Schadrach

To be fair, I find the idea of a government outsourcing IT needs to entities under the sovereignty of foreign governments kind of fundamentally problematic to begin with.

So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.

Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn’t really seem to be any area were MS’ core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this “AI everywhere” strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.

It’s a shiny new tool that is really powerful and flexible and everyone is trying to cram everywhere. Eventually, most of those attempts will collapse in failure, probably causing a recession and afterward the useful use cases will become part of how we all do things. AI is now where the internet was in the late 80s - just beyond the point where it’s not just some academics fiddling with it in research labs, but not in any way a mature technology.

Most gaming PCs from the 2020s can run a model locally though it might need to be a pruned one, so maybe a little farther along.

to prove the fucking obvious(that Tylenol doesn’t cause autism)

Eh, there were a few studies that showed a link including one of the largest ones. Now I get to move this from the “very unlikely but possible” column to the “almost certainly false” column.

There’s a pretty wide spectrum with autism, ranging from “a few quirks” to “nonverbal and more or less totally incapable of taking care of themselves, ever”.

Wouldn’t make a difference. We’ve got him for a bare minimum of at least another year and six days. Otherwise it would count as a term for Vance. They’ll Weekend at Bernie’s his bloated corpse for a year if they have to for that.

If we’re talking about Scott Alexander’s writings, I feel like Sort By Controversial reflects reality far too well. Fucking prescient.

Yeah. Though I liked Ra more than There Is No Antimemetics Division. Especially the way he did a certain thing involving right versus left aligned text early on that if you were paying attention should strongly trigger a “wait, how did that happen?” response in a way that hints at very important things.

Given the Lemmy view on AI, I wonder how many folks are now uninstalling the game and demanding a refund because it’s suddenly transformed into “AI slop”? Or demanding it be delisted from Steam since they didn’t disclose their use of AI on Steam?

To quote UNSONG Chapter 17: No Earthly Parents I Confess (https://unsongbook.com/chapter-18-no-earthly-parents-i-confess/ and yes it’s chapter 17 despite the URL, and I’m sure there’s something significant about that but I am unsure exactly what offhand, but everything in UNSONG is significant):

"Picture a maiden lost in the hills.

“Maiden” can mean either “young woman” or “virgin”. Its Greek and Hebrew equivalents have the same ambiguity, which is why some people think the person we call the Virgin Mary was actually supposed to be the Young Woman Mary – which might change the significance of her subsequent pregnancy a bit. People grew up faster, back in the days when they spoke of “maidens”. Mary was probably only fourteen when she gave birth.

I am a kabbalist. Words matter. Nowadays we have replaced “maiden” with “teenage girl”. A maiden and a teenager are the same thing, but their names drag different tracks through lexical space, stir up different waters. Synonymity aside, some young women are maidens and others are teenagers. The girl in our story was definitely a maiden, even though it was the 1970s and being a maiden was somewhat out of fashion."

Alien hand syndrome?

Depends on model tuning. Basically, you can tune a model to hallucinate less, or to write more human-like, but not really both at the same time, at least not for a model you could expect most users to run locally. For this sort of application (summarizing text), you’d tune heavily against hallucination, because ideally your bullet points are going to mostly be made up of direct paraphrase of article text, with a very limited need for fluid writing or anything even vaguely creative.

Doesn’t do that for me. I have to hold left click on a link for over a second to trigger it.

And yeah, pretty decent. It can produce a basically summary of a fair amount of text pretty quickly and generally accurately. It’s not an expert wordsmith, it won’t give a deep and thoughtful analysis of the poem you pointed it at or anything, but that’s not the use case. The use case is “give me the key bullet points of this article so I can decide if I should give it more attention.”, and it does that job pretty well.

Do people making that argument also find ad blockers even ten percent as horrible as this? They both ultimately have the same effect, which is your web browser not maximizing someone else’s profits by denying them a revenue opportunity.

I’d be curious if the link summarizer in Firefox runs a model locally or calls some remote API. Most current machines ought to be able to run an appropriate LLM model for that task.

So it’s entirely optional, you only encounter it by interacting with the browser in an atypical way, and the thing it does is a thing that AI is actually pretty decent at (summarizing text)? Sounds like they couldn’t stop themselves from joining the dick hammering bandwagon, but decided not to hit it too hard.

This is not at all accurate. If a girl wants to play a sport for which there is a boys team but not girls team, she must be allowed to try out and participate on the same basis as the boys (a boys team is really an “everyone” team - this actually applies beyond schools and Title IX as no professional sports league in the US actually bars women from competing). Only girls/women’s teams get to set restrictions with respect to sex/gender. For Title IX, this is a wildly discriminatory interpretation of a low that bans discrimination, but it’s the one that has been in use for years.

