get:
AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually want but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?
Is that accurate?
The rest of your comment seems to be an other thread so I’ll respond separately.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
I can live with that.
I’d support a UBI so that anyone who wants to can just make art for their own fulfillment. If someone wants AI art though they should be allowed to use that.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
That wasn’t intentional.
Would it be more accurate for me to change “want” to “need” or the other way around?
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
It’s an awkward phrase but I was trying to stay as close to the original vocabulary as possible. I think the point still stands if you replace “not-actual-art” with illustration. People couldn’t get what they were looking for so they paid more for the next best thing. Now they can get something closer to what they’re looking for at a lower price.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
I get that and there are a lot of jobs that people used to pay for and no longer do.
The entire horse industry has mostly collapsed. I couldn’t get a job as scribe. With any luck, all the industries around fossil fuel will go away. We’re going to pay less to most people in those industries too.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
I’m going to try to paraphrase that position to make sure I understand it. Please correct me if I got it wrong.
AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually need but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?
Is that correct or did I miss or mangle something?
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
I’d love to see some data on the people who believe that AI fundamentally can’t do art and the people who believe that AI is an existential threat to artists.
Anecdotally, there seems to be a large overlap between the adherents of what seem to be mutually exclusive positions and I wish I understood that better.
- Comment on Germans: what genocide? 1 month ago:
It’s one thing to refrain from commenting but supporting Israel makes it clear that Germany learned nothing.
- Comment on I hear phrases like "half-past", "quarter til", and "quarter after" way less often since digital clocks have became more commonplace. 2 months ago:
Laughs in Austrian.
The convention for (15-minute) fractional hours is to name the fraction of the time from the previous hour to the next one.
eg:
3:15 -> “viertel vier” = “quarter four”
3:30 -> “halb vier” (“hoiba viere” in dialekt) = “half four”
3:45 -> “dreiviertel vier” = “three quarters four” - Comment on Elon Musk Bought Twitter to Settle His Jet-Tracking Beef, New Book Claims 2 months ago:
I wouldn’t doubt that was his initial motivation for making the suggestions.
I also remember that he tried to back out of buying Twitter multiple times. While doing so he was pretty public about all the crazy crap he would do with Twitter.
Despite all that Twitter went to a judge and got them to force Musk to complete the sale. He’s a crappy CEO for Twitter but it’s kind of on the former Twitter leadership for forcing that situation.
- Comment on They use to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia. Now we know. Wikipedia is the only website you can trust. 6 months ago:
When “they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia” it wasn’t in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.
That’s still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.
The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren’t saying that you shouldn’t use it at all. They’re telling you not to stop there. That’s exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.
If you’re researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you’ve ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren’t primary sources. In egregious cases the “sources” are just opinion pieces.
- Comment on Maybe AI won't be taking all of our jobs after all? 6 months ago:
I’m guessing this argument has been going on longer than either of us can remember.
There was a long time when guns were considered interesting toys but not something a sane person would take onto the battlefield; especially not without some sort of backup. Hell, the “three musketeers” were more known for their fencing than their firearms skill.
I’m sure back in the day some chucklehead complained that papyrus was cute but anything important had to be carved in stone tablet.
- Comment on Maybe AI won't be taking all of our jobs after all? 6 months ago:
Bill has made some famously bad predictions in the past. Here’s a small sample independent.co.uk/…/the-worst-things-bill-gates-e…
It’s possible that the current $100 billion market size of AI and all the AI job openings are completely misplaced but that’s indication that a lot of people have pretty high expectations that AI will continue to grow.
- Submitted 6 months ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 6 comments
- Comment on Maybe AI won't be taking all of our jobs after all? 6 months ago:
Every time I see posts like this I remember a frequent argument I had in the early 2000’s.
Every time I talked with photography students (I worked at an art school) or a general photography enthusiast, I got the same smug predictions about digital photography. The resolution sucked, the color sucked, the artist doesn’t have enough control, etc. They all assured me that digital photography might be nice for casual vacation photos and maybe a few specialty applications but no way, no how, not even when hell freezes over would any serious photographer ever consider digital.
