@lrhodes "math, which has historically been a weak spot for LLMs" is a disqualifying statement on its own. How did you construct a type of computer that sucks at MATH!? Math is the one thing computers were designed to be good at - it's literally in the name!

@maia One of my issues with (pop-)evolutionary psychology, besides the fact it's made up, is that it leaves wide gaps in the historical record it doesn't even bother to explain. As far as it's concerned, what happened tens of thousands of years ago in Flintstone-times is far more important than anything that happened between then and now.

Instead of defending the use of LLMs for polishing up your writing, we could be advocating for unpolished writing. Blog posts with spelling errors and awkwardly repeated words. Emails that sound a bit less warm and professional because you forgot the preamble of "Apologies for the late reply, hope you're well! Thanks for the thing last week".

If there's no budget for a human editor, why should the text meet a "professional" (middle class, formally educated) standard? Dyslexic people can just write how they write and people can deal with it. Autistic people can just say what they mean to say and not waste energy on the double empathy gap.

We can learn to read for a more inclusive world, instead of wasting the planet's diminishing resources masking our differences.

@lrhodes Fortunately for Google, they already had an effective monopoly on the search engine business by this point, so it was easy to scrape those sites for data to power the features that kept users on Google.

@lrhodes This isn't an absolute good - some sites might not want that kind of attention - but it's easy to see why it might appeal to a large number of people. Once Google starts selling ads, though, that value proposition tilts against their favor; those websites become competitors for ad impressions (clicking through a given result means users spend more time there and less on Google).

@lrhodes

"I'd say we accept search engine scraping mostly on the premise that it's done for the benefit of the scraped sites"

I would qualify this somewhat by pointing out how, independent of AI, this acceptance ultimately led to Google benefiting from scraping websites at the latter's expense. The value proposition of Google indexing your site is it draws more visitors to your site who may not have known about it otherwise.

If anyone's wondering how my day's been so far:

@coleoptera @narfnra Also, this might be the article referenced earlier?
https://zalkikar.github.io/

@coleoptera @narfnra I'm of a similar mind, in that a part of me approaches the girls in computing boot camps from the early 2010s on as serving the interests of a growing tech industry, regardless of the organizers' intentions (getting girls into coding necessarily widens the labor pool, and therefore depresses wages for those said pool comprises). Or to put it another way: these initiatives would be a good thing under any system other than capitalism.

@mcc You could almost certainly get around this with cookies. As far as modern websites are concerned, though, that just creates another problem: "We care about our customers, which is why we slapped a DIV overlay asking for permission to use cookies pretty please."

@jdarkside To be honest, not only had I forgotten this game existed until this moment; I also hadn't remembered Justin Roiland's existence, let alone his name.

At least Google is here to vindicate me.

The gaps in my memory are resulting in increasingly deranged-sounding Wikipedia searches.

@aeva Now all I can think of is bird Pokémon picking up Voltorbs and dropping them on other Pokémon they want to explode.

@aeva My assumption is other Pokémon don't eat them because they don't want to risk the explosion.

@jayrockin My two impressions of that movie, neither of which make much sense without a lot of personal context:

1.) "Still a more engaging film than the Minecraft Movie." (I recognize this says more about the Minecraft Movie than about Megalopolis.)
2.) "It's Aeon Flux without Aeon Flux."

@fojy A cheaper and faster alternative: grab an MMD model off the Internet (hope it has mouth bones to grab onto) and chuck it in Blender.

Damn it. It hit me that lesser evilism is the political equivalent of effective altruism. The same deeply flawed premise that the best - indeed, only - way to effect real change in the world is to act through (adjust our expectations and understanding to) the institutions that are already in power. The same shouting down of alternatives as childish naivete we can't afford to indulge.

Me to the Donphan on my Pokémon Crystal cartridge I've left in a closet for twenty five years:
https://youtu.be/WoqlkP99uxo

Maybe it's also worth noting that the art exhibit described in the article avoids this definition of humanity in favor of presenting the chatbot as an effect of the artist's psyche ("He said the bot represented his 'Jungian shadow,'")? Or that at the end of the day, he's still laundering AI artifacts through his name as an artist because making it in the modern art world demands as much? Who knows?