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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • You can if the company is a non-profit like open AI. Basically when you take on investments for a company you declare what the goal/purpose of a company is, either to make money (for profit) or for some other nebulous cause (non-profit) eg. Ending hunger or saving humanity from AI. If an investor thinks you aren’t following that goal and are pursuing some other goal then they can sue the company.

    Sadly most companies are for profit so they can only be sued if they’re trying to do something that doesn’t optimally make money. So a fossil fuel company can’t be sued for legally dumping poison into the air if it’s the most cost efficient method, but they can be sued if they do a less cost efficient solution that would make air quality better because improving people’s health isnt there goal, making money is.




  • I think you misunderstand what apples value proposition is, at least nowadays. The app store and not being able to use other app stores is not a reason people get iPhones. Maybe back when app stores were first created and the threat of malware was greater people might have considered it but nowadays no one cares. Even the idea of a unified ecosystem isn’t as much a selling point any more because Google and Samsung offer similar seamless integrations with their accessories. You can see this in their marketing, they aren’t focused on how all the apple products work together easily any more. In their marketing you can see what they think their value proposition is, and what was their big Superbowl ad this year, longer battery life …

    Apple at this point knows it doesn’t have much of a value proposition for switching from android. So the only way they’re gonna sell new phones is to get the kids who don’t have a phone and convince the people who do have an iPhone to get a new one.

    They convince the kids through their tried and true aesthetics and lifestyle marketing, this is about half there marketing these days. This along with iMessage in the U.S. and the general fear of being in the out group and obsession with brands that younger people have moved them towards iPhones.

    They convince the current users with incremental upgrades, eg. Better battery life, better camera; and maintaining the walled garden and keeping exit costs high so they don’t turn to androids for those incremental updates.

    All this is to say that apple having a single app store isn’t a sign of consumer sentiment, but a sign of apples desire to milk as much profits out of their current users as they can. Other app stores can only benefit the consumers, either they do get them for lower fees or don’t because they put some value on the “ecosystem”. From a company’s perspective yes your right that they want to be able to do anything to their product they want, but the goal of regulation is to step in when the companies desires are at odds with the people or the consumers desire, this is one of those cases.


  • If anything this was worse under the old system. Making art previously costed a lot of money, you had to pay the artists for their time and money, and better artists cost more. So in the past that oil company could commission 100 top quality artists to make corporate propaganda while a person who cares for the environment but has no money could only make a drawing limited by their own personal technical artistic ability, which could be just stick figures.

    This is why “high quality” consumerist and capitalist “art” and branding in the form of advertising is so abundant meanwhile anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist art is rarer, no one’s paying to get it made.

    Now any cause, regardless of money, can create at least mid art to get there message across. Those causes can also have way more people behind them then an oil company can reasonably hire

    It’s sort of like how the gun changed how power worked. Previously a king could use there resources to pay for a smaller army of well equipped highly trained knights to subjugate a group of people. Then when the gun came training and equipment didn’t matter nearly as much and it became more of a numbers game, and to get those numbers rulers needed to give more power to the masses in order to be able to marshall them for their cause. Those rulers who didn’t got overthrown in revolutions.


  • Why would real meaning and messages be harder to find, does AI generated art inherently have less meaning?

    Let’s say I wanted to convey the message that oil companies are destroying the environment so , throwing subtlety out the window, come up with an idea of “a vampiric oil baron draining mother nature of oil”, does the picture that is generated from me putting that prompt into an AI generator have any less meaning then if I actually drew it myself?

    For all the advances in AI it still lacks intentionality, and always will under these current models, that has to be supplied by the person in the form of a prompt. I’d say that intention is the source of messages and meaning in art. AI just allows people without technical abilities in art to express those intentions, feelings and messages.


  • I’m all for players getting payed and unionizing but I think getting rid of college sports would only hurt the players. Less people would watch them and therefore the players would get less money. A large part of the audience for college sports is students and alumni, if you take that away there’s not much reason for people to tune in or go up to Hanover New Hampshire to watch their basketball team play and buy merch, especially if they’re not a good team.

    It works in England because soccer’s the only big sport so you can make some money even if your a lower tier team.

    Not focusing on academics is a problem but if the option is to have to play in a minor league team, earn a middling to low income that’s going to basic neccesities, not make it to the big leagues and be left with no other career prospects or savings; or go to college, make a low income but be able to save it as room and board are covered, not make it to the big leagues but at least have the piece of paper that permits you to even think about having a decent life in this country, I’d go with the latter.



