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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • AI is whatever machines can’t do yet.

    Playing chess was the sign of AI, until a computer best Kasparov, then it suddenly wasn’t AI anymore. Then it was Go, it was classifying images, it was having a conversation, but whenever each of these was achieved, it stopped being AI and became “machine learning” or “model”.


  • It is debated whether it was necessary, but the position that it was wrong is self-contradictory.

    It assumes that the atomic bombs were not a huge factor in the decision to surrender, as they would surrender anyway due to conventional warfare (US bombing and USSR attacking and removing the best negotiating venue for a conditional surrender). Which might be true. But, at the same time it assumes that the nuclear bombs were somehow worse than the conventional bombing that has been going on. So the atomic bombs had to be both ineffectual and hugely damaging at the same time.





  • The thing about corruption is that it’s very inefficient. Spending a trillion dollars on weapons translates to only a couple of billions in the pockets of profiteers, the rest is used to actually make the weapons, move them in place, and to pay the people using them.

    So with a useless war, you waste far more than you would if you just have the money to the profiteers.







  • Every platform is nice at the start, for mainly the reason you say: people who join early have an interest in the platform, so we actually try to keep it nice.

    Then every successful new platform gets its own eternal september. A large influx of people who don’t care about the platform at all, they just want to use it to talk to people. And of these, yes many are still nice people, but also many aren’t.

    You see this in all kinds of communities, not just online. If you’re in a new or niche hobby, everybody there will have an interest in improving the hobby and the small community, so it will probably be very nice. When it gets mainstream (I’m looking at MTG here, but other people probably know other examples) then it starts to attract people who do nothing but complain.