Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him] @ Coca_Cola_but_Commie @hexbear.net

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5

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188

Joined

5 yr. ago

Lol. I think it's fair to say that any US Senator, and especially a US Senator who is on important committees, must rank decently high up on the "list of the most powerful people on the Earth." To go from that to this is quite the fall from grace.

NFTs and now all the genAI bullshit is the stupidest culture has ever been.

I hate that Project 2025 has become some sort of buzzword for what is really the longstanding aims of the conservative political project.

Hey, Siri, what is Harlan Ellison's "I have No Mouth and I Must Scream" about?

The goal, the researchers say, is to come up with a test to determine if a given AI is sentient or not. In other words, does it have the ability to experience sensations and emotions, including pain and pleasure?

I'm not a fancy computer scientist and I've never read philosophy in my life but surely if an LLM could become sentient it would be quite different from this? Pain and pleasure are evolved biological phenomena. Why would a non-biological sentient lifeform experience them? It seems to me the only meaningful measure of sentience would be something like "does this thing desire to grow and change and reproduce, outside of whatever parameters it was originally created with."

A school district recommending its employees actively combat government agents trying to abduct children is pretty grim stuff.

https://xcancel.com/PerversePossum/status/1882206298089087094

https://web.archive.org/web/20250122192121/https://eu.telegram.com/story/news/local/2025/01/22/worcester-public-schools-no-coordinate-ice/77880130007/

Is it possible that the apartments above Costco would actually be too expensive for most Costco employees to afford rent?

Every fucking time. I swear I always double check to make sure I get the right mega and I still fuck it up like 30% of time. Oh well.

I'm definitely interested in Severance, it's on my vague and worryingly long and growing list of shows I need to watch.

Started watching the show Silo on AppleTV a couple weeks ago, maybe 3/4ths of the way through season one now. On the whole a really well-made show, maybe a few pacing issues or the occasionally poorly constructed/lit/shot set that keeps it from being at the same level as the best prestige TV of the last 25 years. But for a sci-fi production that must require a fair bit of CGI or The Volume or just expensive sets it's one of the best I've seen. But then there's Common, who plays the main antagonist in the episodes I've watched, and who's operating at a level far below the rest of his castmates. Every scene he's in just drags down the quality of the show around him.

It's like Common was cast in the CW or old SfyFy channel schlock version of this production that would've existed twenty years ago, but everyone else is in Apple's post-GOT post-Westworld "we have to compete with The Boys and Rings of Power and Dune and The Last of Us" show.

I know it’s just a meme, but every time I see DHMO I think of heavy water.

Me: laughing at the European nanny states and the Oriental Authoritarian Socialist Regimes

Also Me: dying as a direct result of my precious Occidental Freedoms.

there was some embezzlement thing where Brian defrauded 17M, Steven Hemsley (executive chariman) defrauded 102M, and Witty defrauded a few million. Brian was set to testify soon. Hemsley took home almost all of the money.

I've been enjoying concocting farcical conspiracy scenarios in my mind since Luigi was collared. It's not so hard to imagine that he could've fallen down the gladio well. Easy to set him up as a patsy. But that also seems like an enormously risky move that, if you assume the powers that be don't know who the real shooter is, leaves them open to embarrassment. And if they do know who the real shooter is why bother creating a fake one? Seems like a lot of work, that could still backfire on them, when it all would've been forgotten about in a few weeks anyway. And the official line is believable. Promising kid from a rich family runs afoul of the health insurance industry, realizes his life will never be the same again, and decides to kill a guy for it. Escapes one of the most surveilled cities in the world as a result of police incompetence and some good planning on his part. Gets caught because a cop lives in the mind of every American over the age of 45.

