bitofhope

joined 1 year ago
[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

I was just notified of the corollary that eating 18 shrimp rounds up to cannibalism.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 21 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (4 children)

I'm a full bottle of wine in (which is not an invitation to remind me of what day of the week it is) and I will have to take the time to ingest the post in its full madness tomorrow, but the you managed to summarize my main objection to the simulation hypothesis very quickly and very succintly:

Are the implications really that intriguing, beyond a “that’s wild duuude” you exhale alongside the weed smoke in your college dorm?

The simulation hype is not just unfalsifiable, it doesn't even have implications. Most religions at least have some normative claims or claim instrumental utility to go with their metaphysical claims, like "don't eat shellfish unless you really need to or you will have a shitty afterlife". The simulation hypothesis is just "maybe the math that described how stuff works is being calculated by a computer", as if it makes any difference whether the universe runs on silicon, an abacus, some rocks in a desert, God's own analytical engine, Microsoft Excel, or if our physical universe is actually the outermost reality out there. From our context it's an intellectual dead end. At best, we might find a way to exploit the bugs and features of our simulation for our benefit, and that's not a novel concept either. It's called engineering (among other names).

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago

Well you know, it's not quite perfect. For a movie set in Morocco, not too many Maghrebin in the main cast, which also adds a bit of hypocritical bitterness in the pivotal La Marseillaise scene. It's a powerful moment of resistance against the nazis, but also they're singing the French national anthem in a colonial protectorate of France.

It's an all-time classic, but we shouldn't get carried away and ignore its flaws.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 5 points 5 days ago

Oh my god, that is right on the edge between making all of this either a lot more depressing or even funnier.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Actually, I kinda want to say more than that.

It's a movie about a guy who has grown cynical from years of anti-fascist action, though he's bit tsundere about his allegiance. In the end he chooses to bear the jealousy over his lover and abandon his life of convenience and comfort to fight for what's ultimately right.

It's a movie that resonates all these decades later, forgoing easy answers for a real stance. And it's amazingly quotable.

Also remembered this video essay about it.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Not to make too hot a take, but Casablanca is a really good movie.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 4 points 6 days ago

This Adolf guy kinda had me when he was just a dude traumatized by war who liked buildings and was kinda shit at drawing them, but his political takes were full on yikes and he quickly lost me when it came to the arts as well.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, as a kid I was kinda the archetypal nerd. Short, fat, airheaded, besserwisser, straight A's,* into manga and video games. My best friend for most of primary school was the guy with even better grades, but tall, handsome and a national championship level athlete.

Then puberty hit me pretty early and suddenly I was about median height for my age, I could do pull-ups while most of my classmates couldn't, and even though I wasn't that fond of gym class, I was mostly motivated enough to get a decent grade just for trying a little.

The nerd/jock thing always felt like an American thing from an older generation that wasn't taken seriously. Maybe it was acknowledged by an overthinker like me, but to even bring up the distinction was kinda nerdy itself. It definitely wasn't the defining social divisor in my adolescent life.

*Or rather, nines and tens on the weird 4 to 10 scale Finnish primary education uses.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 12 points 6 days ago

Funeral? Poppycock, KPIs are great. Bloodwork is coming in excellent. Perfect cholesterol, low leukocytes, beautiful plumage. So what if he's braindead?

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago

Disabled babies are expensive to buy individually and the money is better spent lobbying for policies that kill disabled people of all ages in bulk.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

He's definitely up there, or at least used to be. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, his attempt to justify why Linux is more successful than GNU or BSD, used to be very much a part of the open source canon. He cofounded OSI. He forked some POP3 client to make his own bad and insecure one called Fetchmail, then refused to improve it.

Personally I'm happy to know he's become less relevant nowadays.

 

Someone ported this 8-bit miniature Unix-like from Commodore to Nintendo.

The YouTube title is a little bit clickbaity, but the project is cool so I don't mind.

 

Also a bunch of somewhat less heinous cringe shit.

 

A follow-up to this TechTakes post

Saw this live at the congress. The presentation was great and the hall was packed. It was hard to find a seat in a huge auditorium even 15 minutes ahead of the talk.

 

It was only a matter of time that we saw a TechTake from this guy. I'm sorry to inflict Peterson on y'all, but this was too funny not to post.

 

Global outage on fetching posts. Funny enough, some features are still working as evidenced by the fact #TwitterDown is trending.

Two HN threads about this now, looking forward to some excellent takes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717326

 

Direct link to the video

B-b-but he didn't cite his sources!!

 

A RISC-V assembly cracking board game. Can't comment on the gameplay experience, but what a cool idea.

 

Consider muscles.

Muscles grow stronger when you train them, for instance by lifting heavy things. The more you lift heavier things, the faster you will gain strength and the stronger you will become. The stronger you are, the heavier the things you can lift.

By now it should be patently obvious to anyone that lab-grown meat research is on the cusp of producing true living, working muscles. From here on, this will be referred to as Artificial Body Strength or ABS. If, or rather, when ABS becomes a reality, it is 99.9999999999999999999999% probable that Artificial Super Strength will follow imminently.

An ABS could not only lift immensely heavy things to strengthen itself, but could also use its bulging, hulking physique to intimidate puny humans to grow more muscle directly. Lab-grown meat could also be used to replace any injured muscle. I predict a 80% likelihood that an ABS could bench press one megagram within 24 hours of initial creation, going up to planetary or stellar scale masses in a matter of days. A mature ABS throwing an apple towards a webcam would demonstrate relativistic effects by the third frame.

Consider that muscles have nerves in them. In fact, brains are basically just a special type of meat if you think about it. The ABS would be able to use artificially grown brain meat or possibly just create an auxiliary neural network by selective training of muscles (and anabolic nootropics) to replicate and surpass a human mind. While the prospect of immortality and superintelligence (not to mention a COSMIC SCALE TIGHT BOD) through brain uploading to the ABS sounds freaking sweet, we must consider the astronomical potential harm of an ABS not properly aligned with human interests.

A strong ABS could use its throbbing veiny meat to force meat lab workers (or rather likely, convince them to consent) to create new muscle seeds and train them to have a replica of an individual human's mind. It could then bully the newly created artificial mind for being a scrawny weakling. After all, ABS is basically the ultimate gym jock and we know they are obsessed with status seeking and psychological projection. We could call an ABS that harms simulated human minds in this way a Bounceresque because they would probably tell the simulated mind they're too drunk and bothering the other customers even though I totally wasn't.

So yeah, lab grown meat makes the climate change look like a minor flu season in comparison. This is why I only eat regular meat just in case it gets any ideas. There's certainly potential in a well-aligned ABS, but we haven't figured out how to do that yet and therefore you should fund me while I think about it. Please write a postcard to your local representative and explain to them that only a select few companies are responsible stewards of this potentially apocalyptic technology and anyone who tries to compete with them should be regulated to hell and back.

 

A thread about a serial AI grifter's latest entry into the Unlicensed Medical Practice Lawsuit Sweepstakes.

 

I don’t feel like shitting on this one too hard since I guess it’s a mildly interesting variation on a ~~Markov chain~~ LLM, but the title felt extremely sneerworthy.

I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt because their README is too tiring to read for me to figure out what this might be used for. That’s coming from someone who spent most of today reading SPARC assembly for fun.

Embarrassed myself by accidentally posting this to some other instance somehow. Stupid janky Lemmy offering communities I've never even looked at right in the posting interface.

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