andrewrgross
@andrewrgross@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter 3 days ago:
First, thanks for that explanation. That’s interesting.
Is there a good place to learn more? I can see why having custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tools are good, but I still have a lot questions.
First, is there a genuine benefit to dissociating a users identity from their server? I think the connection between users and their home instances are a brilliant innovation. They seem to bring village culture back to the internet. They help people associate within networks below just the global level. I think the atomization of people online has been a part of why there is so little trust.
- Comment on Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter 4 days ago:
I don’t understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.
Decentralized? Yep. It’s got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You’ll have a lot of legal problems and most people don’t want it, but the option exists.
Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn’t controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government… well we have that. It exists. It’s pretty okay. Go use it.
- Comment on What is the General Consensus of Web3? 4 days ago:
Thanks for this clarification!
- Comment on I just heard about Brazilian Butt Lifts which is a procedure where they take fat deposits from somewhere on your body and place it in your butt? 2 weeks ago:
Honestly, I don’t recall the details. What I shared was my best recollection. I think what you said sounds reasonable, but I can’t reliably say.
- Comment on I just heard about Brazilian Butt Lifts which is a procedure where they take fat deposits from somewhere on your body and place it in your butt? 2 weeks ago:
Hi. I’m not a doctor, but I can opine as a biologist.
The transplanted cells have blood vessels, because all cells need a supply of oxygen to avoid expiring. If they didn’t have a supply of blood, they’d quickly turn necrotic.
When you deplete your short term energy stores, the body converts fat molecules within fat cells into sugar, then shuttles those through the body in the blood stream.
The body doesn’t draw on fat stores within the body in a totally even way, so I don’t know how quickly it would draw from the transplanted cells, but it works presumably still burn fat from these cells when needed.
And the reverse is true as well: when excess sugar is available, the body would generate new fat molecules to fill those cells, and if necessary make new fat cells as well.
- Comment on Promoted on TikTok, ‘No Thanks’ boycott app targets products tied to Israel 2 weeks ago:
Obviously not. But that’s true to some degree for all news sources. I read Times of Israel through a lens of context, just like I do for the NY Times, The Guardian, The Intercept, etc.
I think it’s incredibly useful to see what a country reads about itself. Not only is that true even for countries engaged atrocities: it’s especially true for countries engaged in atrocities.
- Comment on Promoted on TikTok, ‘No Thanks’ boycott app targets products tied to Israel 2 weeks ago:
I find the Times of Israel to be a decent source. They’re obviously biased in favor of Israel, but it’s not behind a paywall and they’re far more informative than The NY Post, for instance. I think they’re seem less biased then the WSJ, frankly.
Overall, a useful insight into mainstream discourse in Israel with fairly accurate reporting.
- Comment on Promoted on TikTok, ‘No Thanks’ boycott app targets products tied to Israel 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think they mean that tiktok is being banned over this app specifically: I just interpreted their comment to mean that tiktok has been an ongoing nuisance to the American mainstream political establishment.
- Comment on Promoted on TikTok, ‘No Thanks’ boycott app targets products tied to Israel 2 weeks ago:
That’s cool. Do you have any details?
- Comment on Tesla is reportedly laying off ‘more than 10 percent’ of its workforce 4 weeks ago:
It’s either because of DEI or work from home. It’s but clear how, but it’s got to be one of those.
- Comment on Experimental Video Game Made Purely With AI Failed Because Tech Was 'Unable to Replace Talent' 1 month ago:
That’s a great image.
RIP Norm.
- Comment on Experimental Video Game Made Purely With AI Failed Because Tech Was 'Unable to Replace Talent' 1 month ago:
I don’t doubt that AI tools can be used to make great games, but I think part of the reason so many people disagree with you is because:
- You claim “The best games will mostly be AI created eventually”, and I think most people question on what basis you think that AI will produce overall better quality. If you said that it’s faster, or can allow indie studios to complete with AAA, that makes sense. Attributing quality to it – at this stage – seems odd.
