• 13 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 20th, 2023

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  • I imagine even the fk_ai crowd appreciate the non-gimmick stuff as long as it is nothing like a chatbot

    Tiny example from Gmail:

    This is all over, and it can be super useful from time to time.

    They say “f AI!” but I mean sure they don’t want better searches than were possible five years ago? If it’s not sycophantic and confabulatory etc. etc.

    Good point on intrusivity

    PS

    PS: I translated news from Iran this week using AI tools and using traditional translators. Who would advocate for the garbage traditional translation—soon as I went the “AI” route, it was suddenly possible to understand what the journalists were trying to say. That doesn’t mean I want translators to lose their jobs, it just means I know what the best available technology is and how to use it to get a job done. (And does not mean just because it translates well that I will also trust it to summarize the article for me.)





  • Hey there I didn’t complain or downvote but also declined to upvote cuz of the two little tiny words of ad hom……

    … (idea!) …

    DINGUS! Dingus would’ve saved it!

    ya dingus

    Perfect, feels very Lemmy-appropriate—gets the insult with a perfect lulz factor so even the parent commenter could’ve kinda laughed (I hope ppl can take jokes!)

    …sorry I know I’m not your mom, hope this doesn’t come across maximally prescriptive (just my 2c!)








  • I forgot the biggest laugh of them all. This YouTube astrology dude explains some different types of astrology, including one he called mundane astrology. He explained mundane astrologers attempt to explain entire society’s behaviors and fates using the stars or astrology or whatever. And the example that he gave was COVID. And also he brought up, believe it or not, elections. And said that there’s an election astrology.

    So I think there are only three possibilities.

    One is that astrology, including election astrology, is super effective. And a handful of people can do it. And they’re all billionaires.

    Scenario two, the same scenario, except election astrologers don’t like to mix money with their craft. And that’s why we don’t know about the 30th through 50th richest people on the planet, all being astrologers, who enjoy the betting markets, the prediction markets.

    Scenario three is that we don’t see billionaire astrologers. Not because they are too ethical to mix money with sky gazing (or whatever it is), but because they’re making it all up.

    So to the astrologers out there, who amongst you are billionaires thanks to owning the prediction markets every day or every election cycle? Or what kind of ethical code prevents election astrologers from using prediction markets?


  • Awesome, I didn’t reply yesterday because I had too much to say so here is a simple thank you to avert a common never-reply scenario :-)


    Well, just a quick dictation, too. Apparently I forgot that stars were involved with astrology at all, so I slapped my forehead and searched YouTube. And I was hoping to find a skeptic who steel-manned astrology, but that would be pretty odd to spend your time doing such a thing if you were a skeptic. Unless, of course, it was teeing up an explanation for a teardown. But anyway, I listened to some goofball talking super seriously about astrology, and he made a claim about celebrity star charts and said that Iron Man, Robert Downey Juney, had foreseen that he would have a big change in his life. And then, sure enough, Iron Man came out and changed his career. Wow, great job, astrology. You nailed it. Once energy is just about free, and so is compute, it would be pretty easy to disprove that line of thinking by feeding the world’s celebrities into a system and analyzing all of their little charts. Anyway, I was only thinking about birth months and the idea of the positions of balls of gas having meaningful impacts on all of our lives is quite the stretch. Please excuse the lack of editing here. Thank you.


  • Astrology is really dumb. I do have one curiosity with it. It’s a big deal for hockey players to be born early in the year to the point you find fewer pros born in December and in the later months compared to January through March born hockey professionals.

    One other thing, kids have birthdays every year and if they have their parties outside that means some kids are having snowy birthday parties and others are having sunny birthdays and plenty of crossover. The kinds of interactions you have with your friends will be slightly impacted* by how much outdoor gear you have to wear, etc. (*maybe imperceptibly)

    But the point is there are at least two possible differences that come depending on which month you’re born in. What if there are like a hundred of them and astrology is a really terrible way of trying to figure that out? Now I realize it’s not so maybe a better question is I wonder if there is any version of birth month based assessments, correlations, or analyses that might be fruitful or useful in some way or another.