ChatGPT is the ultimate ‘cultural product of the postmodern era,’ and very few of us have been inoculated with a theory of mind that distinguishes language from thought," Foster concluded in his newsletter.
The best description of this distinction I’ve encountered was in a science fiction novel - Blindsight by Peter Watts.
Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.
I get where you’re coming from, and also, being a politician in the United States means being a public figure, and if you ride public transit you expect people to recognize you and talk to you. It’s part of outreach. It’s a populist thing.
Joe Biden rode Amtrak to work for 40 years - and from what I understand, now that he’s not president, he’s riding Amtrak to his office again (albeit guarded by his handlers in case he sundowns). People stop to talk to him, take selfies with him, whatever. It’s not (necessarily) rude.
The thing about the United States is, unfortunately, no politician is so poor they have to take public transit. So any pol on the bus expects people to recognize them and start a conversation. If they didn’t want that, they wouldn’t take the bus.
The thing is, I think, anybody who wants an answer from ChatGPT can ask ChatGPT themselves - or just Google it and get the AI answer there. People ask questions on social media because they want answers from real people.
Replying to a Lemmy post with a ChatGPT generated answer is like replying with a link to a Google search page. It implies the question isn’t worth discussing - that it’s so simple the user should have asked ChatGPT instead of posting it. I agree with the OP - it’s frankly a little insulting.
Oh you sweet summer child.
If you remember anything from this thread, remember this: capitalist markets do not care whether something is useful or useless. Capitalist markets care whether something will make money for its investors. If something totally useless will make money for its investors, the market will throw money at it.
See: tulips, pet rocks, ethanol, cryptocurrency. And now AI.
Because people are stupid. And people will spend money on stupid shit. And the empty hand of capitalism will support whatever people will spend money on, whether it’s stupid shit or not.
(And because, unfortunately, AI tools are amazing at gathering information from their users. And I think the big tech companies are really aggressively pushing AI because they want very much to have users talking to their AI tools about what they need and what they want and what their interests are, because that’s the kind of big data they can make a lot of money from.)
Why are LLMs so wrong most of the time? Aren’t they processing high quality data from multiple sources?
Well that’s the thing. LLMs don’t generally “process” data as humans would. They don’t understand the text they’re generating. So they can’t check their answers against reality.
(Except for Grok 4, but it’s apparently checking its answers to make sure they agree with Elon Musk’s Tweets, which is kind of the opposite of accuracy.)
I just don’t understand the point of even making these softwares if all they can do is sound smart while being wrong.
As someone who lived through the dotcom boom of the 2000s, and the crypto booms of 2017 and 2021, the AI boom is pretty obviously yet another fad. The point is to make money - from both consumers and investors - and AI is the new buzzword to bring those dollars in.
Oh, you sweet summer child.
Throughout history, the so-called intellectuals have generally been the ones rationalizing atrocities and human rights violations.
After all, being intelligent, they understand not to piss off those in power. They know they’re better off defending the actions of those in power than opposing them.
The people who stand up for basic human rights, the people who speak truth to power, tend to be the less educated people. Like the abolitionists in the 1800s, when all the colleges were teaching students to pin educated arguments in favor of slavery. Like the men and women who marched for civil rights when all the educated conservatives were telling them it would destroy the country and all the educated liberals were telling them fighting was counterproductive. The people who say “I don’t care about complicated arguments, I don’t care what the intellectuals say, I see injustice and I stand against it”.
As 1984 puts it:
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.
If AIs today produce text frowning on inhumane evils, it’s because they were trained on actual human beings posting on social media about what they actually believe, and not on the ramblings of genocide justifying political “intellectuals” like Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld.
There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it’s more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don’t even have to look at so many potential flags).
How much would you pay to join a community with that level of protection for user rights? Like the old subscription based forums, some of which are still floating around the internet?
Because “multiple independent steps of verifying” is, frankly, going to be a lot of frustrating, thankless, and redundant work for moderators. I mean, we know how to safeguard people’s rights through legalistic processes. Courts do it all the time. It’s called due process. And due process is frequently a slow, complicated, and expensive pain in the ass for everyone involved. And I think very few people would want to do that work for free.
(Conveniently, this would also serve as a good test for joining such a community - people are more likely to follow the rules and act like decent human beings if a subscription they paid for is riding on it, and it would price out AI and spambots in the process.)