- It’s unlikely, imo, that the best games will be created by AI as opposed to with AI.
I think using AI throughout the process so that one person can achieve the productivity of a whole team is a credible vision. But to say that games will created “By AI” implies that a generative AI engine will generate the code de novo to a complete game. Which I think is already possible, but it will be very, very hard for such a system to innovate newer games. Because currently, these tools rely on replicating features in their training, so their ability to create quests that match a new genre or to generate dialogue that is funny in the context of the story is going to be very impaired.
By and large, I think current evidence shows that Human-AI cooperation almost always improves upon AI performance alone, and this is particularly the case when creating things for humans to enjoy.
- Comment on Made this for my mum's birthday (we're both trekkies) 1 month ago:
This is awesome!
I know it’s natural that your eye can’t help but pick up defects, but overall it looks great, and each project looks a bit better.
- Comment on How the World’s Biggest Plane Would Supersize Wind Energy 1 month ago:
That’d be my assumption too. I just think it’s weird that the WSJ appears to cover the transition to renewables with some petty insistence on NOT discussing any climate issues.
- Comment on How the World’s Biggest Plane Would Supersize Wind Energy 1 month ago:
I’m interested, although a lot of this sounds very carbon intensive, which is not discussed in the article. I could imagine that it might still be carbon negative after a certain number of years of operation, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the benefits were negligible.
Also: you know how in the Onion, the last line is usually the punchline to the article? I think it’s pretty hilarious that this article finishes this way:
The plane would be able to fit one large, offshore-sized blade at a time, or it could carry as many as four shorter blades. Lundstrom also thinks it has other uses for moving large equipment for the military or oil-and-gas industry.
I’m glad wind is taking off, but Jesus tap dancing Christ, the Wall Street Journal crowd is so fucking determined to pretend that this isn’t all taking place against the backdrop of a civilization-scale threat. It’s… it’s exhausting.
- Comment on Palestinian citizen of Israel granted UK asylum in case said to be unprecedented 2 months ago:
That’s very interesting.
- Comment on is this copium or hopium or schizophrenia? 2 months ago:
Check again. He never said it wouldn’t!
He’s not forgetting: that’s what he’s proposing!
- Comment on Want a 3D printer in New York? Get ready for fingerprinting and a 15 day wait 2 months ago:
That sounds very reasonable.
- Comment on Want a 3D printer in New York? Get ready for fingerprinting and a 15 day wait 2 months ago:
What I’m talking about specifically is NY v. Bruen. The supreme Court ruled that states can’t pass gun restrictions that aren’t reflective of historical tradition.
As you can imagine, that makes drafting gun restrictions that are permitted under this reading of the construction nearly impossible.
This kind of ban on 3d printers is an terrible but not unsurprising consequence of this really batshit ruling.
- Comment on Want a 3D printer in New York? Get ready for fingerprinting and a 15 day wait 2 months ago:
I think the reason is because legislators are looking for gun restrictions that can pass, and the combination of legislative obstruction and the Supreme Courts recent ruling against pretty much any gun law written after 1860 or something has basically made it impossible to regulate the purchase of actual guns. So now they’re looking for whatever law they can pass regardless of whether it makes sense.
It’s fucked up.
- Comment on CEOs say generative AI will result in job cuts in 2024 3 months ago:
Are you familiar with the term “capitalist realism”?
- Comment on Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off 3 months ago:
THIS. This right here is the problem.
If Ubisoft wants consumers to give them a chance, they should call up Netflix and Disney and Hulu and politely ask them to not demonstrate what the fuck happens if players put trust in the platforms that we’re assured will be reliable and consistent places to store games for years and years to come.
The problem really isn’t streaming games and cloud storage as a concept. The problem is that the people trying to implement it have demonstrated over and over and over how both untrustworthy and incompetent they are. That’s it. If the platforms had credibility and accountability, this probably wouldn’t be nearly as big a deal.
