Anon, then anon, then gf

Those are trained attack corgis. They may look cute, but their itty bitty widdle teefies can rip apart your throat if you so much as look at them wrong. When you’re watching their little fluffy butts when they walk, they just see you as a target. Just today’s hit. One signal, one word - and it’s over. You’ve been mauled to death by adorable attack sausages.

One time, I was shopping for a specific item. I couldn’t find it on ebay, Amazon, walmart or etsy. Then I went to some smaller retail site (they also didn’t have it), and an Amazon ad for that item popped up. I clicked the ad, and it took me to the item page.

Amazon search (at least at the time) was so ineffective that I couldn’t find it, while their ad data gathering was so complete they knew that I wanted that specific thing.

The collective will is objectively that you can and will be arrested for protesting in a way that deprives others of their rights. We live in a democracy, and already have a way of deciding things collectively, which is far superior to mob justice.

The other 2 thirds of the Earth’s surface, obviously. As the greatest song in history says: “…We got no troubles - Life is the bubbles - Under the sea…”

Peel it.

Like today’s computer scientists, early biologists sucked at inventing new words, and simply reused existing ones. “Berry” in common language is a small, usually sweet and edible, fruit. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries are all berries.

Then biologists came along and decided, actually, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are out, but watermelon and bananas are in, because the size of the fruit doesn’t matter, only the placement of the seeds decides whether something is a proper, scientific berry.

A similar thing has happened with “fruit” and “vegetable”, where scientific fruits include cucumbers, eggplants, and pumpkins. Luckily, all three of these are also berries.

I say we ignore them, and use words to mean sensible things.

What we have done is invented massive, automatic, no holds barred pattern recognition machines. LLMs use detected patterns in text to respond to questions. Image recognition is pattern recognition, with some of those patterns named things (like “cat”, or “book”). Image generation is a little different, but basically just flips the image recognition on its head, and edits images to look more like the patterns that it was taught to recognize.

This can all do some cool stuff. There are some very helpful outcomes. It’s also (automatically, ruthlessly, and unknowingly) internalizing biases, preferences, attitudes and behaviors from the billion plus humans on the internet, and perpetuating them in all sorts of ways, some of which we don’t even know to look for.

This makes its potential applications in medicine rather terrifying. Do thousands of doctors all think women are lying about their symptoms? Well, now your AI does too. Do thousands of doctors suggest more expensive treatments for some groups, and less expensive for others? AI can find that pattern.

This is also true in law (I know there’s supposed to be no systemic bias in our court systems, but AI can find those patterns, too), engineering (any guesses how human engineers change their safety practices based on the area a bridge or dam will be installed in? AI will find out for us), etc, etc.

The thing that makes AI bad for some use cases is that it never knows which patterns it is supposed to find, and which ones it isn’t supposed to find. Until we have better tools to tell it not to notice some of these things, and to scrub away a lot of the randomness that’s left behind inside popular models, there’s severe constraints on what it should be doing.

That estimate is based on assuming that the ratio of matter to light output is the same between galaxies 10 billion years apart in age. The high light output of these young galaxies could also be supermassive stars that burn out very quickly, larger stars typically forming faster than smaller stars, or many other things.

Blindly assuming a linear relationship between two things, then extrapolating is how you get the Windows loading bar circa 2000.

Separately, but just as big a potential issue, the data itself may be incorrect. Previous galaxies measured at extreme redshift values were remeasured, and found to have less extreme values. This can be as simple as there aren’t that many photons from these galaxies reaching us, so a short measurement period might not be enough to get an accurate picture.

As the President and CEO of a fortune 500, and a neurosurgeon that does rocket surgery as a side project, there are many people relying on me to be an upstanding member of the community at all times.

In reality, most of the ways I misrepresent myself are to obscure my identity, and mostly it’s by leaving things out.

In my mind, the line is that an engineer is someone that can commit a crime by doing their job incompetently. If the only things at risk are your job and your pride, that’s a different thing.

“I program all day, so there’s a lot of trial and error. My friend is a negligent civil engineer, so there’s a lot of error and trial.”

I’m a Senior Computer Software Developer Programming Engineer, or SCSDPE (which is pronounced Skuzz-Deep), and I will be irreparably miffed if you get it wrong.

For your convenience, I also accept “that guy that sits weirdly close to the water fountain”, “hey”, and “paid keyboard user”.

I don’t know. I didn’t go to school near Ohio, but my state had some sports divided by sex and some not at that age. In my area, it seemed to be largely that the popular sports were divided, and the less popular sports were not.

The way to change it is either to ask for it to be changed by the existing organizerd, or form a new league if they won’t, and enough parents want that.

These are 6th graders. There’s no “top” competition for 6th graders at all, which is why this is a region specific league, and most of the sports are divided into boys and girls divisions at those ages.

Yeah, but then you have to limit your fashion selection! Imagine restricting yourself to wearing a hat over some silly fear of death.

I appreciate numbers.

“You wouldn’t put on a tricorn hat, would you?”

I actually would, if I could find a nice one…

“…and leave your job to sail the seas?”

… That’s an option? I didn’t even consider-

“And you certainly wouldn’t drink rum, and fire cannons, and carry a saber and tell silly parrot related puns.”

buys a tricorn hat

I almost get 100,000 pis. Almost, but not quite :'(

I’m… uhh. I think I’m screwed here.

So… corporations figured out how to clean the world, and then sell a cleaner Earth back to us, one can at a time? This sounds like the libertarian dream ocean.