endlessmonotony posted:

The government is currently asking us to limit showering.

Which is a shame because I like long showers.

We have literal propaganda saying every other day is fine.

Ham Equity posted:

I mean... what's the alternative? Asking those millionaire mcmansion owners not to water their lawns?

Shear Modulus posted:

Is this goons' newest excuse for never showering

Amphigory posted:

Malicious AIs spamming *everything* with nonsense that is, essentially, indistinguishable from real information is just Kessler Syndrome for the internet, isn't it?

We're going back to books, folks...

Amphigory posted:

Malicious AIs spamming *everything* with nonsense that is, essentially, indistinguishable from real information is just Kessler Syndrome for the internet, isn't it?

We're going back to books, folks...

Rutibex posted:

finally my librarian skills will be worth money

uber_stoat posted:

this concept comes up in Peter Watts books a lot. the internet in Rifters is exactly that and in Blindsight the sum total of all human communication is posited to be meaningless garbage.

quote:

Writing in literary magazine n+1, Laura Preston tells us what it was like to impersonate Brenda, a chatbot whose fallbacks were “poets and writers with MFAs, but there were also PhDs in performance studies and comparative literature, as well as a number of opera singers.” Getting this talent was possible because, at $25/hr, they got paid better than they would as adjuncts in academia.

endlessmonotony posted:

natural gas from Russia to get green energy

Subjunctive posted:

natural gas is green energy now?

Subjunctive posted:

natural gas is green energy now?

uber_stoat posted:

this concept comes up in Peter Watts books a lot. the internet in Rifters is exactly that and in Blindsight the sum total of all human communication is posited to be meaningless garbage.

Mameluke posted:

can you maybe next time post a link instead of a link to a link

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/

Bastard Tetris posted:

it rules when people think that dystopian technological job destroyers won’t ever be pointed at them

Renaissance Robot posted:

crafting the perfect replica of a lovely boss by feeding gpt3 a copy of the cia's simple sabotage field manual

Rutibex posted:

finally my librarian skills will be worth money

edit: yeah now that I think about it, there is totally going to be a movement of people who only want to read printed books made before the era of AI. i'm gonna start hording books.......more than i was

shrike82 posted:

to tie it back to peter watts, i think there was a recent viral tiktok or reddit post discussing that many people don't seem to have internal monologues

tokin opposition posted:

shrike82 posted:

to tie it back to peter watts, i think there was a recent viral tiktok or reddit post discussing that many people don't seem to have internal monologues

Cup Runneth Over posted:

I'm going to start printing and binding GPT output

Tulip posted:

https://medium.com/@NoraReed/hook-bait-and-camouflage-making-a-honeybot-28a9ccfe0bed

quote:

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

You can’t live here without getting the legacy of the Manhattan Project in your bones. I grew up closer to nukes than most people I knew — my father spent much of my childhood covering them. My family has the cone from a disassembled warhead on a shelf and a bit of the salt excavated from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in a drawer.

I think that being knee deep in this culture blinded me to the reality of nuclear bombs more than most people are, because working on those was just something that the parents of the kids I knew from school did, and since the work was confidential, they didn’t know the details anyway.

I was always fascinated by the history and the science. There’s enough misinformation about radiation in the world that there’s a mythos of its own around it, and Robert Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project always loomed large here. It was something I was fascinated by but also that I took for granted.

The scale of the bomb as a weapon wasn’t something I really comprehended, and when I started to get it, I panicked.

I saw those pictures printed large in a museum in Los Alamos. I’d been studying the human angle of the Manhattan Project, taking classes in college on the people who built the bomb, on the American angle, on how and why we chose to use them, on the spies in the project.

I’m sure it wasn’t even the first time I’d seen those pictures. But it was the first time that the scope of the damage that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did.

I was sick to my stomach. It’s the first time I can remember having a panic attack, and it shook the way I thought about the bombs ever since.

We dress the history of nuclear weapons development in patriotism and the story of a world coming together to develop a great project that would stop World War II. It’s hard to tell the stories of the bombings, because the scale of damage is basically incomprehensible to us as individual humans.

I read Letters From the End of the World, a first person account of living through the bombings, and after that, I pretty much took the coward’s way out. I stuck to studying the effects on the West. I tried not to spend much time thinking about how many orders of magnitude more powerful the nuclear weapons we have now are than the weapons that killed hundreds of thousands of people in two cities in 1945.

In a way the bomb is so ubiquitous in our culture that we never have to think deeply about it. The idea of a nuclear apocalypse is the basis of a thousand science fiction stories. We put mushroom clouds in our cartoons. “I have become death, destroyer of worlds” is quoted so much that it’s nearly meaningless. Put that aside, for a minute, and look at Nagasaki.

The bombs we have are bigger and scarier than the bombs we dropped in 1945.

I can’t say for sure that Donald Trump would use the bombs. I can’t say for sure, either, if those under him would stop him from doing so, like so many people hope. But I do know that if there’s even a chance that he would, we cannot have him as the President of the United States.

No matter where your feelings on policy are, please look at those photographs, and realize that if you make Donald Trump our next president — something that is, I will note, against the will of the American people as decided by popular vote — there is a possibility that he will use these weapons. And there is no way to mitigate the damage that they do. They will kill hundreds of thousands of people, including children, and wound and sicken more. They will, likely, launch counter-attacks that would unleash that kind of devastation on our country, too.

Please look at those pictures and let it sink in that not only could that be the cities of any countries that attempt to oppose Donald Trump’s America. And it’s unlikely that we could use nuclear weapons without retaliation, so it’s likely that could be any United States city, too.

There were people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki whose bodies were destroyed so thoroughly that all they left behind were the outlines of their bodies on the ground, and given what it was like to die of wounds and radiation afterwards, this was considered a merciful death. If we end up in a nuclear war, that will happen again.

Any chance of that happening is too high. Please do the right thing.

Sincerely,

Nora Reed
Albuquerque, New Mexico

Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:

with the increasing use of AI powered surveillance i'd say that non-whites being invisible to AI might not be an entirely disadvantageous thing for them

although i somehow get the feeling that the AI models used for that do get plenty of non-white people in their training sets, for some reason, so it probably doesn't apply

Rutibex posted:

im pretty sure Trump at no point could have ordered a genuine nuclear strike

itskage posted:

No that's the fun part. It can't accurately distinguish between them, so you get cops harassing or arresting false positives.

Someone linked a post about it in here a while back.

Chamale posted:

On January 6th, Pelosi, Pence, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff took control of the nuclear arsenal just in case.