- Comment on Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off 3 months ago:
What’s funny is that they’re not detached from the gaming industry. The average person, if you asked them “Do you think players like live service games?” they’d say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
These people have a lot of really nuanced, heavily informed opinions on the history, present, and future of gaming. They’re just all highly unpopular outside of people who demand to get a check in the mail immediately if not sooner because they just bought a share in a company they know little or nothing about.
- Comment on Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off 3 months ago:
These people are like an adversarial neural network being trained to find the most efficient ways to piss of their own customer base.
I think it’s important to note that the entertainment landscape as a whole has been changing, and those changes have mixed with the shitty investor culture that already existed to create a terrible set of incentives that are wildly misaligned with consumer sentiment. I say this because I think that if we want things to change, we need to look at root causes.
The entertainment industry is feeling very threatened. It’s hard to make money. That’s a reality. And all the solutions to the problem are fucked up attempts to find ways to get players to give more money for things they don’t want.
I think we need a better patronage model.
- Comment on CEOs say generative AI will result in job cuts in 2024 3 months ago:
Yeah, what’s unfortunate about CEO predictions is that they can kind of just will their expected result into being by acting on it whether it’s sound or not.
Still, I think it’s well past time we started preparing for high surplus labor. We’re already in the early stages of post scarcity, and if we don’t embrace something like socialism, we’re getting more dystopia.
- Comment on SAG-AFTRA Approves AI Voice Actors, Enrages the VA Community 3 months ago:
This is a tough subject, because I agree with you.
I’m not sure what a good agreement would look like in this circumstance. I think, even if this sounds outlandish, we need to start preparing for a post-work world.
I don’t mean post-work in the sense that no one will work, just that the assumption that everyone should find a job is breaking down. Surplus labor is growing, and it’s going to grow more and more, faster and faster, in different industries before others. And it’s going to be disruptive.
Currently, I think that labor unions are a critical part of securing worker rights, but this is another example that they’re not going to be enough to respond to shifts on the order we’re witnessing. We need strong unions, but we need a broad social movement towards guaranteed services as well.
- Comment on Six months after the initial reddit surge (graphs) 4 months ago:
Thanks for sharing this, this is really interesting.
My hope is that when Reddit announces their IPO, more people will start talking about wishing for alternatives. I hope this motivates a few people who checked it out and left and lots of new people to take a first look, and when they do I hope they find an already active community that produces enough content to retain more people and generate more content.
- Comment on OpenAI CEO says Muslim tech workers fear retaliation for speaking out 4 months ago:
u/Otter@lemmy.ca provided an output of its reasoning when asked to explain this behavior, and I think it’s worth examining.
The short version is that when asked why it can joke about some groups and not others it speculates that it maybe because it’s output is based on training data, and its safeguards recognize that the training data on some topics is more likely than others to be lower in cultural literacy and higher in offensive stereotypes, and this can lead it to decline a request. That sounds like a fairly credible explanation.
- Comment on OpenAI CEO says Muslim tech workers fear retaliation for speaking out 4 months ago:
That sounds like it was able to provide a pretty sensible assessment of its own limitations.
I think this sounds like a pretty good implementation of guide rails. Obviously it’s a little jarring to ask for a joke about one group and get a very bland-but-inoffensive joke, and then ask for a joke about another group and hear something like ‘Error: my heuristics indicate low confidence in my ability to provide a joke about that group without saying something that would be considered offensive.’
But that’s better than having it give an offensive joke. And I think it’s concern is valid. If it’s learned humor from the internet, jokes about Muslims are far more likely to be unintentionally offensive. I hope it learns to tell jokes better, but until then this I think this more of a sign of success than failure.
- Comment on OpenAI CEO says Muslim tech workers fear retaliation for speaking out 4 months ago:
I would second this. Based on what I’ve read, he seems like a pretty standard megalomaniacal tech billionaire, but when you’re right you’re right. And his take here is right, and I’m grateful for it. Especially coming from a fellow Jew. Our voices in particular are a powerful tool for protecting our Muslim brothers and sisters.