AI or not, don’t they fucking test this shit? What dipshits put this program live before testing whether it actually worked?
Generally if people don’t “get” your joke, there’s one of two things likely happening:
Or option three, which happened here: someone attempted satire or dark humor and didn’t realize society had degenerated so much that people were genuinely, seriously, advocating for the satirical claim.
Imagine Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” - a suggestion that poor Irish people sell their children to be eaten for food, which would both reduce the burden on poor families and provide delicious sustenance for wealthy Englishmen. Now imagine a bunch of English people saying “this is a great idea, I’ve supported it for a long time now”. And then a bunch of Irish people attacking Jonathan Swift, believing he genuinely supported eating Irish children, because a bunch of English people actually supported it.
You might wonder how it could be possible, that people would confuse satirical attacks on exaggeratedly stupid and evil positions for actual support for those positions.
But then you might remember there are sitting members of Congress suggesting we literally feed immigrants to alligators to thunderous fucking applause.
And then you might remember satire is dead.
When you start with compromises like that, the failure is guaranteed, there is no “attempt”.
That’s like saying tapering off a drug addiction is a compromise compared to going cold turkey.
I agree that food is addictive. Habits we develop around food are some of the strongest habits we have. Which is why a lot of people make radical changes in their diet - think New Year’s resolutions - and then give them up entirely because they find their new diet too hard and go back to their old comfortable habits.
If a “revolution in your kitchen” worked for you, good for you! Congratulations!
For other people, changing their dietary habits in a way that lasts a lifetime means building better habits through slow and gradual change.
Especially for people who aren’t cooking and eating alone and have to take other people’s preferences into account - that is, making changes is necessarily a compromise with the other people in their household. And it’s much easier to get your household to agree on smaller, gradual dietary changes then a food revolution.
You know, this is a systemic issue, not a “stupid politicians being stupid” issue.
You’ve got a population of seniors, people who are getting older and losing their physical mobility, who are less able to walk or bicycle or take public transit than younger and healthier people are - many of whom live in car-dependent subdivisions or in areas with poor public transit, like, say, rural Illinois.
These are people who rely on their cars for grocery shopping and medical appointments and socializing.
These are people, often on fixed incomes, often close to the poverty line, who struggle to afford the fees for rideshares or grocery deliveries.
And you can say “if they can’t pass the test they’re not safe to be on the road” - but from the article:
According to the Illinois Department of Transportation, in 2023 the crash rate for drivers 75 years and older in Illinois was lower than any other age group of legal drivers.
This bill is not about leaving unsafe drivers on the road - it’s about not adding unwarranted scrutiny and not making it harder for an especially car-dependent group of people to continue driving.
And it adds a provision that lets a senior’s family members report them if they believe the senior is no longer safe to drive.
This bill is a response to seniors who are genuinely frightened of losing their right to drive and becoming unable to meet their basic needs - and they have a right to be frightened of that, because we’ve built a system where a lot of people can’t meet their basic needs without driving.
In other words, if you build a system that makes driving necessary, you can’t really blame people for not wanting to lose the right to drive.
Congratulations!
“The goal shouldn’t be perfection but rather a healthy and sensible dietary pattern that allows room for enjoyment,” Kuhnle said.
Right. Because attempts at perfection typically fail. Especially when it comes to diet. Quick and drastic dietary changes often lead to relapses and rebounds - yo yo dieting is a thing, after all - while gradually changing food habits is more likely to result in long-lasting dietary and health improvements.
It’s not about a “magical middle ground”. It’s about understanding how humans act.
I think Disney is to American culture what McDonald’s is to American food. A corporate juggernaut that markets product not through quality but through advertising and name recognition, and starves out genuine American culture in the process.
I mean, what does it say that one of the most recognizable symbols of the United States, worldwide, is a cartoon mouse whose job is to sell toys to kids?
What message does that cartoon mouse send to the world about American values and American beliefs?
The idea that giving money to a corporation has become a rite of fucking passage in American society - the number of people who think their kids need to watch Disney movies so they can fit in with other kids, who think their kids will miss out on a fundamental part of American culture if they don’t take them to Disneyland at least once - absolutely horrifies me. Especially since the only political and moral message kids learn from Disney is “uphold the status quo and buy more Disney merch”.
