This isn't true. AI can generate tan people if you show them the color tan and a pale person -- or green people or purple people. That's all ai does, whether it's image or text generation -- it can create things it hasn't seen by smooshing together things it has seen.

And this is proven by reality: ai CAN generate csam, but it's trained on that huge image database, which is constantly scanned for illegal content.

While you're not wrong, it's important to retain a global perspective. There are "communist" leaders that were total pieces of shit and while they did have help, that help wasn't always capitalist. Stalin is an example here.

And then there's pieces of shit who were supported by external forces, but not by capitalist regimes seeking to undermine them. I'm not 100% confident in this history, and there's no way I'm going to spell his name right, but, the Romanian piece if shit, Caucescu (???) came to power riding a wave of support from the Nazis. Hitler didn't do it to destabilize Romania, but because he was like, "there's some good old fashioned fascist genociders down there, let's give them more guns." And those fascist genociders were technically communists.

What I'm getting at is that the enemies of a worker-ruled communist state are many, and many of those enemies are within their own systems. Communism, like every other system, suffers from the fact that there are humans involved. Just because a communism exists doesn't mean it's going to be utopia.

But that also doesn't mean that communism can't be good, or at least better.

It's not a coincidence, it's systemic sexism. If you use sexism as your guiding principle when if comes to generated nouns, in almost every language that has them, you'll be right most of the time.

I just wrote like a 10 page response to another comment on that same post I made so I don't think I have the energy to go too deep on this - so, to keep it short:

1. I was just rebutting that person's claim that a car and a digital object have the same relationship to value, and they don't; physicality requires resources that "digitality" doesn't.

2. I feel like you might've agreed with me in the second part? Or, if not, I think you managed to destabilize the entire data economy in like 2 sentences, so, fuck yeah.

I like this take - I read the refutation in the replies and I get that point, but consciousness as an illusion to rationalize stimulus response makes a lot of sense - especially because the reach of consciousness's control is much more limited than it thinks it is. Literally copium.

When I was a teenager I read an Appleseed manga and it mentioned a tenet of Buddhism that I'll never forget - though I've forgotten the name of the idea (and I've never heard anyone mention it in any other context, and while I'm not a Buddhist scholar, I have read a decent amount of Buddhist stuff)

There's some concept in Japanese Buddhism that says that, while reality may be an illusion, the fact that we can agree on it, means that we can at least call it "real"

(Aka Japanese Buddhist describes copium)

My daughter asked me about something that happened back in the nineteen hundreds and I nearly lost it

You seem very upset about this. I doubt this will help since it doesn't seem like your reasoning is influenced by logic, but, the fact that there are fraudulent doctors and diagnoses doesn't mean science isn't real.

You don't have to crack it to make it but you have to crack it to determine whether you've made it. That's kinda the trick of the early AI hype, notably that NYT article that fed Chat GPT some simple sci fi, ai-coming-to-life prompts and it generated replies based on its training data - or, if you believe the nyt author, it came to life.

I think what you're saying is a kind of "can't define it but I know it when I see it" idea, and that's valid, for sure. I think you're right that we don't need to understand it to make it - I guess what I was trying to say was, if it's so complex that we can't understand it in ourselves, I doubt we're going to be able to develop the complexity required to make it.

And I don't think that the inability to know what has happened in an AI training algorithm is evidence that we can create a sentient being.

That said, our understanding of consciousness is so nascient that we might just be so wrong about it that we're looking in the wrong place, or for the wrong thing.

We may understand it so badly that the truth is the opposite of what I'm saying : people have said ("people have said" is a super red flag, but I mean spiritualists and crackpots, my favorite being the person who wrote The Secret Life of Plants) that consciousness is all around us, that every organized matter has consciousness. Trees, for example - but not just trees, also the parts of a tree; a branch, a leaf; a whole tree may have a separate consciousness from its leaves - or, and this is what always blows my mind: every cell in the tree except one. And every cell in the tree except two, and then every cell in the tree except a different two. And so on. With no way to communicate with them, how would a tree be aware of the consciousness of it's leaves?

How could we possibly know if our liver is conscious? Or our countertop, or the grass in the park nearby?

While that's obviously just thought experiment bullshit, my point is, we don't know fucking anything. So maybe we created it already. Maybe we will create it but we will never be able to know whether we've created it.

please let us make bad choices and don't talk about why they're bad

I'm not sure what that means. Open source telemetry is still telemetry.

That's basically been my path - I started with Ubuntu in 2007, then Mint, then Fedora, then BLAG, Crunchbang, god knows how many others, and then finally, Arch. After being on arch for a few years, I switched to Antergos, and endeavorOS when Antergos was retired (rip in peace, I loved it).

I've been steady with Arch/Antergos/EndeavourOS for the better part of a decade and I have no inclination to hop any more.

Imo "scammer" is the wrong word. "Hustler" is more accurate in my experience.

Under certain circumstances, those iFixit places are exactly what it says on the tin - but if rent's coming up and they haven't had many walk ins, you might end up with a new Flux Capacitor in your JavaScript Microlibrary, since the old one looks like it started sending unhandled exceptions to the teraflop reader - but don't worry, they put in a new 6-charge teraflop reader that should future proof it for years.