kombookcha

I have been very curious to try a Gros Michel after learning that the common artifical banana flavor is supposed to taste like them, not like the post-Panama Disease bananas.

I wonder how it is that we keep using this heirloom banana flavoring even after everyone's assumptions about what a proper banana tastes like changed.

Can't lose your finger to the QR code scam. One hopes.

One interesting thing about NK is that they have their own walled garden intranet, only accessible from NK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network)

Kwangmyong has been around since the latter half of the 90s, and is famously 'home grown' as a deliberate security feature.

NK also has some access to the regular internet, but it's very limited and tightly controlled. Meaning it is a luxury reserved for a few members of the upper echelons of NK society, or certain entrusted to people who need it for work (intelligence agencies and whatnot).

Damn that's crazy, almost like they're completely different and applying the features of one to the other is apples and oranges. ;)

To enter this Free And Open Space you must consent to being held upside down and given a vigorous shake. Any money or valuables that fall from your pockets will belong to us, and go in this big sack marked with a dollar sign.

:)

That's the disturbing part, isn't it - it's completely normalized to the point that most of the sites you're gonna pass through on a given day will be doing it to some degree.

It's like if in literally every room you entered on a given day, there was one of those street peddlers who accost you to make you sign a subscription to something or other. Sure you can just firmly tell him no a couple of times and he'll back off, but going through your day like that sucks!

ML is a lot more accurate to what many of these current 'AI' products do anyway. The AI wave is ultimately about branding more so than any particular threshold of ability.

I think you're right - if there is a large AI crash that sours people on the term for a while, most of these products are just gonna stick around in some more marketable format.

Looking back at industry people pretending like ChatGPT was some frighteningly intelligent very-nearly-general-intelligence type of thing, you kinda wonder if they were deliberately doing a marketing stunt or just bought their own hype.

>And that’s the larger point. The Justice Department seems to believe it’s meaningful to charge a company with a felony. But it’s not. Companies don’t commit felonies—people do. And if people aren’t held responsible—and sent to prison when necessary—then they’ll never have the incentive they need to change.

This is at the core of the issue, but as the author points out, it's extremely unlikely to happen.

>The settlement makes it obvious that the government is afraid of what would happen—not just to Boeing but to the Defense Department and even the larger economy—if it hit the company as hard as the company deserves to be hit.

Boeing is very much too Big™ to (be allowed to) fail, and thus the actual individuals who are responsible for killings hundreds of people will walk away and be replaced by another set of people who will know that they can do the exact same thing with impunity.

>asking about specifics is a sign that you're a bad faith actor

"Only maximally fuzzy claims that align with my vibes are allowed, facts are for haters"

Definitely a good sign when your model of the world cannot be allowed to ever touch actual reality. Or grass.

Original printings and original manuscripts are different types of originals, and contain different types of data for scholars. They are not fungible.

Do you presume that nobody is bothering to try to preserve natively digital culture? Because I assure you people do. Do you presume nobody will care in the future? Why would that be the case?

What a strange, smugly uninformed angle.

In 100 years when you can do even better scans, how will you make them without an original? You'll be stuck with whatever we were capable of in the moment when we decided to not give a shit about the original anymore.

It's not trivial to "preserve 100%" of a physical item at all. You can't hold a digitized copy or take samples. You can't get at anything that's beyond the resolution and nature of your scan.

The notion that digital copies simply contain all relevant information is on its face naive because it's inherently lossy to create a scan of a physical item.

Differences between print editions can be important scholarly material. Did a printing error in the third run end up getting reproduced in later runs? Did an editor change this word at some point after the original publication, which wound up migrating into later editions of the work? Was that in agreement with the author, or done on their own? Was there originally a chapter break here to accomodate an illustration? What was the typeface like? What kind of ink was used - is the green tint on the chapter headings intentional, or did it fade over time?

On a purely aesthetic media-nerd level it's also interesting. Books aren't just their plaintext. There is craftsmanship and artistry involved in how a work is intended to be presented, and without examples of the original prints this context can be lost.

On a similar note, old movies are notoriously eclectic about different cuts and editions with scenes missing or added or lost to time. Having and preserving original reels is invaluable (especially because they're much more fragile in storage than books).

Imagine watching Buster Keaton while a guy is actually playing live music and breaking out slide whistles while the crowd cheers and smokes and waves their hats - it's an experience that's closer to going to a club and seeing a comedy act, than streaming movies on the couch. That particular experience is largely inaccessible to us today because we don't have pristine fully staffed 1920s cinemas that we can walk into. But if you have an original printing of a book, you can in fact just 'walk in' and see what it was supposed to be like. :)

There is something super raygun gothic about walking on the bottom of the liquid hydrocarbon sea in an old timey lead-boot diving suit.

You already kinda do if you're drinking bottles of water left in the car for a long time, time+sun/heat/motion is how microplastics are made.

I think that's about right, yeah - in my experience international gatherings in Europe tends to converge on a sort of continental pidgin English where you shave off all the difficult aspects and end up with this very clear and crisp shared language that's more mutually understandable for everyone involved than any of the ordinary 'native' variants of English.

I think what's less clear is how consistent these convergences are. Certainly I have noticed colloquialisms and alterations to better fit romance and germanic languages that pop up again and again, but at what point does it get consistent enough to be its own 'thing' and not just a handy linguistic tool fashioned for the task at hand?

There's also an interesting split occurring with continental Euro-English, which is primarily being spoken by non-native speakers as a lingua franca. The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English

It's a pretty fun party fact that by the time the last mammoths died out, the Great Pyramid was already 1500 years old :)

It gives me a lot of hope for revival projects that there's relatively 'young' dna to be found. Of course the reduced range towards the end probably means there's not many of these recent sources to source it from, but still!

