AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on Have you all not notice there are NO communist countries? 2 days ago:
Since a theoretical communist society would be stateless, the idea of a fully communist country is an oxymoron. Instead you have countries claiming to be transitional states that are laying the groundwork for true communism at some point in the future.
- Comment on Was the fall of Rome this stupid? 2 days ago:
The “Fall of Rome” conflates a lot of different events, covering over a thousand years:
- The end of the Republic
- The Crisis of the Third Century
- The fall of the western empire
- The capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade
- The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire
The most commonly thought of event is the fall of the western empire… and while it was preceded by some stupid policy decisions, they weren’t notably more stupid than many other decisions the empire made over the previous five centuries.
- Comment on Ad companies should just cut out the middle man and pay me to watch their ads 1 week ago:
Like holding companies?
- Comment on Ad companies should just cut out the middle man and pay me to watch their ads 1 week ago:
Or you could condition yourself to have a negative reaction to all advertising, then charge the ad companies to block their ads.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I assume you mean this as a warning rather than a suggestion.
But in any case, actually revoking UBI would provoke more protests from those affected, who would then have nothing else to lose—the only coercive power would come from threatening to revoke it without actually doing so.
But even threatening UBI would cause a widespread electoral backlash from everyone else who rather have a reliable income not dependent on the prevailing political winds.
- Comment on When We Sleep Our Mind Creates A World In Dream Then Can't We Believe The Power Of The God? Human Birth Is To Attain The Supreme 1 week ago:
To be fair, the community name is semantically ambiguous.
- Comment on Block chain to stop AI scams. 1 week ago:
I think you’d have better luck doing it the other way around: fingerprint known non-AI content, and treat everything else as potential AI.
- Comment on I think the reason we evolved 5 fingers is so we can carry hot serving dishes farther by alternating which one is in contact with the hot thing. 1 week ago:
Actually, that’s why multicellular life evolved—bacteria and protists couldn’t carry hot serving dishes for shit.
- Comment on Is it true that the natural lifespan of humans is only 38 years old and we only live past that because of loads of modern medicines/technology? 2 weeks ago:
It’s saying 38 is the maximum lifespan predicted by their model—but it also says their model has an R^2 of 0.76, meaning their model only accounts for about 76% of the actual measured variation. And then they mention other factors that could account for the remaining 24% of the variation, including post-reproductive-age lifespan.
- Comment on Is it true that the natural lifespan of humans is only 38 years old and we only live past that because of loads of modern medicines/technology? 2 weeks ago:
Unless I missed something, the word “telomeres” doesn’t occur in the article or its source paper—rather, it discusses the rate of DNA methylation.
IMO, the key passage in the paper is this:
However, any genetic regulation for a species may potentially be a secondary factor as there may be other environmental selective pressures. This may be the case with species which have lifespans post reproductive age and therefore, there may be non-genetic factors that may be more predictive of their maximum lifespan.
I suspect that the methylation rate is actually tracking the end of the reproductive stage of the lifecycle, rather than the length of the lifecycle as a whole.
- Comment on Why does information want to be free 2 weeks ago:
Storing information while simultaneously keeping it private requires a ongoing resource commitment; and there’s always a non-zero chance that it gets corrupted or leaked anyway. So in the long run, all information either becomes public or gets lost.
- Comment on I've been alive for the entire narrative of the internet and it's crazy to think any of the newer generations will be able to sort it all out for themselves. 2 weeks ago:
The mediaiferous period.
- Comment on Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is not the definition of insanity. It's the definition of practice. 2 weeks ago:
We have (at least) two fundamentally different types of knowledge—there’s our intuitive world model that does improve with repetition learning (much like a neural network) and does change with practice; and there’s rule-based knowledge that improves by eliminating possible rules/theories via observation.
My interpretation of Einstein’s quip is that insanity consists in confusing the two—thinking that rule-based knowledge can improve by performing the same tests over and over until the results match our theories, instead of modifying our theories to reflect the results.
