Yeah, this is one of the many things that annoys me about AI discourse.

"We can use it to solve climate change!"

We already technically know how to solve climate change, but politics makes doing that impossible.

And, no, AI can't "fix" politics. We're going to have to figure that out by ourselves.

Why would you have zero expectations that he'll win? Were you not around in 2016?

Absolutely, and a big part of being a good scientist is acknowledging that subjectivity (and well as the degree of uncertainty in all our knowledge). In social science, subjectivity is baked in... there's no way to avoid it, no matter how hard you try.

That's not to say subjectivity means science can't do anything useful in these areas. Most of the problems with subjectivity come from pretending something is objective when it's not.

Extremely subjective creatures, many of which believe they're always right (including many "scientists").

But yeah, you're right, the reality is somewhere between the two extremes of the meme. Although we might also want to have a conversation about what "pure objectivity and truth" means.

There's some evidence to suggest he'll lose significant support: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48654-would-donald-trump-conviction-move-his-voters-evidence-from-past-present-bill-clinton-polls

But hard to know for sure.

And most of those headlines are spread by the tech companies... So we don't have much reason to trust them

We're not in a movie. Climate change isn't going be solved by one brilliant scientist. It's not even a scientific/technology problem at this point, it's a political one.

We've been used to having access to websites instantly, but you can't scale forever. Servers have a real impact on the environment. We're already using a significant proportion of the world's electricity on running servers.

It's all bullshit marketing hype until we actually see it. There's no reason to believe AI will advance better than linearly in the next 5-10 years.

How long before it's illegal to hack LLMs?

Depends where you live. Plenty of countries with high % of renewables

I wouldn't call it "surreal" at all, I'd call it "completely expected" given who runs that platform

As far as animal consciousness is concerned, the consensus now seems to be that many animals have some kind of consciousness, including non-mammals such as birds. e.g. http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf

Might want to read the article?

Most of us are not scientists or have a good handle on the latest climate research. We have to trust in what scientists tell us that climate change is real and is something we need to worry about. In that sense, acceptance of science relies on people's beliefs.

This kind of research is just trying to measure the nature of people's climate opinions, which people tend to think of in terms of their beliefs.

Maybe I don't understand Substack that well, but it seems like its market share would be extremely vulnerable. It's just a way to provide a newsletter (also published on the web) and accept subscriptions (and presumably they take a cut). It's really easy for someone to set this up themselves even with minimal tech skills. If they already have a following on Substack, they just tell their subscribers to move, and potentially could even import the subscriber list to a new platform. It's not like social media where there's a lot of boosting or whatever from others on the platform, so the switching costs are high.

So unless I'm missing something, I hope people who don't want Nazis around just move somewhere else. Because from the sounds of this article, they're not really doing much about the Nazis.

Obsessing over brain size and the hip width of women is a big eugenics / white supremacist thing... the kind of thing the nazis were really into... what a surprise to see Musk spouting this kind of bullshit

Reading the comments in that thread made me realise how little I miss Reddit. The sub is RedditAlternatives and there's a whole lot of people in there whinging that people are talking about alternatives to Reddit. Lemmy has it's problems, but Reddit is toxic AF.

It's highly country specific... America's puritanical roots seem to still hold sway. Go to Western Europe and nudity is commonplace

The research suggests it will be quite hard to remove in practice. Probably needs to be tested more in the wild though.

And it doesn't have to be voluntary. But even if it is, the main AI companies may want to start doing it anyway. Training their models on ai generated text can lead to model collapse, so they will want a way to avoid that.