AbnormalHumanBeing
@AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
Some weird, German communist, hello. He/him pronouns and all that. Obsessed with philosophy and history, secondarily obsessed with video games as a cultural medium. Also somewhat able to program.
- Comment on Winging it 21 hours ago:
Fun fact: Those weird paintings of Jesus as an “adult baby” are actually intentional. This was an attempt at representing that in the interpretation of the time, Jesus entered this world already fully perfected/divine, without having to have gone through an “imperfect” phase.
- The Power of a Niche [Video talking about Fediverse successes when providing spaces for niches the mainstream social media has problems reaching]videos.abnormalbeings.space ↗Submitted 2 days ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Framasoft have reached the first goal of 15000 € for their PeerTube Fundraiser, with 15 days to go!support.joinpeertube.org ↗Submitted 1 week ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 7 comments
- Comment on A postal worker in Harlem attacked a trans woman. She fought back and fatally stabbed him in self-defense. This is how the NY Post framed it. 1 week ago:
Yeah, as much as this framing of “pure evil” is nonsense, where they quote the family of the deceased - everything I found does not make this a legitimate case of self-defense, even if 100% of her story is true.
Quoting from this one:
nydailynews.com/…/jaia-cruz-admits-stabbing-posta…Cruz’s attorney claimed his client, a transgender woman, lashed out against Hodges because the 36-year-old postal worker had made a slur “about her gender identity.”
Hodges and Cruz were waiting in the sandwich line at the deli counter at Joe’s Grocery, on Lenox Ave. near W. 118th St., on Jan. 2 when the postal worker accused her of cutting the line.
Cruz claimed that Hodges had ridiculed her with homophobic remarks and struck her several times before she pulled a knife and fatally stabbed him.
She showed no remorse for her actions when interviewed by detectives at the 28th Precinct in Harlem.
“I hope he’s maggot food,” Cruz told detectives, according to court documents. “I killed him laughing. Oh, well. I’ll piss on his grave.”
While there is some sympathy for her there with me, understanding that some things can just make you snap - unless there are very different laws at play, answering harrassment over a fight over cutting in line with several repeated stabs is legally never self-defense. And morally, not “pure evil” by a long shot, and them presenting it as such is despicable - but trans people are people, and people can do shitty people things, like murder someone in overreaction when a fight escalates. The other guy using slurs, and even striking her is no excuse, if you pull a knife during a fistfight, and then repeatedly stab the other person - with witnesses reporting they tried to break up the fight, so potential for de-escalation was there - even if they are scum and started the thing, you are not just defending yourself, you got angry and out of that anger - no matter how justified - you killed a person.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
While a good observation, and correct - why is this in /c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world?
!microblogmemes@lemmy.world or a similar community would be more fitting, right?
- Comment on MEGA PENGUIN 1 week ago:
Good that they provided both the Emperor penguin and human penguin for scale.
- Comment on SteamOS massively beats Windows on the Legion Go S 1 week ago:
Probably, but I know that at least in the past, their philosophy was to uphold Windows as the one gold standard at all costs, and I doubt that has changed.
It might be one of those non-authentic quotes, but I heard that Steve Ballmer supposedly once said, that they’d rather have people pirate Windows instead of using another OS. No matter if that is an authentic statement - there is a real synergetic effect: If everyone is used to how Windows works at home (even if pirated there), then any potential employer will want to have Windows licenses for their IT and office stuff, which is where the main money lies. That’s one of the reasons Microsoft has been so furiously anti-competition, because their main advantage is being the de-facto standard, and being the only proper gaming system became a part of that strategy, with attempts to further lock-in any gamers into their ecosystem if at all possible (some of which thankfully failed).
So I think making an app for Game Pass for Linux won’t be in their interest any time soon, unfortunately.
- Comment on Framasoft, the devs of PeerTube and other projects, are doing an AMA over on !opensource@lemmy.ml - check it out! 1 week ago:
Sure:
lemmy.world/post/30376256 should work for you.
!opensource@lemmy.ml - should work for anyone that isn’t defederated, it should be the top post at the moment there.
