Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Does this make any sense?

    Yes.

    First they define pregnancy to start before conception.

    That’s not what’s happening. This is a statistical math problem and the last, reliably known variable is most likely the last period of the person before conception. That doesn’t mean they were pregnant before conception. If neither the date of the last period nor the date of conception are known, they use a different method, probably ultrasound picture comparisons, and add a lower number.



  • Maybe the NYT’s headline writers’ eyes weren’t that great to begin with?

    The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

    We already declared that with the advent of photoshop. I don’t want to downplay the possibility of serious harm being a result of misinformation carried through this medium. People can be dumb. I do want to say the sky isn’t falling. As the slop tsunami hits us we are not required to stand still, throw our hands in the air, and take it. We will develop tools and sensibilities that will help us not to get duped by model mud. We will find ways and institutions to sieve for the nuggets of human content. Not all at once but we will get there.

    This is fear mongering masquerading as balanced reporting. And it doesn’t even touch on the precarious financial situations the whole so-called AI bubble economy is in.


  • I think there biggest problem with sea water is dirt, not just the salt. So it’s easier to waste drinking water on cooling the chips. The idea of a combination server farm and desalination plant is probably possible. Desalination is expensive though. I remember reading about Singapore’s efforts. So this would have to be a big investment with profits pushed far back into a sustainable future. So if you’re on the board and have this fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value you’ll probably throw your hands up and give up at that point. Without governments making wasting drinking water on server cooling expensive, this plan will never even make it to the c-suite.



  • I don’t think there is a good reason. It’s an interesting ability for a model. I can see the appeal why people are interested in much the same way I can understand why people climb mountains. Wouldn’t wanna do it myself but I can see why you like it kind of way. For me this falls into the category of “the general public doesn’t need to have access to this.” I get mad when I hear people talk about it in terms of what is and isn’t allowed in it. “And then I tried to put a light saber in it and that was okay but I couldn’t make me into Super Mario.” You just created enough heat in a server farm that will kill a polar bear, that needs to be cooled with future drinking water we need to desalinate, and you have huffed some more air in the hyped up bubble economy surrounding so-called AI. All so you can see where the model draws the copyright line? And if you think that I was modest in my hyperbole, you’ll probably agree with me when I say in a similar spirit that we as a species deserve to eradicate ourselves off this planet.

    The so-called AI peddlers have the same problem as news peddlers online. It’s fucking hard to turn users into paying subscribers. And they need to turn a profit at some point. It’s the merciless mechanics of capitalism that dumps all these models on an unprepared general public at dumping prices. A drive to increase shareholder value above any other consideration. It’s time to change that.

    And I’m not opposed to this model existing. Research it, fine tune it, offer it for the actual cost you’re running in the background plus a bit of a profit margin. And when it costs $207.40 per month to make these brief videos, I’d be okay with that. It would price out enough users not to undo any of the insufficient climate saving measures we as a species have already implemented.




  • I fear this will be an uphill battle for YT. I have this gut feeling that Meta and OpenAI here are employing the flooding the zone strategy to hurt and maybe displace YT. The sheer flood of slop with the occasional enjoyable nugget of content flooding YT from the pAIrates will be harder to filter out, clog up servers, and users like you and I will get annoyed and gradually consume less content. YT loses market share and some new platform can move in for the kill, operated by Meta, OpenAI and/or other such reputable companies. It’s not easy to monetize this crap, which is a loss leader at this point. It doesn’t look to me like enough people will subscribe to these services to be financially viable. They have to find other ways. So pivot to video 2.0 - this time with so-called AI! Sigh.



  • You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head. They just call it socialism. There are several shades of poverty, for different reasons. One shade is due to the fact that a lot of services, like welfare, education, and medical, are only available to you in your hometown, probably the one you were born in. But if you have migrated from bf nowhere Gansu province to a big city where the jobs are, you rid yourself of that safety net. It’s hard/costly to change this hometown registration so most don’t and become quasi undocumented workers in their own country. And they are the ones who work insane hours in shitty and dangerous work conditions and it’s then who will look for anything to save a yuan.


  • It’s been a while since I’ve been to China. But even in the 2000s it was not uncommon to have to pay for toilet paper at a vending machine. Not at all public facilities but the more local you went, the fewer tourists would be there, the more this happens. So getting roll for watching an ad is an improvement.

    And as the article points out, they cannot have nice things, i.e. free sandpaper toilet roll, because people will just steal it. I feel like this becomes exponentially less dystopian when you frame it as you can either have no paper at all or watch the ad/pay for it.

    And there is another cultural difference. The Chinese are more like the Romans when it comes to these bodily functions. Much more willing to take care of it communally or at a hole in the ground surrounded by a thigh high “modesty” barrier. So asking an attendant for extra roll is something that the majority of Chinese would have less of a problem with, I think.


  • What’s wrong with these people? The rabbi had time to sink to the floor, the priest is clearly passed out on the floor, why is the pastor still walking into the bar? Are they all blind and deaf?

    The deeper message must be that just out of shot an imam and a Buddhist monk are looking at each other puzzled exchanging remarks like “They really cannot learn from each other, can they.”

    (I do get the bar joke, internet. No need to well actually me. This was very much tongue in cheek.)


  • Discrimination in hiring happens every day. Be it conscious or subconscious. If there isn’t a hard, unavoidable quota no one can force anyone to hire people they don’t like. The laws may just forbid them from being this forthright.

    Never attribute to malice what you can more appropriately attribute to stupidity. The people who coded this may be young and not even on their first divorce yet. To me, that’s what this family plan business falls under. To leap from that to organized discrimination of folks being born out of wedlock seems a tad too conspiratorial from my POV.

    This may be a fryable fish. Yet I see much bigger fish elsewhere.

    What may also hold back development of functional patchwork family plans is legal hot water. Not every split is amicable. The Googles and Microsofts may simply have decided they don’t want to be put in a situation where they need to adjudicate between two warring ex partners whose bitterness is overriding their child rearing responsibilities with petty disputes. And building a system where maybe new partners can gain access - even just by mistake - to their spouse’s kids accounts also has very bad PR potential when it turns out the step parent is abusive.

    Nevertheless you should let them know about your feedback. Patchwork families are quite common and they can probably do more in that area.




  • This has to fall under the category of “never trust a statistic you didn’t forge yourself.” I’m confident without looking that the amorphous Western countries don’t all count suicides and attempts the same way. And for China you would have to trust official numbers or generate your own because the one thing the leadership does not like is looking bad in the international community.

    The other question I would have is this ratio based on absolute numbers or per capita. The reason why I ask is that China has a massive gender imbalance, a blast from the past when the one - child policy was in play and millions of female embryos were somehow aborted. And here I would also assume that official population numbers may not be entirely correct to make the generally known problem within the country look less severe.

    If there are more men in absolute numbers, there will be more male suicides, some of which one might attribute to the ripples downstream of that very same imbalance.

    Whoever concluded this may have accounted for all the pitfalls in their study. And the result may be fantastically accurate. But we oughta be careful and keep more than just a few grains of salt handy when we hear about something like this.