I met a Russian student studying abroad who was very intent on staying out of Russia as much as possible because he’s aware of how messed up things are. Had very a good sense of humor. His jokes about Putin and the Russian government would be enough to get people there thrown in jail.

I remember hearing a while ago a little bit about Servo. It seems to have been started by Mozilla, but is now managed by the Linux Foundation Europe.

I know. But unfortunately, the president is also the commander in chief of the executive branch, so he has the power to approve their operations.

From what I understand, the military will suggest potential courses of action, but not all of them are good, which is where the president is supposed to use his wise judgment, if only he had it.

I don’t think he’s right. Personally, his comments rub me the wrong way. They remind me of the annoying, confidently incorrect comments I’ve see on Reddit so many times.

Granted, I’m also fairly biased because I used to be in the army, and don’t appreciate the kind of assumptions/generalizations people make about people in the US military. I bash the military all the time personally in my private life, but it’s different when I see people who clearly don’t know shit do it.

I respect you for admitting there are things you might not know though.

I feel like many of the commenters below are missing the point, or didn’t even read the article. It’s not about incompetence by the SEALs (they weren’t), it’s Trump’s incompetence. He basically ignored the restrictions his predecessors had put in place because they knew that using special operations for extremely high-risk operations (because they’re likely to fail or be disastrous in the first place) was not something to be done lightly, but Trump, being Trump, just approved crazy operations without any clear thought.

Hey you kids, get off my WLAN!

I went to New York City a lot a decade ago, but going back there recently after getting used to living in Tokyo actually gave me reverse culture shock. Why the goddamn does it smell like piss everywhere in the subway. Like, I know why, but WHY people, WHY.

I feel like it’s a do-or-die caveman instinct or something.

I was hanging out with a group of people in my friend’s backyard. We were supposed to have a bonfire, but the wood was wet and wasn’t burning. We used all sorts of fuel, fire starters, etc. I saw what looked like corner of a log turn into ember, so wouldn’t give up. Never got a flame when we were there, of course.

I felt very proud though when my friend sent me door camera footage of the firepit turning into a massive blaze in the middle of night that woke her up.

I like the use of colors for shading on the trees. Oddly satisfying to look at.

What I mean by adding something of our own is how art, in Cory Doctorow’s words, contain many acts of communicative intent. There are thousands of microdecisions a human makes when creating art. Whereas imagery generated only by the few words of a prompt to an LLM only contain that much communicative intent.

I feel like that’s why AI art always has that AI look and feel to it. I can only sense a tiny fraction of the person’s intent, and maybe it’s because I know the rest is filled in by the AI, but that is the part that feels really hollow or soulless to me.

Even in corporate art, I can at least sense what the artist was going for, based on corporate decisions to use clean, inoffensive designs for their branding and image. There’s a lot of communicative intent behind those designs.

I recommend checking the blog post I referenced, because Cory Doctorow expresses these thoughts far more eloquently than I do.

As for the latter argument, I wanted to highlight the fact that AI needs that level of resources and training data in order to produce art, whereas a human doesn’t, which shows you the power of creativity, human creativity. That’s why I think what AI does cannot be called ‘creativity.’ It cannot create. It does what we tell it to, without its own intent.

My comment is replying to the guy talking about whether or not you can call AI ‘creative’ though.

You’re forgetting the fact that humans always add something of our own when we make art, even when we try to reproduce another’s artpiece as a study.

The many artists we might’ve looked at certainly influence our own styles, but they’re not the only thing that’s expressed in our artwork. Our life lived to that point, and how we’re feeling in the moment, those are also the things, often the point, that artists communicate when making art.

Most artists haven’t also looked at nearly every single work by almost every artist spanning a whole century of time. We also don’t need whole-ass data centers that need towns’ worth of water supply to just train to produce some knock-off, soulless amalgamation of other people’s art.

Look at what they need to mimic a fraction of our power.

Superman himself was a refugee too, undocumented even, brought to Earth as a child because his parents wanted him to escape the fate of their home.

I get it, because we want to do the opposite of what RFK Jr wants the majority of the time.

I really appreciate that these types of collectors of random appliances exist whenever I need to buy something and want to read real opinions written by people instead of the garbage sponsored recommendation list articles that seemed to pollute the search results (even before the LLMs appeared) that forced everyone to start appending ‘reddit’ to their Google queries.

I wouldn’t consider those examples to meet the definition of ‘critical thinking,’ from what I understand it to be. In fact, they’re kind of the exact opposite.

I would interpret those examples as just being “critical” or biased towards something.

Sharpie enough to control hurricanes.

In that scenario, I agree the pragmatic choice is to save the majority.

But many situations tend to be complex and aren’t as clear as a trolley problem, so I want to avoid falling into the trap of seeing a false dilemma when there’s possibly more than two options.

Those are already arguments for why NASA and space programs shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I remember watching something about the space race, and there was a clip of public opinion during the time of the first mission to the moon, where a man complained that the money should’ve been used to improve the lives of poor Americans instead.

Regardless, for the scenario in The Martian, if money is already being spent and going to continue being spent on space missions in the future, I think you can rationalize it as using money for another or next space mission. They would still gain knowledge from what they had to do to pull off that rescue, so it’s not a complete waste of funds for a mission either.

On the morality point, I’d argue that we should spend the money to rescue any person if we have the money/means, and it can feasibly happen without excessive risk to other lives, otherwise we’re assigning monetary value to human lives. That includes both people in imminent danger, requiring expensive emergency services, and people suffering slower, persistent risks like hunger that require sustained support.

Years ago, I asked for a Fitbit for Christmas. The next day, I returned it when I found out it didn’t integrate with Apple Health without third-party apps.

Bought a Garmin instead. It’s not perfect (a bug deleted a year’s worth of data one time), but at least I can store the data on my phone instead of it being stuck only in Garmin’s cloud.