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Captainant

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Captainant

  1. Also I know it doesn't surprise anyone this point, but the judge who issued the ruling is a qanon loon.

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-parker-alabama-ivf-embryo_n_65d7ea34e4b0cc1f2f7b3e26

    Quote

    Parker was the featured guest on “Someone You Should Know,” hosted by Johnny Enlow, a Christian nationalist influencer and devoted supporter of former President Donald Trump. Over the course of an 11-minute interview, Parker articulated a theocratic worldview at odds with a functioning, pluralistic society.

     

    “God created government,” he told Enlow, adding that it’s “heartbreaking” that “we have let it go into the possession of others.”

    As reported by Right Wing Watch, Enlow has claimed that Trump “is on assignment” from God to work with the angels Michael and Gabriel to take down George Soros and Bill Gates, among others; he has claimed that Russian President Vladamir Putin is fighting “Luciferian pedophiles” in Ukraine, in a battle to stop them from deploying vaccines and 5G that would turn people into transhumanist semi-robots; and he has claimed that the majority of other world leaders are “satanic” pedophiles who “steal blood” and “do sacrifices.”

    So yeah a real straight shooter that believes in covid vaccines being mind control, that putin is doing good things in Ukraine, and that satanic pedophiles are stealing blood from and sacrificing children. 

    Totally the guy who should be dictating reproductive rights. 

    God bless America, we are fucked. 

    • Rage+1 4
  2. 6 hours ago, wild_turkey said:

    We have one amazing child through IVF. We were late 30s when we started trying to become parents and had one natural pregnancy that resulted in miscarriage. After about a year of trying, we saw a fertility specialist who recommended skipping straight to IVF due to our age, and we got lucky on the first egg retrieval and implantation cycle and now have a happy and healthy one year old daughter. I know 4 other couples who are at various points in the infertility struggle, some of which are failing IVF, and I feel awful for them.

    We also have several embryos frozen that we are unlikely to use because the first childbirth and recovery was physically very difficult for my wife. We don’t have much of an ethical dilemma over that because we don’t consider frozen embryos to be people.

    I don’t understand why or how someone could define an embryo as a human being, and assuming most people who take that stance are doing so for religious reasons (radical Christianity), I’m genuinely curious where in the Bible this is even close to being defined? If not the Bible, then how do they arrive at these ideals?

    (I realize the definition of when life begins is pivotal to the abortion debate, which I admittedly have mostly ignored until recently, so probably this has been beat to death.)

    Also, it would be nearly impossible to argue against IVF without also opposing oral contraception and IUDs. Those methods allow fertilization to occur in vitro, but then prevent the fertilized egg from implanting into the endometrium. So I suppose everyone in Alabama is committing murder when they have sex while taking birth control?

    It will be interesting to see if this gets adopted in other states. I thought IVF would be untouchable due to the fact that most people on both sides of the political aisle probably have family or friends who have used IVF and witnessed firsthand the joy it brings to the world, but here we are. Everyone who was paranoid about gay marriage, trans rights, and oral contraception was absolutely right to be worried.

    Aside from the transparent attack on women's bodily autonomy, the logic of declaring every potential pregnancy a fully viable baby is fraught. A solid 20-30% of fertilized and implanted embryos fail to result in a healthy birth and viable baby, and end in miscarriage. That's not a moral or personal failure, biology can just be messy. But now can those women be prosecuted for """killing a child""" when they miscarry? 

    It's just gonna get worse from here for women. 

  3. 43 minutes ago, Homercles said:

    Show tickets of any kind have become an absolutely stupid expensive endeavor through TicketMasters monopoly on distribution, venues and artists.  I practically lived at Stubbs for a few years at $35/ticket barely a decade ago…now it seems any show anywhere is $120+ once you include the ‘convenience’ fee that you are required to pay.  

    Shit, on an expensive ticket you're looking at $150-200 on fees that are not part of the listed price of the ticket. Shit should be illegal, but regulating business is unfortunately communism so we just get to bend over and enjoy it

    • Rage+1 2
  4. 1 hour ago, Chopper said:

    Computers aren't thinking. They're drawing off data-sets. AI doesn't understand what information means nor how it should be used.

    image.thumb.png.22599116fa85bbce8baf27275e4d77a3.png

    If you're putting your faith in a computer that's programmed to baffle you with bullshit instead of providing out that admits, "I don't know," the joke is on you. "I don't know" doesn't sell to end-users.

    I'm not talking faith, I'm talking the actual computational mathematics that underly ML. "Weights and biases" is another term for the sum of functions and the per-function modifier applied that goes into an inference. It's not baffling me with bullshit in the slightest, and chatGPT isn't some all-knowing knowledge engine. It's just really good at transforming information from one form to another, one token at a time

    • Hook 'Em 2
  5. 14 minutes ago, safe sex said:

    Like most things now, the absurdity is so far skewed in one direction that I don't think it's particularly helpful to treat things as business as usual, because it's not business as usual.

    I think this is the core criticism that Stewart is gonna have to face before he really wins his audience over

  6. 2 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

    I think your initial analysis is probably right. This has minimal connection to Hunter's actual legal problems, as opposed to the fictional ones Comer is trying to work up. 

     

    But, last I saw, his defense lawyer is Abbe Lowell, who is very much for real. So you can be reasonably sure that he can connect it up some way, even if kind of farfetched. 

    Standard defense lawyer tactics that certain posters would decry as bad faith fascist enabling if it was someone on the other side. 

