YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!

Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out “uh…emails and productivity and things.”

I see your point, but I still don’t think the scene works, but thinking about it like that makes it much more watchable. My point is that the scene is simultaneously poignant and a throw-away. It’s a “big deal” but also just one scene.

By the 32nd century, something like that should be such a non-issue for humans, that it would be like stating just another fact about yourself (amnesia and trust-issues aside), which lends itself to being a throw-away…but that defeats the purpose of the scene. Again, I am all about the message and Stamets’ reaction, but it felt very 21st century and on-the-nose.

I’d have preferred if Adira were just non-binary from the beginning and maybe have a quick correction of someone when they were misgendered. Or, let that scene be the reveal of something else, like the symbiont. With that change (I’d have to rewatch the season to see where this scene was in relation to the symbiont reveal), I think the scene would still work while tightening up the writing. I also think it’d get the message across, too.

Now, if the writers really wanted that scene to stay as-is, there are options. Make them an alien from a culture not as enlightened (which would cause other issues) or have this scene play into a bigger theme of Earth backsliding post-Burn (like a Dark Ages) to have mores closer to the 21st century and show the 23rd century crew as horrified by it and work to bring Earth and humanity back toward enlightenment.

This kinda sums up my main problem with Disco. There were great options on the table to realize a concept, but they just wrote it in an awkward way that is unsatisfying (at least to me). Sometimes, that awkwardness reads as performative/lazily progressive.

It’s not that Disco isn’t progressive; it’s just lazily progressive. Case in point: the scene that bothers me to this day is Adira coming out as non-binary, just beyond cringe-worthy and very 21st century. As a viewer, the scene read like Adira was waiting to be judged harshly for their identity, and it just totally took me out of the era. By the 32nd century, I’d expect that being judged harshly for one’s gender identity would be at least a millennium behind us, and the conversation should either have not happened or been so matter-of-fact that it was treated as nothing. I get what the writers were trying to do, and it fell so flat and felt so bluntly obvious. I’m all for the message, but the delivery was not great.

The saddest thing about Disco to me is that there were great ideas and great intentions, but the execution of those ideas was so poor. Really, it just shows that you can have great actors, great directors, and great concepts, but if the writers can’t make it work, it just all comes apart.

I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It’s not my daily driver, but it works well when I’m on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn’t want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won’t touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.

I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they’re floundering.

It’s almost like racism, anti-intellectualism, and general bigotry are bad for business. If right wingers want an LLM that aligns with their regressive beliefs, they are free to buy their own GPUs and train it themselves. Considering how much math is involved (and education to understand it), I wish them the best of luck; I’m sure Cletus was sure to teach his homeschooled children all about linear algebra.

Except this is a state case. Unless he also has the Supreme Court Court of Appeals of the State of New York under his control…he’s going to have a rough road ahead I think.

The truly unfortunate part is that this may be the only conviction we get. The documents case is being destroyed by the judge, and SCOTUS is likely going to tank the January 6th case.

EDIT: Caught me! I’m not from New York and didn’t check 😅

However, the name “Arthur Grand Technologies” will always be synonymous to racism.

For now. This will be memory-holed in a couple weeks. A couple grand is nothing, maybe just a slightly down quarter. They should have been completely annihilated. Crimes like this shouldn’t be fixed dollar amounts; it should be percentages of average annual gross earnings, and in this case, something like 300% annual gross earnings. Let them sell everything off.

escooters which are terrible

That’s a bit of a stretch. They aren’t great, but they’re still better than a car, and a lot of the disadvantage is because of poor infrastructure and lack of courtesy by a lot of e-scooter riders. One of those is easier to fix than the other.

E-bikes are way better than e-scooters, though, and I’d say e-bikes are more versatile.

The original paper itself, for those who are interested.

Overall, this is really interesting research and a really good “first step.” I will be interested to see if this can be replicated on other models. One thing that really stood out, though, was that certain details are obfuscated because of Sonnet being proprietary. Hopefully follow-on work is done on one of the open source models to confirm the method.

One of the notable limitations is quantifying activation’s correlation to text meaning, which will make any sort of controls difficult. Sure, you can just massively increase or decrease a weight, and for some things that will be fine, but for real manual fine tuning, that will prove to be a difficulty.

I suspect this method is likely generalizable (maybe with some tweaks?), and I’d really be interested to see how this type of analysis could be done on other neural networks.

I’m in Illinois, and my entire family thought I was nuts for supporting bail reform. My cop brother said that we’d have hordes of criminals on the street causing more crime, and my parents again voiced how they “want to move out of state” (because Indiana is sooooooo much better /s). They never could answer why paying to be set free until court was so central to security because it never made sense to tie pre-trial lock up with ability to pay.

They never bring it up anymore, and for that, I’m grateful.

Blue or green for me. Never could find a proper teal folder.

Hey, don’t be rude. Cave women were far more civilized and intelligent. They don’t deserve being compared to MTG!

My thoughts exactly. Growth is a byproduct of quality. Similarly, if the Fediverse grows too much and quality starts to slip, we should also let it shrink until quality comes back. I think our aim should be quality, and anything else is just a side effect.

What I think is even sadder is that even if a local small business makes a good, honest product and values consumers and employees and even if it miraculously doesn’t get decimated by cheap>quality and becomes successful. It will still get destroyed because private equity or another large soulless corporation will swoop in and make an offer the owner can’t refuse which then starts the the good business down the road of being sucked dry by the corporate vampires.

I do my best to go out of my way to patronize small businesses first, but too many times I’ve seen this happen. Every time it’s so depressing. What’s more depressing is that it really doesn’t need to be this way, and yet we continue as is.

You’re getting downvoted, but you’re right. And that is the reason that using proprietary software and SaaS is a problem. If I’m only buying the right to use a copy of something as a company sees fit, then I’m not really buying anything. I’m essentially paying a company a tribute to use their software in their way.

Decades ago, it was the same way, but it felt different. We got physical media, and we could do what we wished with the files: modify them, delete them, etc. Hell, the EULAs for some '90s and early '00s software even said you could use the software in perpetuity, and we could use software in anyway we saw fit. The biggest constraint was on selling copies. Back then, and even now, that seems pretty reasonable. (Though, as an aside, it would have been better to also get access to the source code, but I digress.)

Now, we have to use company’s software exactly how they want us to use it. Personally, I refuse to go along with this (as much as I can), so I have migrated most of my digital life to FLOSS.

Yeah, I agree. It was well-written, and I thought it was good, but saying this was the best SOTU of all time seems a bit far-fetched. Biden straight-up isn’t a great orator, and that’s fine by me. I would rather someone who can do the job than make wonderful speeches.

Now, how Biden dealt with the hecklers was pretty great, I’ll say.

I mean, not all will vote for Trump. I imagine some supporters will not vote, vote third party, or (gasp) vote for Biden. I think the majority will just vote for Trump because of the R next to his name, though.

This is awesome!

Then they’ll be the first to complain when they go overseas and people don’t speak English.

If I remember correctly, he didn’t want to nominate her. He wanted Liebermann and didn’t even like Palin that much. She was just sort of forced on him.