🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦

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  • 353 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 11th, 2025

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  • It’s good to highlight the efforts of some of the little keystones that are all too easily overlooked. The deeper you dig the more you realize there are more people silently doing their job that makes anything else we do on the internet even possible. Millions of people all over the world, invisible to you on a normal day, doing things you only have the vaguest awareness of making every moment of every day possible to begin with. Offline too if you want to get technical. The intricate web of civilization is humbling when you think about it.


  • See that word “Editorials” in the link. That’s a dead give-away it’s not really a good source. While it’s a decent breakdown of the facts, the article doesn’t cite sources for its claims. As a statement of a position, its fine. It’s not evidence though, and evidence is what you need to debunk something. Experimental data, analysis, meta-analysis, something that you can point at that anyone with the right tools and resources can duplicate independently and get the same results, as well as a clear description of your reasoning for how it proves what you say it proves. That’s evidence.

    The conclusion is correct, but it doesn’t show how someone can know that for sure. An opinion, by itself, doesn’t disprove anything. It amounts to “Trust me bro” which can be rhetorically compelling, but isn’t the same thing as being objectively correct.



  • Yeah, chips are more of a perishable good than any kind of durable infrastructure, and at the end of the day, the models themselves have no durable value because information is never truly scarce, regardless of how they try to make us pretend it is or poison the well with lies. There’s no magic solution to making LLMs actual AGI or even effective tools outside of their narrow scope. Not only that, the way they’re using it is extremely reckless, deeply inefficient, and supremely cost intensive, on a level that makes the Manhattan Project look wholesome. There isn’t going to be a “last man standing” to win, it’s just going to go up like flash powder and take everyone in the dogpile with it.




  • This guy gets it. There’s legitimately people who couldn’t get the food, don’t have the facilities to prepare it in their shoebox apartment, don’t have the skills to prepare it, have next to nothing for food storage capacity, and/or are on too much of a time crunch to actually prep their own food.

    Does that describe everyone? No. Do they exist? Absolutely, and sadly more common than people realize. I’m extremely blessed to have a comfortable suburban house and all the access in the world to the resources I need, but I came up in less favourable circumstances and have old acquaintances who are still there. A grocery store was hard enough to get to it may as well have been on the moon for all the time and transportation I had to get there, my access to tools and appliances to cook were effectively non-existent and the fridge and freezer I had access to couldn’t hold a full week of food to begin with. Living on convenience store taquitos and fast food wasn’t a choice, it was that or starve, and you ate what was open when you had time.




  • Because the modern world runs on psychological manipulation. Has since the end of WWII. The economy as we know it is built on leveraging, manipulating, and exploiting our cognitive biases and psychological vulnerabilities. Today we give it gentle sounding names like “Marketing” and “Public Relations” and “Brand Identity Management”, but what it is, is the psychological warfare techniques developed during WWII, evolved during the cold war and weaponized against civilian populations to extract profit. This is just the latest evolution of a set of practices that goes back 75 years or more, which underpins every part of society as we know it in the modern world.



  • The best way I can say it is it’s kind of like exercise. Going to the Moon makes about as much sense as " pick up heavy object, put down heavy object." The Moon itself doesn’t really accomplish a lot in the moment, but the practice of engineering all the little things that it takes to get to the Moon, and learning about the universe along the way, is kind of like exercise for society coming together to solve hard problems.

    Now you’re correct that there’s a lot of hard problems right here on earth for us to try and solve, and that’s valid. But I also need you to think about just how little funding actually goes to NASA. Or Space X for that matter. It’s actually a lot less difficult (and expensive) to get to the Moon than say, teach all our children to read properly.

    The skills we build and the things we learn along the way however can be turned around and repurposed for lots of other hard problems down the road that are a lot closer to home. It sure as hell beats the other kind of “exercise” we’ve historically done to advance our skills which mainly consists of killing each other by the millions.

    Does that make sense?