wolframhydroxide

Indeed. The law doesn't protect people. People protect the law.

80% certain that's Quentin Tarantino, or were you talking about Brad Pitt? Actually, I now see that they are all wearing black shirts, so maybe you're talking about Leonardo DiCaprio?

Well, at least I know we didn't spend all that time searching only to miss them. I was afraid I was going to find out that you live near a bunch of them somewhere on the North Island.

I was unaware that there were cassowaries in NZ. We tried to find them in the various aviaries and zoos, to no avail, because they aren't endemic and NZ has VERY strict rules about importation of birds.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

This is why p-hacking and searching huge databases for anything with a correlation to a desirable (or undesirable) trait are simultaneously so prevalent, and so damaging.

It also clearly cites it at the bottom. Its not like this is plagiarism. Its clearly making the point that this is the new, awful truth of the world before us, and maybe we need a few avengers, like little Billy Ignore Instructions and his vindictive mom.

While this may be true for technologies, tools are distinctly NOT inherently neutral. Consider the automatic rifle or the nuclear bomb. In the rifle, the technology of the mechanisms in the gun is the same precision-milled clockwork engineering that is used for worldwide production automation. The technology of the harnessing of a nuclear chain reaction is the same, whether enriching uranium for a bomb or a power plant.

HOWEVER, BOTH the automatic rifle and the nuclear bomb are tools, and tools have a specific purpose. In these cases, that SOLE purpose is to, in an incredibly short period of time, with little effort or skill, enable the user to end the lives of as many people as possible. You can never use a bomb as a power plant, nor a rifle to alleviate supply shortages (except, perhaps, by a very direct reduction in demand). Here, our problem has never been with the technology of Artificial Neural Nets, which have been around for decades. It isn't even with "AI" (note that no extant "AI" is actually "intelligent")! No, our problem is with the tools. These tools are made with purpose and intent. Intent to defraud, intent to steal credit for the works of others, and the purpose of allowing corporations to save money on coding, staffing, and accountability for their actions, the purpose of having a black box a CEO can point to, shrug their shoulders, and say "what am I supposed to do? The AI agent told me to fire all of these people! Is it my fault that they were all ?!"

These tools cannot be used to know things. They are probabilistic models. These tools cannot be used to think for you. They are Chinese Rooms. For you to imply that the designers of these models are blameless

when their AI agents misidentify black men as criminals in facial recognition software; when their training data breaks every copyright law on the fucking planet, only to allow corporations to deepfake away any actual human talent in existence; when the language models spew vitriol and raging misinformation with the slightest accidental prompting, and can be hard-limited to only allow propagandized slop to be produced, or tailored to the whims of whatever despot directs the trolls today; when everyone now has to question whether they are even talking to a real person, or just a dim reflection, echoing and aping humanity like some unseen monster in the woods

is irreconcilable with even an iota of critical thought. Consider more carefully when next you speak, for your corporate-apologist principles will only help you long enough for someone to train your beloved "tool" on you. May you be replaced quickly.

There are some indications that God created them more than 10000 years ago, and that they used to be as big as humans. It makes one wonder if the K-T extinction event was triggered solely so that there wouldn't be anything big enough to eat God's only begotten creation.

I would, but only if you promise that she isn't a package deal with a wing-suited billionaire who's made a deal with the police and the nearest mental health institution to forcibly incarcerate anyone who stands against his ownership of the country. If we pay for the Poison Ivy package, can we get a discount on the Mr. Freeze package, where we get a disgruntled-but-brilliant climate-scientist-cum-virologist who will spray SO3 into the upper atmosphere and synthesize a strong enough volcanic winter to balance out anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions?

Not all beliefs are equal. If you hold by a holy text that says that women can (and should) be bought and sold or are otherwise 'lesser' than men, or you revere an imbecilic demagogue who claims that all immigrants are rapists, murderers and gang members, then yes, the "culture" of your group will have a higher probability of any given person being an asshole than a group of randomly-selected Humanists, for example. To equivocate that all belief systems are equal from a moral perspective is deeply naive.

ETA: I am not a humanist, because I believe that there is a point at which violence is necessary and justified to protect other lives and the rights thereof.

Yes. It's an incredibly shallow approach to politics. Humans are shallow.