  • A publication can be credible and also still be extremely biased. If a right wing publication publishes a story " black people say affirmative action is unfair" the story may be factually correct in that they found a couple black people that said it’s bad and quoted them but at its core it’s just a “people are saying” story. Like any “people are saying” story who these people are?, how many of them are their?, do they represent or have power over the people the article is implying they do? Etc. is conveniently left out.

    the fact that they chose the story shows bias as well. If the only justification for calling a story news is the fact it fits your worldview than the publication is biased. The publication is responsible for reporting on stories that are relevant and effect a large amount of people. This story does not as it’s just some anecdotes reported to the IDF. If this was a large scale issue reported by independent aid organizations or shown through polling on the ground than that would be a story as it’s actually effecting a large amount of people.




  • the primary motivation behind this decision was. Obviously it wasn’t building public housing

    That doesn’t mean the intent behind the CCP policy isn’t good, well intentioned, or positive

    Can you see how I’m confused, do you think the primary intent is for public housing, or for some political drama?

    It could be some political drama, we’ll never know what goes on in the HK city council, but if you read the article you’ll see this site wasn’t selected so much as it’s lease was up and the city would be taking back control of it and they needed to do something with it. Yeah some high official could’ve been waiting for the course to come back into city hands so they could build public housing over it and snub a rival, but I think it’s far more likely that the property fell into the cities hands and they decided to turn it into affordable housing because that’s what the city needs, no sinister or alterior motive is needed.




  • Oh definitely, I don’t see it getting to SF before the bright line opens and I don’t see it getting to la in the next decade. But the bright line is using more tried and tested technology and methods in a significantly less populated area on an established corridor, while hsr is building from scratch through the heartland of California.

    It’ll take a long time but it will eventually get done, because there is still a will, not a strong one, to get it done. Most Californians recognize the immense value it will bring and will keep pushing for it.


  • Oh definitely, I don’t see it getting to SF before the bright line opens and I don’t see it getting to la in the next decade. But the bright line is using tried and tested technology and methods, while hsr is building from scratch.

    It’ll take a long time but it will eventually get done, because there is still a will, not a strong one, to get it done. Most Californians recognize the immense value it will bring and will keep pushing for it.




  • That study is like giving a written test to an illiterate adult, seeing them do worse than a child and saying they aren’t intelligent or innovative. Like I said earlier intelligence is multi-faceted, and chatgpt excels at rhetorical, conversational and other types of written intelligence. It does not, as that study shows, do well in spatial manipulation, that doesn’t mean it’s not intelligent. If you gave that same test to a paralyzed blind person with little to no concept of spatial reality they’d probably do just as bad. If you asked them to compose a short story or an essay they might be good at it because that’s where they’re capabilities lye. That short story could still be innovative in its composition and characters, and could be way better than anything a child wrote.

    You have to measure different types of intelligence with different tests. If you asked chatgpt and a set of adults and children to write a short story about a wholey new subject chatgpt would beat most of the children and probably some of the adults.

    And if that short story is about a new subject matter completey out of its training set what/who is it plagiarizing from? You could say it’s taking common tropes, themes and story elements from other stories, but that’s fundamentally what a lot of writing and culture is. If that’s plagiarism then you should be more worried about the marvel franchise as it’s a plagiarism machine that has way more cultural impact.


  • It can answer questions as well as any person. Just because you may need to check with another source doesn’t mean it didn’t answer the question it just means you can’t fully trust it. If I ask someone who’s the fourth u.s. president and they say Jefferson they still answered the question, they just answered it wrong. You also don’t have to check with another source in the same way you do with asking a person a question, if it sounds right. If that person answered Madison and I faintly recall it and think it sounds right I will probably not check their answer and take it as fact.

    For example I asked chatgpt for a chocolate chip cookie recipe once. I make cookies pretty often so would know if the recipe seemed off but the one it provided seemed good, I followed it and made some pretty good cookies. It answered the question correctly as shown by the cookies. You could argue it plagiarized but while the ingredients and steps were pretty close to some I found later none were a perfect match which is about as good as you can get with recipes which tend to converge in the same thing. The only real difference between most of them is the dumb story they give at the beginning which thankfully chatgpt doesn’t do.

    The 7th grader and plagiarism comment make me think you haven’t played with them much or really tested them. I have had it write contracts, one of which I had reviewed by a lawyer who only had some small comments, as well as other letters and documents I needed for my mortgage and buying a home. All of these were looked over by proffesionals and none of them realized it was a bot. None of them were plagiarized too because the parameters I gave it and the output it created were way too unique to be in its training set.