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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • As someone who’s had two kids since AI really vaulted onto the scene, I am enormously confused as to why people think AI isn’t or, particularly, can’t be sentient. I hate to be that guy who pretend to be the parenting expert online, but most of the people I know personally who take the non-sentient view on AI don’t have kids. The other side usually does.

    When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

    People love to tout this as some sort of smoking gun. That feels like a trap. Obviously, we can argue about the age children gain sentience, but my year and a half old daughter is building an LLM with pattern recognition, tests, feedback, hallucinations. My son is almost 5, and he was and is the same. He told me the other day that a petting zoo came to the school. He was adamant it happened that day. I know for a fact it happened the week before, but he insisted. He told me later that day his friend’s dad was in jail for threatening her mom. That was true, but looked to me like another hallucination or more likely a misunderstanding.

    And as funny as it would be to argue that they’re both sapient, but not sentient, I don’t think that’s the case. I think you can make the case that without true volition, AI is sentient but not sapient. I’d love to talk to someone in the middle of the computer science and developmental psychology Venn diagram.








  • It’s a tricky situation.

    I think a lot of men, particularly rural men, want someone in their corner. I think a lot of people are underestimating how angry and hopeless many of these men feel. The study a couple years ago from NPR about how many families are living paycheck to paycheck, have less than like $400 in savings, and have nobody to call in during a financial emergency was astounding.

    Most Americans are in a desperate situation. And they aren’t used to it. And they feel they don’t deserve it. And because of that, they’re going to vote for whoever promises to fix it, whether they fix it or not.

    The issue is that neither party is willing to fix the wealth desparity and class oriented labor practices that cause it. They’re only interested in playing the same game we are now that keeps them paid, and grinds everyone else into the dirt.


  • It’s an oversimplification, but it’s like an older brother and a younger brother sharing a room. They hate each other. They’re always messing with each other’s stuff. The older brother knows better, but he’s angry and tends to be abusive. The younger brother knows he shouldn’t pick a fight, but can’t help himself. They’ve both been fighting so long that each feels justified in hurting the other.

    Who’s at fault is the wrong question. Is it the 7 year old? He’s 7. Is it the 12 year old? He’s a kid too, just bigger and stronger. Both lack the maturity and empathy to be in charge and have the run of things. They’ve both proven they’re entirely incapable of being fair or kind to each other.

    It’s the parents’ fault for letting it happen. Or in this case, enabling both kids and giving them tips and tricks for how to fight better.

    We can’t expects Israel or Palestine to be the adults in the room. They aren’t. They can’t. We can’t expect ourselves to be the adults in the room. We’re watching these kids beat themselves bloody for our amusement.

    Until someone puts their foot down and says enough is enough, nothing will change, but the person who says that and lays down their weapons probably gets killed. So this won’t end until one side exterminates the other.




  • I think this is a case where the imagination is much, much better than the reality.

    For the mobilization of technology, miniaturization has had a lot of benefits, not just in the technology, but in the accessibility. Having a desktop computer instead of a mainframe was huge. It brought the computer to the home. Laptops becoming viable was huge again. It untethered the computer from the wall. For most of the planet, we’re still in the midst of the massive leap that is smart phones. It put a computer in the pocket of billions of people.

    Beating that is hard. Smart phones are the most accessible, most powerful devices most end users have ever used. We take that for granted, and we take the time it took to get there for granted. It took 25 years of desktops to get real, decent laptops (personally, I’d say mid 90s). It took 25 of laptops to get real, decent smartphones (again personally, I’d say ~2010ish).

    Like it or not, we have another decade to go probably before the technology is there for the next evolution in personal computing. But the problem we have really is that there’s not another leap as far as accessibility is concerned. Smart phones work places where laptops can’t. Laptops work places where desktops can’t. Desktops work places where mainframes can’t. Smart phones can work anywhere. Taking the computer from the datacenter, to the home, to your backpack, to your pocket is huge. Is the next step from the pocket to your wrist? To your face? Is it worth it? Is it really that much better?




  • Same, but when I began really looking at it and trying to overcome it, I found it’s a very universal experience, certainly not divided by gender.

    When you look at these odd archetypes of what people want out of the ideal man or woman, they all share the same core. Strong, independent, doesn’t need help, doesn’t want help. The individualistic experience is such a sad, lonely, miserable, experience. They want to be able to go it alone, but in hundreds of thousands of years of truly human existence, going it alone is such an exception. Our weights and burdens and lives are meant to be shared. They always have been and always will be.

    For example, I have a 4 year old son who has been infatuated with ballet for a couple months now. There are dads today who are beating their sons for liking ballet. It’s terrible. But it’s not that ballet is “queer” or that men don’t do ballet. There are plenty of men who are queer. There are plenty of men who do ballet. But, I don’t do ballet. If I beat my son, it’s because I am making it about myself. I don’t want a son who does ballet. That is as narcissistic and individualistic as it gets.

    That’s not to say that it’s not toxic masculinity, just that the toxic masculinity is narcissism in a trench coat.