And Title IX doesn’t require equal funding, but something much more nebulous about impact and opportunity that makes the whole thing kind of intentionally wishy washy so anyone they need to be can not be in compliance. To make it even more impossible to actually comply, questions of funding and opportunity are not limited to what the school itself supplies, so for example anything donated by parents or volunteers (such as the work of a booster club) also counts. So for example, if you cut funding to a boys team and parents more than make up the shortfall in donations and fundraising, it’s entirely possible based on that you might have to cut it further. Related, this kind of thing is why less popular boys sports are prone to being cut at the drop of a hat - football and sometimes boys basketball make money, most other sports teams lose money so the school is incentivized not to make cuts from King Football or Prince Basketball, but they have to target equal opportunity and impact between boys and girls athletic spending which means they spend what they’re willing to have as a cost on girls teams and cut whatever boys teams they need to cut to avoid cutting into the football budget, because the football budget has an ROI.

Per NFHS website (https://nfhs.org/stories/title-ix-compliance-part-iv-frequently-asked-questions):

FAQ: Does Title IX require that 50 percent of our athletic budget be spent on girls programs and 50 percent be spent on our boys programs? Answer: No. The key to allocating financial resources under Title IX is the overall impact of expenditures – does your school’s allocation of financial resources provide equivalence of athletics opportunities and benefits to boys and girls. Although this will result, in most cases, in an approximate 50-50 budgetary allocation, Title IX does not require a strictly proportional division of dollars.

FAQ: Our school offers soccer for boys, but not for girls. Does Title IX require that we allow girls to play on the boys team? Answer: Title IX requires that in sports where a girls team is not offered, girls must be allowed to try out for the boys team and participate on the same basis as boys. This does not mean that a girl automatically gets to be on the team. She has to try out and make the team on the same basis as any boy would have to try out and make the team. She can also be cut from the team, but only on the same basis as a boy could be cut from the team – for an objectively verifiable lack of ability or a lack of size, strength, skill and experience making participation unsafe.

FAQ: Our school offers volleyball for girls, but not for boys. Does Title IX require that we allow boys to play on the girls team? Answer: No. Although there have been a few, isolated lawsuits where boys have obtained injunctions to allow them to participate on a girls team for which their schools offered no same-sport equivalent for boys, the courts generally rule that the purpose of Title IX is to remedy past inequities of athletics opportunity for the historically under-represented gender – females – and that if boys are allowed to participate on girls teams, they will because of height, weight and strength advantages come to dominate the membership of those teams, and thereby decrease the competitive opportunities for women. Therefore, in the vast majority of cases, the courts have not permitted boys to play on girls teams, even if there is not a same-sport boys team.

The law in question only prohibits biological males from participating in female sports. It does not prohibit females from joining boys teams.

There’s a simple reason for that - the second sentence is required under current interpretations of Title IX, while the first is not. The argument for that is about girl’s sports being a sort of protected space for girls, so it’s OK to bar non-girls (however your jurisdiction chooses to define that) from girls sports, but “boys” sports are actually for everyone who can compete.

i think sport, exspecially in schools, should always be mixed.

Girls’ teams exist entirely to guarantee girls a number of slots, on the presumption that on average in most sports once you hit puberty generally the boys will start to dramatically outperform the girls due to things like size, upper body strength and other traits that are broadly connected to testosterone levels. Then you have things like chess, where you still have a women’s league, but that basically exists because “not enough” women play chess and the notion is that a smaller talent pool broadly means easier competition that will in turn be more approachable.

Mixed teams in school sports as a general practice won’t happen unless specific minimums are mandated, because it would impact competitiveness.

At the same time, under Title IX, if there is no girl’s team and a girl wants to play a sport she must be allowed to try out and must be allowed to play if she can pass try outs. The reverse is not required under current interpretations, leading to a weirdly discriminatory interpretation of a law banning discrimination.

Was going to be my second pick after the considerably more niche VR.5. Which involved the MC entering the minds of people via modem because it was 90s scifi about virtual reality. It also tended to be trippy as hell in a way that is just amazing. Also basically impossible to find without sailing the seven seas, and not easy even then.

Was going to throw Kindred: The Embraced in as a third choice. Also considerably more obscure than Heroes, it was basically a White Wolf Vampire: The Masquerade TV series.

Meh, no process is perfect and sensitivity and specificity are often enemies. Basically, in a lot of cases the more sensitive you make a test to detect something, the more likely it is to accidentally catch false positives.

Sounds like they’ve vastly improved it’s ability to detect, hopefully that didn’t come with false detections for people running unusual hardware or software combinations.

…and yet the elevator pitch “Seth McFarlane wants to be Picard” sounds like it would be awful. But it works.