AI can’t make anything new, it can only copy what’s existing. Essentially serving slop every time. Best it can ever do is make a meme game that’s fun to play as a joke for an hour or two.

Long overdue and much needed across the country to stop the destruction of our ecosystem. Ecuador, Bolivia, India, and Panama did something similar a few years back by giving nature wide sweeping legal rights. It sets a a good legal framework to push back on corporate exploitation. That said, it’s still a long way away from actively being able to stop the force of our economic objectives and definitely needs a society that’s ready to uphold them in order to succeed.

This is a good article around Bolivia’s laws that offered some apt observations on how this won’t be enough (even though I fully support it): https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/bolivias-mother-earth-laws-is-the-ecocentric-legislation-misleading/

“The Mother Earth laws sadly have become statutory devices to legalize the exploitation of natural resources in Bolivia, instead of protecting Mother Earth. By promoting extractive activities in order to achieve the Living Well objective, on one side, and the defense of Mother Earth, on the other, these laws end up being highly contradictory, making environmental protection a secondary objective, which is contingent to the government’s prevailing economic interests. In reality these laws did not translate into any improvement in environmental policies in Bolivia and they only served to bolster the deceptive image of the Bolivian government as an international pioneer in environmental protection.

It is not enough to pass laws with abstract Indigenous visions and apparent non-capitalistic concepts if they are not coupled with concrete practices, real actions and enforceability mechanisms. These laws will never be effective if there are no new public policies to change the current non-sustainable production pattern, shifting away from extractive practices that go against Mother Earth’s survival. As long as there is this fundamental dissonance between these laws’ provisions, other legal provisions and specially the Bolivian government’s practices, there is little hope for any improvements in future environmental and animal protection efforts based on there Mother Earth Laws.”

Intelligence helps you understand how certain choices affect you in the long-term, and morality tends to align with long-term self interest. It makes sense people with low intelligence tend to appeal to an authority to derive their morality.

That “company” is the key part of the scam here. Your father will be asked to invest money in it for various reasons. Whether they’ll go for the “it’s a great deal” or “help me Obi Wan” angle is dependent on the mark.

Nothing wrong with the methods. If anything they are not harsh enough.

There is a severe lack of attractive coworkers these days. Terrible for morale.

It’s always funny seeing how stories like this get the gun nuts out of the woodwork to start complaining about local gun control. The problem will always be twofold. Local guns need to be controlled, and the traffic of contraband needs to be controlled. The end result we want is to avoid becoming a gun infested shithole like the US. NRA talking points can go take a hike off a cliff.

I don’t even know why they bother pretending they have laws anymore. No one on the outside buys their bullshit and their loyal zombie hordes will bend over for any reason. It’s just a silly larp now.

Intentionality is the key difference. You can eventually tell a Chinese room’s nature by giving it new variables that it hasn’t encountered before. New problems lead to algorithmic breakdown.

That said, there’s deeper conversations you can have about what consciousness truly is, of course. My personal view is that it requires a level of complexity that we are still very far away from architecturally, and a level of scalability that we may not even be able to support ecologically. This thought experiment is mainly to show you what the inner workings of a computerized process can look like, and works to provide a demystified perspective.

A concept that I think is really helpful for interpreting what an LLM does is the concept of a “Chinese room”. The idea is someone slips a piece of paper containing a message in Chinese under the door and inside that room is someone that doesn’t know Chinese following a set of rules for converting characters and numerals into a response based off their syntax. Afterwards the person in the room creates a response and slips it back out under the door. At no point does the person in the room understand the Chinese in the input or in the output, but the person standing outside of the room might believe there is a Chinese speaker inside of the room. This is the same idea with computerized outputs like LLMs. They only provide the illusion of intentionality and don’t actually have an understanding of inputs or their outputs.

The way I see it, AI is just another log on the fire, although it is indeed a big log. The use of laptops and the prevalence of smartphones all damaged kids’ attention spans, then came the advent of short form content which further degraded their ability to stay focused and now we have AI slop summarizing what we see with our own eyes and taking agency away from their very brains. Somewhere along the line we convinced ourselves that more tech is good for education, and I think that needs to be rethought. We need to get kids back to reading and writing the old school way. There’s neuropsychological benefits to it that you just don’t get from typing or scrolling on computers. And this problem exists even outside of the classroom or kids. It’s a problem with all generations. I’m noticing just as much mental decline in older populations as younger ones.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Keep the jokes coming!

Romania and other places in European have unlimited data for under $10/month. Meanwhile here in Canada an unlimited plan is over $100/month. God forbid you have a non-unlimited plan (which is still more expensive than an unlimited plan in EU btw) and you have a cap on your data, because with the way the internet is these days the amount of bloatware on every website will kill your data allocation in a week, and then you’re left with overage charges that double your monthly fees. You either get screwed now or get screwed later. Those are your choices when it comes to telecom companies in Canada.

Get rid of the execs and their overinflated salaries/bonuses instead. How’s that for agile?

When the umbilical chord is cut.

“Most powerful man in the world”. Nationalistic egocentrism never fails to get a laugh out of me.

This is an often misquoted fact. The study that compared coal and nuclear was only studying air pollutants, and obviously the steam stacks from nuclear reactors don’t have as much radionuclide pollutants as coal. However, the study did not look at other sources like wastewater - which is where most radionuclide pollution from nuclear reactors comes from (along with other sources like spent fuel, casings, and moderator rods).

Seems to me the Township admin should be going after the private owner of the billboard sign that’s currently leasing the digital display to Morgan. Weird how this private entity has been kept anonymous in the reporting.

As uninspiring and dystopian as a parking lot is, I think in this particular place we’re at, it can be helpful. There’s lots of car traffic by the lakefront after people exit the highway, and instead of them trying to drive up the narrow streets looking for parking at various residences and roadsides they can now leave their car here and potentially take public transport for any further uptown activities. It might help relieve some congestion and it’s owned by the government of Ontario so the profit it generates can be helpful. I’m not a fan of the whole Ontario Place debacle and the 99 year lease for a spa, but I can see the upside of this one. Or maybe I’m just overdosing on copium because there’s nothing I can do to keep DoFo’s meddling fingers out of Toronto.