At the time I would think back to my annoying grade school discussions with teachers who assured me that (dot matrix) printers just sucked. Serious writing was done by hand and if you didn’t know cursive you might as well be illiterate.
For some reasons people keep forgetting that technology marches on. The dumb glitches that are so easy to make fun of now, will get addressed. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI development. Every major company and country is developing them. The pay rates for AI developer jobs attract huge amounts of people to solve those problems.
- Comment on What are some alternatives to bars that stay open late for folks that don't drink alcohol? 8 months ago:
That’s unfortunate but not terribly surprising.
Humans will build a bar as soon as there are more than two people that want to drink but you typically need much larger populations before you get a sober community at all. You usually only get dedicated sober spaces when those communities get big enough.
Fortunately, as many others on this thread have pointed out, there are many sober options beyond dedicated sober spaces.
- Comment on What are some alternatives to bars that stay open late for folks that don't drink alcohol? 8 months ago:
You can check out soberbarsnearme.com
- Comment on The mist Texan of all expressions - Y'All - is ungendered and therefore woke 8 months ago:
Yeah. We mostly think of grammatical number as a simple choice of singular vs plural but that’s not what we do in real life.
We generally have multiple labels that describe the concept of progressively expanding circles of what’s included when we think of ourselves.
There’s the very narrow sense of I/me/myself. We have various expansions around us/all’y’all. Jamaicans have the phrase “I and I” which focuses on the individual but explicitly calls out the connection with others.
- Comment on The mist Texan of all expressions - Y'All - is ungendered and therefore woke 8 months ago:
We also have “Ya’” where we elide the entire ending and you need to determine plural vs singular from context. For example, “Ya’ can’t get thea, les’ ya been there befoa.”
- Comment on The mist Texan of all expressions - Y'All - is ungendered and therefore woke 8 months ago:
“You” is also ungendered. There seems to be a common idea that English is missing a second person plural. We have one, it’s “you”. We just stopped using the second person singular. That’s what all those variations of “thee, thou, thy” etc were.
“Y’all” would be a superpluralization. If that’s still not enough we also have the ultraplural form of, “all y’all”
- Comment on Why do most religious conservatives support capitalist ideology? 9 months ago:
I’d start by narrowing the scope of this question to conservative Christians in the US and Europe. India has a larger population that the US and the EU combined, is quite religiously conservative and leans socialist. Even though the Catholic Church issued a “Decree Against Communism” in 1949, that has since been amended and many Catholics around the world embrace socialism. While modern Muslims do participate in market economies, Islam has some fairly strict laws against capitalism; Sukuk is the complex workaround they use in order to get against their prohibition against charging interest.
For Christians in the US and Europe I think there are a few major components.
Christianity has had strong capitalist elements for a long time. In particular, John Calvin argued, among other things, that God rewards good Christians in this life as well as the next. These rewards can take the form of material wealth and therefore material wealth is evidence of God’s favor. This philosophy was obviously extremely popular among the wealthy.
After WWII the US government wanted a way to convince people that our erstwhile allies, the USSR and China should now be considered enemies. One obvious element to emphasize was that they were both Communists. An element of Communism was godlessness, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” So the US took the contrary stance and presented itself as a Christian nation. Two of the more obvious results were that “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance and Congress replaced the unofficial “E Pluribus unum” (out of many, one) with, “In God we trust.” Since it was primarily intended to be anti-communist it was, effectively, pro-capitalist.
In the US there was also a deliberate shift when George HW Bush realized that evangelical Christians made up a large part of the Republican base. At the time churches had a fairly strong aversion to politics. They generally considered politics and economics to be part of the profane world and thought it was beneath them. He managed to convince them that the profane wasn’t just irrelevant to spiritual health, it was an active threat. By this view, good Christians couldn’t ignore politics they had to take an active role to help fight Satan. Since the Republicans were the ones actively recruiting Evangelicals into politics they made sure the message stayed supportive of their policies (including economic policies).