Oh man Garak is one of the best characters in Trek. And that’s a competitive list.

Holy hell yeah you did. How would you go about doing that in a single expression? A bunch of back references to figure out the country? What if that’s not included? Oy.

I was thinking a nice golden throne. More appropriate for a god-emperor.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/perl_problems.png

Alright this just has me wondering which is worse, a wet fuck or a dry one…

Softly. With their words.

Yeah that’s how I feel about ads targeting children (even when the products are intended for children): they are not yet equipped to look at the ads critically and recognize when they’re being manipulated.

My sense in reading the article was not that the author thinks artificial general intelligence is impossible, but that we’re a lot farther away from it than recent events might lead you to believe. The whole article is about the human tendency to conflate language ability and intelligence, and the author is making the argument both that natural language does not imply understanding of meaning and that those financially invested in current “AI” benefit from the popular assumption that it does. The appearance or perception of intelligence increases the market value of AIs, even if what they’re doing is more analogous to the actions of a very sophisticated parrot.

Edit all of which is to say, I don’t think the article is asserting that true AI is impossible, just that there’s a lot more to it than smooth language usage. I don’t think she’d say never, but probably that there’s a lot more to figure out—a good deal more than some seem to think—before we get Skynet.

I reference this particular moment in our national culture—I won’t say often, but with some regularity—and very few people ever indicate recognition. Either they don’t know/remember it, or a response is beneath them (which is probably true).

And even then, I’m fine to browse a menu on a mobile-friendly site (as long as the restaurant is diligent about providing reliable wifi for anyone who might not have great signal). But when the code has me download a PDF, they can fuck right off. First of all, I don’t need the menu sitting in my cache or download folder. And when the PDF was clearly formatted for physical printing… Good lord. I’m not pinching and zooming this shit.

Concurring with my argument by citing one of my favorite authors. 😊

Did we just become Lemmy-friends?

I write in cursive about half the time, because it’s satisfying. But I always switch to print for acronyms and initialisms, because I think multiple consecutive uppercase cursive letters looks dumb.

It’s worth noting though that the shitty music of yesteryear doesn’t persist in the public consciousness. When we think of music from previous generations, we’re thinking about the stuff that was good enough to last (or bad enough, I suppose, if it’s notably bad). So the popular music of today may seem to be dominated by shit, but you’d have to examine what else was on the airwaves of a given era to really make a good comparison.

I also think there’s two major factors brought on by technological advancement and they both have a positive side. There are a lot more avenues to discover music than there have ever been. Musicians no longer have to be extremely talented and have broad appeal to reach an audience. From the listener’s point of view, it’s much easier to find good music that fits your particular tastes. And I think that in turn leaves more room in the mainstream avenues for lower quality but broadly appealing music.

The other factor is the accessibility of the technology to make and share music, which I think makes it easier for both “good” and “bad” music to find it’s way outside of the artist’s bedroom, so to speak.