- Comment on Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say 2 weeks ago:
To distract us from the other bots.
- Comment on Should you copy a person's accent when pronouncing their name? 2 weeks ago:
I think it depends on whether the sound difference actually makes a phonemic difference in the source language—like, would a native speaker hear it as an oddly-pronounced version of the correct sound, or as a distinct, different sound in that language?
- Comment on People with six fingers can get away with anything, because everyone will assume that any videos of them were AI-generated. 3 weeks ago:
That’s assuming the video isn’t dismissed as fake before they even look for matching suspects.
- Comment on people who use AI a lot would probably be the most likely to get their exact wish from a genie. 3 weeks ago:
Nah—with AIs it’s all about finding the prompt most likely to generate the desired output based on statistical correlations, not logical rigor.
- Comment on People with six fingers can get away with anything, because everyone will assume that any videos of them were AI-generated. 3 weeks ago:
I can see someone watching PB now and saying “what’s up with Count Rugen—couldn’t they hire a real actor?”
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 15 comments
- Comment on Palingenetic Ultranationalism is a concise definition of fascism coined by political theorist Roger Griffin 3 weeks ago:
Palingenetic means rebirth or renewal.
Ah, I assumed it meant a tendency to generate Sarah Palin.
- Comment on Magic is real, we just know how it works and call it technology 3 weeks ago:
Belief in magic is kind of hard to define, anthropologically—we tend to call anything that contradicts currently-known laws of physics “magic”, but that makes the term contingent on the observer’s knowledge rather than the believer’s. (For instance, things like astrology and alchemy that we regard as magic now were thought to be the result of natural forces in the Middle Ages.)
I would call magic the belief that there are multiple, independent systems of causality, whether you fully understand those systems or not.
- Comment on Would **Nothing Nowhere All Seperately** be the prequel or sequel to **Everything Everywhere All At Once**? 3 weeks ago:
Depends on whether you want to construct the negation of a compound descriptor by taking the negation of their intersection or the intersection of their negations.
One construction would give you “Something Somewhere Sequentially”; the other would give you “Nothing Anywhere Ever”.
- Comment on Religious texts contributed to the em-dashes that chatbots use. 3 weeks ago:
Each dash has a different use case that all professionally-typeset books adhere to (not just religious texts).
Hyphens are for compound words; en-dashes are for ranges or (on rare cases) to disambiguate multiple levels of hyphens; and em-dashes are for parenthetical dashes (for publishers who don’t use spaced en-dashes instead).
- Comment on World’s first AI-designed viruses a step towards AI-generated life 3 weeks ago:
We’ve already created antibiotic-resistant bacteria—but what happens when bacteria evolve resistance to AI?
- Comment on Google will use hashes to find and remove nonconsensual intimate imagery from Search 3 weeks ago:
Ah yes—the only known force weaker than gravity.
- Comment on Google will use hashes to find and remove nonconsensual intimate imagery from Search 3 weeks ago:
First I’ve heard of StopNCII… what’s to stop it from being abused to remove (say) images of police brutality or anything else states or corporations don’t want to be seen?
- Comment on In the wild, chimps likely ingest the equivalent of several alcoholic drinks every day 4 weeks ago:
With the state of their habitat, who can blame them?
- Comment on Education doesn't increase intelligence by making people memorize things, but by constantly reminding people that they might be wrong. 4 weeks ago:
I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making it available to your brain for pattern recognition.
Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.
- Comment on Space colonization would create so many jobs for everyone. Not great jobs but jobs. 4 weeks ago:
Yeah—“job creation” only makes sense in the timeframe of making incremental changes to industry to adjust to changes in the labor pool. On the timeframe of decisions that alter future demographics, job creation is a distorted and detrimental lens to look through.
- Comment on Space colonization would create so many jobs for everyone. Not great jobs but jobs. 4 weeks ago:
Only if you ignore the opportunity cost—i.e., the number of terrestrial jobs that could have been created with the same investment.