Anyway, I assume that Luigi is the guy, partly out of "nothing ever happens" brain and partly out of fear that a sophisticated gladio network could really exist, has existed other places in ways that are provable, but I want to believe it's all paranoid delusion, that the State couldn't really be that powerful, because that's too frightening to contemplate. There's that line you see skeptics trot out all the time with regard to conspiracy adjacent stuff, that conspiracy theorists are just looking to believe in something bigger than themselves that has control, because the random and chaotic nature of life can be too hard to take. I hope that's true of all the gladio shit.

This insider trading case does give me pause, though. Suddenly, with that much money on the line, shit that I would normally think is impossible doesn't sound that farfetched.

Love this show to death but if I think too long about the both-sides politics I start to go crazy.

Bizarre that when some of the Zaunites agree to fight alongside the topsiders to stop the techbro-dystopian/feudal-warlord alliance that's trying to bring about the apocalypse the Zaunites wear the uniform of the Enforcers, the local cops/occupying army that has killed and terrorized the Zaunites for- What? Centuries? At least decades. I could accept them fighting together to stave off a worse enemy, but as depicted I thought it was more than a little distasteful.

It's just weird how often the show seems to expect viewers to have sympathy for Piltover's position when it's shown over and over that they are depriving the Zaunites of all dignity. It's at least implied that the generation before Vi and Jinx were born as a slave caste in mines underneath Piltover and narrowly won the precarious freedoms we see them with at the start of the show. Though I'm not entirely clear on the lore there.

It's even reinforced in Episode 7 of Season 2 that in a world where Hextech never exists and also Heimerdinger gives even a little bit of a shit about the people of the Undercity that the entire situation is much much better, though nowhere near parity. But I'm supposed to feel bad that Jinx blew the council to hell?

Putting on my fedora and trenchcoat, strapping a katana underneath it and heading to Nintendo HQ to re-enact the "Don't Fear the Reaper" ending from Cyberpunk 2077 (CW: graphic violence, mention of suicide, and also spoilers for 2077) except I piss myself and quietly return home before the building's even in eyesight.

This is neither here nor there, but I want to talk about the little audio track that all these major news sites have now of an AI voice reading out their articles.

I don't like them.

Obviously there's an argument to be made in favor of accessibility, and they aren't really doing anything that built-in voice-over accessibility settings weren't already doing, except maybe a little more pleasing to listen to, so I'm not saying that when the cultural revolution comes such things should be banned outright. I just feel like major institutions like the NYT or WAPO could easily afford to pay a small staff of people a very nice wage to read their paper aloud.

My butlerian-jihad-esque reflexive hatred of anything labeled "AI" or "automated" maybe isn't totally appropriate here, I could see a reasonable argument being made for smaller, online-only outfits that still want to have this accessibility feature being allowed it. But if the NYT doesn't want to pay a narrator to read the articles or an audio engineer to alter the recording in case of later corrections or whatever hypothetical argument could be launched against this seems like labor-"saving" bullshit to me.

I have a dilettante's interest in history and in experimental archeology. I've also read a bit online about things like the SCA and other fancy dress/reenactor groups that are less serious.

It's happened less often than I'd expect, honestly, but there's always uber-reactionaries lurking around the edges of these things, at least online. "Hmm, is this guy who's trying to harvest pine tar using pre-industrial methods on YouTube for 300 views just a regular type person with a healthy interest in history or are they a batshit race science eugenicist white supremacist primitivist who wants to return civilization technologically and sociologically to a fantasy version of ancient norsemen?

I always forget how unpleasant his voice is. I fully believe the real RFK Jr. died at some point and was replaced with a prototype robot. Why else would he sound like that?

Jay Leno has become some kind of sin-eater.

Why have you reached into my mind and stolen my thoughts only to display them like a prize in public?

I’d thank you to put them back where you found them.

"In Japan they have a gun that kills the memory of a man." -some tweet I saw when Abe was killed.

Obviously Alex Jones is an evil man who should be buried in sand with his head exposed and left to die of exposure. But it would be extremely fitting for him to be US Press Secretary. He's already the character of American US Propaganda Chief ripped from the most unsubtle political satire ever written.