399 responses and counting. I got bore going through them. The train, apparently is VERY long and indeed will take a VERY long time to pass.
Daryl
joined 1 month ago
Rumor has it that a certain super-rich tech mogul has am AI bidet/toilette in his house, that has to be connected to the Internet before it will work. When the Internet glitched (the site went off-line) and lost Internet connectivity, he could not flush the toilette manually.
AI itself is not getting better. Humans are getting better at writing the algorithms that will better be able to discern, classify, categorize, identify, direct the information flow, and predict based on more improved standardized inputs.
But the 'tech bros' never really jumped on it until Mark went through his 'existential crisis' thing.
AI is now a catch-all acronym that is becoming meaningless. The old, conventional light switch on the wall of the house I first lived in some 70 years ago could be classified as 'AI. The switch makes a decision, based on what position I put it in. I turn the light on, it remembers that decision and stays on. The thing is, the decision was first made by me and the switch carried out that decision, based on criteria that was designed into it.
That is, AI still does not make any decision that humans have not designed it to make in the first place.
What is needed, is a more appropriate terminology, describing the actual process of what we call AI. And really, the more appropriate descriptor would not be Artificial Intelligence, but Human-made Intelligent devices. All of these so-called AI devices and applications are, after all, completely human designed and human made. The originating Intelligence still comes from the minds of humans.
Most of the applications which we call Artificial Intelligence are actually Algorithmic Intelligence - decisions made based on algorithms designed by humans in the first place. The devices just follow these algorithms. Since humans have written these algorithms, it should really be no surprise that these devices are making decisions very similar to the decisions humans would make. Duhhh. We made them in our own image, no wonder they 'think' like us.
Really, these AI devices do not make decisions, they merely follow the decisions humans first designed into them.
Big Blue, the IBM chess playing computer, plays excellent chess because humans designed it to play chess, and to make chess decisions, based on how humans first designed the chess game.
What would be really scarry would be if Big Blue decided of its own volition that it no longer wanted to play chess, but it wanted to play a game it designed.
What turns a Canadian into a Terrorist? A terrorist organization, plan and simple.
I know this for a fact, having watched a Canadian youth turned into a terrorist right before my eyes.
If you are in a car, and the tires are going flat, is it a deterministic, nihilistic, view that inevitably, no matter who the driver is, the car will soon have to come to a stop? The choice, of course, is how catastrophic the stop will be - a controlled stop or a calamitous stop?
The trouble with America is that, even if Harris won, the entire American system is still based on an adversarial, winner-take-all system. In that regard, as Obama found out, the system is inherently unstable and unsteerable. Every move Harris tried to make, would be opposed and every attempt made by the opposition to undermine it. Under such conditions, progress is impossible. But even a controlled landing is impossible. No matter how much time America had, the fundamental problem was unfixable without a complete reset. The American governance system is basically unworkable and dysfunctional. The Civil War proved it, and the Civil War never really did end.
America has to split up in order for the parts to function properly again. The two sides are basically incompatible, and divorce is the only viable solution, apart from continuing the fighting, hating, and constant battling. Prolonging the situation will only lead to both sides destroying each other.
In point of fact, when Trump is deposed by Vance, the inevitable split will accelerate. Half of America will never live under the 2025 Manifesto, and the other half will never allow it to be undone once Vance puts it in place.
Something the Americans do not want the world, and especially other Americans, to know about Canada. Canada is at the forefront of developing the next stage of clean, harmless, safe nuclear power that actually uses existing nuclear waste as the fuel.
https://smractionplan.ca/content/moltex-energy-canada
The irony is that Canadian physicists were instrumental in developing the technology 50 years ago. It is the same technology that the Americans used in their nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. But because of 'security concerns', the Americans prevented the Canadians from even mentioning the technology, under fear of lifetime incarceration. It was 'Avro Arrow' silencing on steroids. However, these reactors were so small, that development on them could be confined to the basement of a University physics building, or even under a greenhouse. Yet not only did Canadian universities, engineers, and scientists have to deny they existed, they could not even say they do not exist, because that would acknowledge they even recognized the possibility of the technology. Yet there they were, in American submarines, clear as day evidence that they existed.
And yet the most effective and less harmful drug proven to work against inflammation and inflammatory post-op pain - CBD oil - was not only banned, but any research into its usefulness was made illegal as well.
It is credible to say that the Opioid crisis was actually a .made-in-Vietnam' crisis, in the sense that it gained a lot of traction from the returning American Vets from Vietnam, who were horribly injured (both mentally and physically) but ignored by the American system. They had no alternative but to seek solace from their emotional as well as physical pain in opioids.
Vietnam was the worst defeat of America in their entre history, It completely destroyed America. and for absolutely no good reason. Under the same system that America tried to quash, Vietnam is now an economic and industrial powerhouse, a major exporter to America.. A complete and senseless waste of American lives and resources. Moreso in that the bottomless pit for money became so all-encompassing to the American economy that funding for the entire space endeavor completely dried up, along with funding for physics research. America hasn't won a serious Nobel prize in Physics in decades.
Almost. it is 'selling America's future to the top 20%. It would take at least 10% to actually form a viable economy. The Roman Empire and the British Aristocracy in antiquity realized that. So has Putin, North Korea., and Saudi Arabia. The system needs a critical mass to ensure survivability and continuity
I don't need to 'look up the history'. I was there from the beginning. ARPA and DARPA. Unix based. No WWW, no HTTP, no HTML. . No 'MarkUp Language' at all, because there were no web pages. No browsers. Everything text based TCP/IP. Pin-up 'Pictures' sent as very elaborate constructs made from different typed ASCII characters providing the different shades of grey, depending on the density of the characters. I still have one. tucked away somewhere in my file drawer, I think. Since it was mostly used by grad student tech nerds in the beginning, discipline was strictly enforced by 'flaming'. It was only when the WWW became well established that corporations realize there was money to be made from it. Before that, it was indeed 'free'. Well, the lines paid for by the Government and Universities.