- Submitted 1 week ago to games@lemmy.world | 42 comments
- Framasoft, the devs of PeerTube and other projects, are doing an AMA over on !opensource@lemmy.ml - check it out!lemmyverse.link ↗Submitted 1 week ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 37 comments
- Comment on PeerTube from your pocket! | JoinPeerTube 1 week ago:
Ah, they have made an official post on here, will remove my post of the link so the attention won’t get split up.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 1 week ago:
I think you are underestimating that some skills, like reading comprehension, deliberate communication and reasoning skills, can only be acquired and honed by actually doing very tedious work, that can at times feel braindead and inefficient. Offloading that on something else (that is essentially out of your control, too), and making that a skill that is more and more a fringe “enthusiast” one, has more implications, than losing the skill to patch up your own clothing or calculating things in your head. Understanding and processing information and communicating it to yourself and others is a more essential skill than calculating by hand.
I think the way the article compares it with walking to a grocery store vs. using a car to do even just 3 minutes of driving is pretty fitting. By only thinking about efficiency, one is in risk of losing sight of the additional effects actually doing tedious stuff has. This also highlights, that this is not simply about the technology, but also about the context in which it is used - but technology also dialectically influences that very context. While LLMs and other generative AIs have their place, where they are useful and beneficial, it is hard to untangle those from genuinely dehumanising uses. Especially in a system, in which dehumanisation and efficiency-above-contemplation are already incentivised. As an anecdote: A few weeks ago, I saw someone in an online debate openly stating, they use AI to have their arguments written, because it makes them “win” the debate more often - making winning with the lowest invested effort the goal of arguments, instead of processing and developing your own viewpoint along counterarguments, clearly a problem of ideology as it structures our understanding of ourselves in the world (and possibly just a troll, of course) - but a problem, that can be exacerbated by the technology.
Assuming AI will just be like the past examples of technology scepticism seems like a logical fallacy to me. It’s more than just letting numbers be calculated, it is giving up your own understanding of information you process and how you communicate it on a more essential level. That, and as the article points out with the studies it quotes - technology that changes how we interface with information has already changed more fundamental things about our thought processes and memory retention. Just because the world hasn’t ended does not mean, that it did not have an effect.
I also think it’s a bit presumptuous to just say “it’s true” with your own intuition being the source. You are also qualifying that there are “lazy/dumb” people as an essentialist statement, when laziness and stupidity aren’t simply essentialist attributes, but manifesting as a consequence of systematic influences in life and as behaviours then adding into the system - including learning and practising skills, such as the ones you mention as not being a “bad thing” for them to become more esoteric (so: essentially lost).
To highlight how essentialism is in my opinion fallacious here, an example that uses a hyperbolic situation to highlight the underlying principle: Imagine saying there should be a totally unregulated market for highly addictive drugs, arguing that “only addicts” would be in danger of being negatively affected, ignoring that addiction is not something simply inherent in a person, but grows out of their circumstances, and such a market would add more incentives to create more addicts into the system. In a similar way, people aren’t simply lazy or stupid intrinsically, they are acting lazily and stupid due to more complex, potentially self-reinforcing dynamics.
You focus on deliberately unpleasant examples, that seem like a no-brainer to be good to skip. I see no indication of LLMs being exclusively used for those, and I also see no reason to assume that only “deep, rigorous thinking” is necessary to keep up the ability to process and communicate information properly. It’s like saying that practice drawings aren’t high art, so skipping them is good, when you simply can’t produce high art without, often tedious, practising.
Highlighting the problem in students cheating to not be “properly educated” misses an important point, IMO - the real problem is a potential shift in culture, of what it even means to be “properly educated”. Along the same dynamic leading to arguing, that school should teach children only how to work, earn and properly manage money, instead of more broadly understanding the world and themselves within it, the real risk is in saying, that certain skills won’t be necessary for that goal, so it’s more efficient to not teach them at all. AI has the potential to move culture more into that direction, and move the definitions of what “properly educated” means. And that in turn poses a challenge to us and how we want to manifest ourselves as human beings in this world.
Also, there is quite a bit of hand-waving in “homework structured in such a way that AI cannot easily do it, etc.” - in the worst case, it’d give students something to do, just to make them do something, because exercises that would actually teach e.g. reading comprehension, would be too easy to be done by AI.
- Comment on BlackRock is Suing UnitedHealth for Giving “Too Much Care” to Patients After the CEO was Murdered 1 week ago:
Hooray for laws that make it your legal responsibility to maximise profits for shareholders! Those are doing such amazing things for the overall public good!
/s just in case
- Comment on Your help needed: PhD research on why people choose to self-host 1 week ago:
I believe self hosting saves me money in the short term i believe self hosting saves me money in the long run
I can add to the voices here that have this as one big consideration. With some second-hand hardware, it’s very cheap to set up almost unlimited cloud space for personal use.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 3 comments
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to history@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org | 1 comment
- Comment on We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. 2 weeks ago:
I found this article from last year: www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364
Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.
