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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • AI has been a field within computer science since at least the 1950s. It encompasses algorithms for making decisions, which is why so many technologies are labeled this way. “Intelligence” may seem like an odd choice of terminology (some people conflate it with sentience or similar), but general machine intelligence is one goal of this study, and the applications of AI are putative steps to that end.

    Back when those guys started talking about what methods could get us there, things like decision trees, symbolic manipulation, neural nets, were all potential pathways that were on the table. So these get included in the field because that’s where and to what end they were produced.

    Another thing is that intelligence can be narrow in its domain. A character in a video game that needs to move from point A to point B can do so following something like the A* pathfinding algorithm. In the domain of graph traversal/pathfinding, it’s hard to imagine something much more intelligent (or fit to solve the problem) than A* despite being a simple algorithm.

    But yeah, as a marketing term it is kind of silly since most people don’t know what it means. It remains a useful categorization for a broad field of study/research in CS though.





  • As the gp poster I didn’t mean to sound like I’m dumping on rural life. I grew up in a rural area, riding four-wheelers and roaming the woods till the sun went down. One of my best friends started a family around the same time I did and opted to buy some acreage a decent commute away from town. They ride dirt bikes with their kids on literal mountains in the backyard, have a chicken coop and machine shop, deer wander up and eat their vegetable garden. It’s super rad and I wouldn’t mind having gone that route either.

    I really didn’t dig the suburbs and having to drive literally everywhere though. On the balance I liked the diversity in the city and having easy access to metropolitan amenities. I’d never shit on the rural route and it may well be where I end up, I just thought it was wild how much blowback I got from wanting to raise a kid in the city.



  • I’m a software developer with about twenty years in the field, spending my first half of that working in a Unix environment. I have tried so hard to make Linux my home desktop solution. I’ve come back to it every five years or so, hoping it’s finally figured out the UI/UX thing.

    Things I like:

    • no comercial motivation
    • intrinsically programmer-oriented
    • free with available sources, as deep as I care to dig

    Things I don’t like:

    • High barrier to entry (which distro?)
    • Poor support for newer hardware (not a fault of Linux but a reality)
    • Too much competition in very basic facilities like package managers and desktop environments
    • Well-intentioned but largely unhelpful community support due to the above points

    I’m back using Linux again (Fedora) because at the moment I’m doing a lot of embedded and SoC work, and again I love the dev experience. But so far it seems like not much has changed wrt how fiddly daily driving can be. I can’t stand W11 for a lot of reasons, but I’m constantly tempted to try my luck with WSL as a better compromise.





  • If you don’t think anything unethical happens in the production of porn I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s getting better but exploitation, sex trafficking, revenge porn, etc. have been a thing since pornography was invented.

    AI porn at least does not necessarily need to consider consent. Plenty of AI porn involves animated figures or photorealistic humans that don’t represent any identifiable person.

    The only hang up I have is producing images of actual people without their consent, and I don’t think it’s a new problem as photoshop has existed for a while.


  • They’re probably losing money now and just trying to build a user base as a first-mover. They accept donations and subscriptions with fairly minor benefits, but I imagine hosting and serving sizable AI models is not cheap.

    They’ll probably have to transition to paid access at some point, but I don’t see it as particularly unethical as they have bills to pay and do attempt to moderate content on the site.

    I tend to agree generating adult content of real people is unethical, but probably less so than how a lot of real porn is made. I don’t think there should be open avenues for sharing that kind of stuff online, and their rules should be better enforced.