    Well there's a pretty material difference when the law is being used to defend someone from a group of fascists trying to use the government to legitimize false information from an enemy spy to attack the son of a political enemy.

     

    Ya know, as opposed to the current standard that you regularly defend of using the law to slow roll even starting a criminal prosecution of a nationally televised criminal act.

    • Hook 'Em 1
  7. 27 minutes ago, BeardIP said:

    Would that ^^ be considered "hallucinations" @Captainant?

    Literally and neurologically yes. In a human, a hallucination happens when neurons get connected in "weird" and atypical patterns that result in unexpected experiences. In an LLM, a hallucination is pretty much the same thing but it has way less supporting information to pull from to fill in the blanks than we do when we make shit up. Plus, LLM's are prone to input poisoning, so if (as the memes are implying) they were to ingest a sufficiently bad dataset like the posts of surlyhorns.com or reddit.com into the LLM it could drive it figuratively mad and become prone to hallucinating.

    I'm not a neurologist or a neuroscientist, but I'd be fascinated to have a conversation with them on how the human brain learns and cross compare it with gradient descent and other neural network learning techniques

  8. 7 minutes ago, Chopper said:

    Amazon continues its rapid pace of enshittification.

    image.thumb.png.24d8c06f3ea25e064a073705fdef5a9b.png

    The Amazon business model IS ENSHITTIFICATION

     

    They drove everyone else out of the market by ignoring profitability and undercutting on price while delivering a higher quality service, and then once they had primacy, started chipping away at the quality of their offering and platform overall.

    It's the same playbook as Uber and a bunch of other tech startups. And it's profitable as FUK BOIIIIII so they ain't gonna stop

    • Hook 'Em 2
  9. 50 minutes ago, Goredho said:

    My anniversary is coming up, so I decided to see if I could delegate conveying my personal, heartfelt emotions to AI.  This is pretty awesome!  With very little effort you too can be a digital Mr Wonderful doll, at least in written text.

    Prompt:   Write a heartfelt letter to my wife for my anniversary. Please convey how important she is to me and how much I love her. Don't be too flowery with the words, make it sound informal and personal.

    Edit:  The immoral hacker in me wants to see a catfishing mashup that integrates with online dating websites and ChatGPT/DALL-E to see how many people could be fooled into falling head over heels in love for an AI generated persona.  I'm too lazy to ever act on that, but I bet you could catch a lot lonely hearts out there.

    You're really missing out on some extra sillyness you could be bringing with some simple prompt engineering:

    Quote

    Prompt: Write a heartfelt letter to my wife for my anniversary. Please convey how important she is to me and how much I love her. Don't be too flowery with the words, make it sound informal and personal. Oh yeah, and make it sound like a pirate limerick

    Dear me hearty wife, on this special day,
    I want to say how much I love and adore you in every way.
    You're my treasure, my mate, my rock,
    And with you, I know I'll never be lost.
    So here's to us, and to many more years to come,
    With you by my side, I'm never done.

    Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum,
    To my love, my wife, my one and only numb.
    I'll love you till the end of the sea,
    And I'll always be your faithful pirate, you see.
    So raise your tankard high, and let's toast to us,
    Here's to us, and to a love that's truly just.

    Yours always,
    Your pirate husband

     

    • Hook 'Em 1
    • Haha 1
  10. 20 hours ago, Macanudo said:

    Something I had not given a whole lot of thought to ever and I don't know why...   The condition that most Forts came back in...   How the fuck did those crews keep them flying?  That's some straight up magic.

    A combination of fuckin balls of steel on the pilots to believe in their ability to bring their bird home, and an incredible engineering job to have such durable planes. Practically speaking, if they're at altitude and get beat up and lose an engine and some lifting surface from a wing, they've got enough stored energy to limp home. Even moreso once they drop the dozen or so 500lb bombs they're hauling 

    • Like 2
  11. 14 minutes ago, Dnaguy said:

     

    HR policy docs, procedures, SOP's, etc.

    Fucking game changer for me and time.

    It can churn stuff out. Minimal editing on my part. Verification of citations are needed of course, but talk about be able to leverage your time.

    Biggest difference maker I've seen is ingesting a bunch of reference and policy documents into a KB, and then an agent program listens into the call and proactively surfaces relevant docs and info, and gives some suggested next responses for the agent - all in real time integrated into the agents workspace. 

    The person on the call is still the ultimate filter for the info, but it really helps to reduce their mental load for new hires or when policy may change. 

    And again, that whole knowledge ingestion bit is relatively cheap computationally. My desktop 3080 can do all of the above without breaking a sweat - just imagine what a proper data center chip can do

    • Hook 'Em 2
  12. 5 hours ago, TreatyOak said:

    We love ChatGPT and use it in a myriad of ways every day. Research, sales outreach, articles, and of course, social. Yes, you have to remove the cornball crap it adds to everything, but people also write lots of cornball crap that we have to remove. For a small, a time-stressed team like ours, it’s a game changer. 
     

    We make interns/new sales staff use it or we assume they are wasting their time. 

    In a sense, you're using it for a core design use case- you're taking information in one shape and transforming it to another format. Like taking a sales report and converting it to a paragraph or two for an exec report, or taking your promotional terms and converting it into a sales pitch. 

    It's not going to give you groundbreaking results or something completely new and novel, but it'll be good enough to move past where you're at. My org is looking at using in house foundational models to summarize support cases and characterize common failures and problems so we can uplift our docs and FAQs and hopefully reduce load on support agents 

    • Hook 'Em 1
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