The wide range should not be too surprising, it’s a mess to keep track of, especially with the current administration. Since then, with Trump immediately pledging to support the “industry”, I can only imagine it consuming even more now.
- Comment on We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think books ever had the same amount of discussion of how they impact our global carbon footprint, and where it comes to “houses” - I doubt people in the neolithic said about their new invention what is being discussed with AI. It is a disingenuous comparison. (And sure, someone somewhere may have said something like that about basically anything, but usually not a large part of professionals from within the field, like is the case with AI.)
This is also not simply Ludditism, the nature of how AI is used currently goes far beyond where it is genuinely useful in a case of investor hype FOMO, and the hidden costs for our efforts against climate change are real, as are the problems for creatives - who sadly need a lot of the “bullshit work” that AI can substitute to survive while honing their craft - as is the quality drop in journalism, as are fundamental questions about how far generative AI models can truly evolve in quality for the massive amount of energy invested, so the usual “just wait until the tech gets better” is not the easy way out to justify draining said energy (and fresh water) on top of what crypto mining has been wasting with data centres in the past years.
Now, those problems aren’t simply problems of the technology, but also of how that technology manifests within market dynamics. But the technology still is not just neutral, and even if we view it as an inevitability, that inevitability does not have to manifest without regulation and within the context of hyped, often unwanted application to basically everything.
Without mechanisms to address problems and to enforce regulation, in lieu of fundamental changes to what market/investment dynamics demand, this is indeed a very questionable technology at this point. And also: To truly love something abstract, like “technology”, means being able to - sometimes harshly - criticise it. Think the meme of a “tech bro” with a fully automated house vs the IT guy who barely has tech stuff beyond their PC and some stuff tinkered on passionately in their own time.
- Comment on Just saw this by chance: Donations and Patrons for Lemmy development surged massively on Liberapay in the last weeks! 3 weeks ago:
Thank you!
- Comment on Just saw this by chance: Donations and Patrons for Lemmy development surged massively on Liberapay in the last weeks! 3 weeks ago:
Ah, yes, that was right at the time where I was having peak personal stress/health issues and only did the bare minimum admin work on Lemmy and my other platforms, no wonder I missed it. Glad to see people actually responded to the call to action, though!
- Comment on Just saw this by chance: Donations and Patrons for Lemmy development surged massively on Liberapay in the last weeks! 3 weeks ago:
They posted asking for people to stand up for them.
Ah, that makes sense - I missed that, but have been happily giving them a bit of money for years now. I don’t have a lot to spare, but every little bit helps with crowdfunded stuff like that.
- Comment on Just saw this by chance: Donations and Patrons for Lemmy development surged massively on Liberapay in the last weeks! 3 weeks ago:
Great, now I won’t be able to unsee that ever again!
- Just saw this by chance: Donations and Patrons for Lemmy development surged massively on Liberapay in the last weeks!lemmy.abnormalbeings.space ↗Submitted 3 weeks ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 84 comments
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Check the sticky post about rules concerning this:
!fediverse@lemmy.world is not a place to file your grievances with “free speech”, disrupting users, moderation, etc.
If you have problems with users: File complaints to the mods or just block them.
If you have problems with mods: File complaints with admins of the instance or just migrate to an alternative community.
If you have problems with an entire instance: Just leave it.
And to add: If you do want/need to highlight misbehaviour, stalking or even just rant about injustices happening publicly, there are places like !fediverselore@lemmy.ca (rules prohibit stuff you are personally involved in, though) and !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com where it concerns mod/admin abuse.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org | 1 comment
- Comment on YouTube's new ad strategy is bound to upset users: YouTube Peak Points utilise Gemini to identify moments where users will be most engaged, so advertisers can place ads at the point. 3 weeks ago:
It would be wrong to call it a replacement, but this is a good place to plug !peertube@lemmy.world - there’s more quality content on there than many might suspect, especially if you are into FOSS andpeoplde tinkering with stuff they are passionate about.
- Comment on The joy of going through pregnancy along with your sister 3 weeks ago:
Also, there isn’t even a way to tell if this is real. Sure, it could be, but chances are high someone took a picture of a couple that look kind of “white trash” from who knows where, and just used it to create outrage/superiority-circlejerk-bait.
- Submitted 1 month ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Submitted 1 month ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 0 comments