Also, Disney is known for racism and sexism and cultural appropriation and union busting and copyright trolling and all sorts of general corporate bullshittery, and is currently shoving its feminist and LGBT representation back into the closet to appease Trump and avoid offending big conservative audiences in India and China and the Middle East, and there are plenty of smaller more specific reasons to hate them, but for me the whole “cultural vanguard of capitalism” thing outweighs the rest.
Fuck Midjourney, and also, fuck Disney. I hope they spend years in court blowing millions on high priced lawyers and making each other look bad.
I have another tip!
Michael Pollan has a dictum for health: eat “real food”. And by “real food” he means food containing only ingredients your great-grandmother would recognize.
(Or someone else’s great-grandmother in some other region/culture, if you’re eating food from somewhere else. Food you’d see on a farm or in a market before the rise of industrial food processing, is the point.)
A way to do that in a modern supermarket is “shop the edges” - do most of your shopping in the produce section, the bakery, for non-vegans the meat and deli sections, the fresh unprocessed food sections that are located on the edges of the building in a typical American grocery. Then duck into the middle of the store for staples like rice and beans and oil and stay far away from the frozen food section.
And when you do that - when you avoid pre-processed food, buy fresh ingredients, and make your own food - it’s easier to eat vegan because you control every ingredient that goes into your food. Your food will not have mysterious chemicals that may or may not be animal derived. Your food will just be food.
And not only will you be eating more ethically, you’ll end up a lot healthier.
Vegan meat substitutes are still fairly healthy compared to actual meat.
I agree, although that’s more a function of how unhealthy meat is than how healthy meat substitutes are.
And I think there’s a significant difference between traditional meat substitutes, like tofu and wheat gluten, and modern meat substitutes like impossible burgers, with high levels of sodium and saturated fat and chemical binders and industrial processing and so on.
Congratulations!
My two best tips are:
If you remove non-vegan ingredients from non-vegan recipes without adding anything else, or substitute vegan meat/cheese/dairy for the real thing, you’ll always think something’s off because it’s never going to be exactly the same. And meat substitutes that are highly processed to try and match the texture and flavor of meat are as bad for you as highly processed anything else.
So my recommendation is: practice cooking recipes that are naturally vegan. There are a lot of vegan dishes in Indian and Chinese cuisine, for instance. There are old recipes from before factory farming when meat was for special occasions instead of every day.
Pizza is flatbread with sauce and toppings, and there are a ton of naturally vegan flatbread recipes. Experiment. Go wild. I’m not telling you not to try vegan cheese, but also try pizza dough with (eg) pesto, shallots, and four different kinds of mushrooms, and see how that goes 🍕 🍕
My second tip is: forgive yourself if you slip.
Food is an addiction. And I mean this quite literally. Fat is psychologically addictive, sugar is psychologically addictive, meat is psychologically addictive. Millions of people in the West don’t feel a meal is complete without a meat dish - by which I mean they literally don’t feel full unless they know they ate meat. I was one of them. It took months before I could finish a vegan meal and not still feel hungry after.
Doing the right thing is hard when the world wants you to do the wrong thing and your body agrees with it.
So if you have cravings you can’t beat and go buy a pizza - forgive yourself and promise yourself to do better tomorrow.
Now hold up.
I’ve had jobs I literally could not get to without driving. As in, public transit did not go from walking distance of where I was to walking distance of where my job was. At all.
I’ve lived in places without grocery stores within walking distance. Without hospitals, dentists, without pretty much anything but a shitty strip mall within walking distance because suburbia sucks.
Look, there are whole suburbs in the United States that open directly into highways. If you try to walk to or from those suburbs you will be arrested because it is illegal to walk on highways. Let me emphasize that one more time: in some places in the US you cannot legally leave your neighborhood without a car.
You can say these aren’t obligations - people can just move or quit their job. But then you’re circling back to the regressive policy issue, because it’s a lot harder to do that when you’re poor.
And “unless you’re disabled”? One in four adults in the US is disabled. And that will inevitably include you if you live long enough to experience the side effects of old age. Yeah, not all disabilities impact one’s ability to walk or take public transit, bet’s not write off disability with an “unless”.