That sounds tough to work in. Do people ever cross-pollinate between theoretical positions and use eachothers data without the competing theory attached, or are they completely siloed off?

That's a very interesting perspective, thank you. If you don't mind me asking, do you have a sense of why this feels necessary in psych - is it deference to some preferred school of thought that needs to sign off on your work, or is it more that you need to signal that you know lots of theory? How did you go about it, when they made you put in a theory chapter?

What would happen if you turned in some psych work that was robust in its method, but without explicit references to theory?

Certainly. I'm an anthropologist by training, where extensive fieldwork is the gold standard. Second to this comes a great deal of methodological nerd stuff (IE how to make sure you get good data from all that fieldwork). 'Theory' is mostly subsumed into this, and essentially comes in the form of securing the epistemic quality of the method.

I'm passingly familiar with sociology, area studies, cultural studies and linguistics - all of which seem to me, like they also value real world observations in their respective areas much more highly than it sounds like psych does.

From your description of these questionaires, it sounds like a methodology issue to me. If your baseline is a questionaire, then the questions you would think to ask are going to be informed by your preconceived notions of the issue, and you're forcing the raw data out there to conform to these formats you've set for it. If your chosen method for collecting the data is already distorting the field, then you're injecting a major risk of just confirming your own bias.

I appreciate that psych is trying to get at a different type of knowledge, but from where I'm at this sounds like an "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type of problem. I'm very much not trained to do statistical analysis though, which I believe is part of the toolkit for psych phds - so maybe it actually is the best tool for what they're trying to do.

"I personally think it's fair to compare social science research with monks researching a religious text. They can work hard for years without ever coming up with a new idea."

Based on my own experiences, I really don't think this applies to other social sciences very well at all. I'm not particularly familiar with psych papers, which may well be mostly based on text-on-text, but in all the social science disciplines I am familiar with there's a great deal of focus on fieldwork and diving into the messy nitty-gritty of the actual world.

Is psych uniquely constrained from doing this somehow (patient ethics?), or is it a particular culture in the psych departments causing this?

That would be a rather weird and boneheaded thing to do, when you've already twice approached said AI's voice actor and been rejected.

There are any number of human-sounding movie AI's, but apparently only one whose actor has specifically and repeatedly rejected this association.

Does he keep getting into ethical hot water because he's a reckless fool, or because he doesn't really care about ethics at all, despite all the theatre?

Sam tweeting "Her" is a clear as daylight indication that they are deliberately trying to associate the voice with ScarJo's performance.

They're squarely in the zone with knockoff products deliberately aping the branding of the real thing.

"Dr Peppy isn't a trick to piggyback on Dr Pepper, it's a legally distinct brand!" might give you enough of a fig leaf in court with a good lawyer, but it's very obvious what kind of company you're running to anybody paying attention.

"But what if a person was so thoroughly replaced with robot parts to be just like a computer" is just "if my grandma had wheels, she would be a truck, therefore it's not so easy to say that cars aren't allowed to drive inside the old folks home".

People and software are different things, and it makes total sense that there should be different rules for what they can and cannot do.

It sounds like a bit, but it's true. Outlook offers to write my e-mails. LinkedIn suggests how I should comment on posts I see. I assume this is all being done to give the impression of feature growth to investors, but the reality is that Dead Internet Theory is becoming more real every day.

I think there's a lot of self-selection going on with the cathegory of estranged parents who blame their kids. If you're the sort of person to reflect on your behaviour, take responsibility and change it because you realise you're hurting others, you're a lot less likely to end up with estranged kids in the first place.

If it does happen anyway, you're probably also less likely to be self-soothing with listicles about how it's definitely the fault of your ungrateful kids and whoever turned them against you.

I hope you're in a better spot now, and I'm glad you found the strength to demand better.

The "AI is magic and we should simply believe" is even being actively promoted because all these VC hucksters need it.

Any criticism of AI is being met with "but if we all just hype AI harder, it will get so good that your criticisms won't matter" or flat out denied. You've got tech that's deeply flawed with no obvious way to get unflawed, and the current AI 'leaders' run companies with no clear way to turn a profit other than being relentlessly hyped on proposed future growth.

It's becoming an extremely apparent bubble.

I don't think anybody here is upholding Wittgenstein as an exemplar of an emotionally well-adjusted person. I'm not proselytizing for him, just explaining his take to the best of my ability.

I don't disagree with this criticism of his position either, for what it's worth - Personally I think Wittgenstein ignores empathy as a transfer of embodied nonspoken knowledge, for one.

It'd be one thing if his example were of something very radically different (IE space aliens), but social mammals like lions and whales and humans all learn to navigate the world through the presence of others first and foremost. Long before you have any awareness of language, even long before birth, you will have an awareness of closeness. You will primarily learn to navigate the world by way of your relationships to others. That goes whether you're a lion cub or a human baby.

>And whoever wrote the original sentence can always come back and ask “but did you really really understand them”?

Asking questions that are very difficult to answer precisely and well, and then trying to do so, is kind of the whole deal with philosophy. How /do/ you know the things that you think you know? You can roll your eyes at it and choose not to investigate further, or you can try to get super granular about sussing out an answer. Philosophers generally try to do the latter.

If your answer to "what does it mean to know things" or "how do we actually use words to navigate meaning" or "how well can we understand other living things" is "I don't care, that's nerd shit" then I highly recommend that you don't read Wittgenstein, because you're gonna get real bored real fast.

+1 - absolutely tremendous podcast series.