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gameoverhumans

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WhatsApp's AI shows gun-wielding children when prompted with 'Palestine'

theguardian.com
7 points·by gameoverhumans·3 года назад·5 comments

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gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Counterpoint: there's plenty of coaches out there that teach/reinforce bad form.

> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.

I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).

Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Indeed.

Worth taking a look at our top exports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exports_of_Australia

I wonder why the leaders of our country that profits primarily from large-scale export of coal, natural gas, petroleum, beef and cotton don't want the population worrying that maybe these exports aren't sustainable in the long- (or maybe even mid-) term?
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
is it really so hard to imagine that perhaps the climate issues that have been "constantly talked about for 20+ years" have been heavily moderated/filtered/co-opted by financial/political interests?

The current party line is "holy shit we gotta do something soon or 2100 is gonna be bad, ya'll!". Thing is, essentially nobody today will be alive by 2100. Humans are not very good at thinking in these kinds of timescales. Corporations are hilariously bad at thinking beyond the next quarterly financial report.

So if it turns out that we're witnessing irreversible and catastophic changes to important natural systems that many of us will witness first-hand in our own lives, don't you think it's entirely plausible that the people in charge don't want us to learn the full scope of how bad things got under their watch? That the people profiting from this carnage don't want the majority to act in a way that impacts their profits?
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
This take made me cringe. The only one putting emphasis on the fact that this scientist who has visited Antarctica 20 times in their life happens to be female, is you.
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
I'm happy to stick with "challenge". It means I can lament how "morally challenged" Apple is :)
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
I went looking for the website I was thinking of, but instead I found this article from The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/four-hiroshima-bombs-a-second-ho...

Dated 2013. 10 years ago we were already talking about how we're releasing 4 Hiroshimas into the atmosphere per second. Good thing that woke everyone up and enacted a decisive response to the existential thr---- oh.
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
> You think we are physically unable to build an asteroid defense?

Mate the dino-nuking asteroid that hit Earth was 10km in diameter. Even if we launched every nuke we had at such an object, it wouldn't do much to deter such an object. And that's assuming it's moving at a low enough fraction of c that we could actually detect such an object in time to mobilize all said nukes.

So, no, I don't think we would be able to defend ourselves today (nor by 2100, let's say) against such an adversary. Same deal with any species that is sophisticated enough to do interstellar travel. For them it's even easier, they can just pick up a few rocks from Kuiper belt, stick some mass drivers on them and it's bye-bye Earth within a few weeks/months.

> (and we are doing a lot)

The point is we're not. We haven't even reached peak fossil fuel yet. Even if we stopped everything tomorrow, things would still keep getting worse for at least another few decades. But as it is we're reading today about how bad we made things for ourselves in the 80s. Since then our consumption has only continued to accelerate, which can only mean things will be even worse tomorrow.

> but if the counter to everything is: not enough, doomed anyway

No. That's not what I or anyone else in this thread has been saying.

It's like this. We are on the Titanic. Some very clever people have charted our course and done ocean sonographs and determined there's a big-ass iceberg ahead. Many folks like you are insisting either a) there's no iceberg or b) icebergs are good for ship hulls or c) we'll out-technology the iceberg somehow and thus we don't need to worry about the iceberg. So right now all we've done is ACCELERATE towards the iceberg. If there was sensible suggestions like "let's alter our course slightly" I wouldn't be saying "well that still puts us on course for the iceberg so there's no point". I would be saying "great! that's a start!".
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Meh I dunno, there's that website that reports how many hiroshimas of energy we're releasing into our planet per second, the skeptics/denialists don't seem to care much for that metric, either.

I don't think the problem is how it's being reported, I think it's just that this is the kind of news some people will do anything but hear.
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
> covid showed that despite widespread disruption, technology civilization actually didn't collapse at all.

What I hear: "hey look, I pulled a piece out of the Jenga tower and it didn't collapse! Clearly from this I can infer that more pieces can be pulled without any consequences!"

> if it isn't warming, an asteroid will get us or aliens or nuclear war or ..., so why bother?

Uh, because we don't have control over foreign sentient beings, nor the path of celestial bodies? Do you really not see the difference between those things and anthropogenic warming as a result of rapid industrialization?
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Okay so we've established that neither my imagination, nor the labors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are any good for determining how likely we are on course for nuclear war.

You know that humans do have nukes, right? And a long history of killing each other over pretty much anything? (from land rights to idealogies and everything in between).

So in your estimation, who would be a good source to determine how/whether humans get to a point where nuclear war is a likely scenario?
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
> So you are an expert in these things that you don't trust other experts

I don't see how the grandparent comment implied a lack of trust in other experts, nor did they imply themselves to be experts.

> Catastrophic collapse is not really something generally assumed on the 2-3 degree warming path.

Actually, the IPCC, which tends to be rather optimistic on how bad things could be (or already are), predicts pretty significant socioeconomic problems arising from 2-3 degrees warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways

It doesn't take much imagination to come up with ways that "Social cohesion degrades and conflict and unrest become increasingly common" leads to "nation states with nukes and experiencing extreme scarcity and high social unrest declare war on each other"...
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Agreed, humanity is unlikely to survive an asteroid of the likes that wiped out the dinosaurs, considering it increased global atmospheric temperatures to several hundred degrees celsius for a few minutes (or several thousand for a few seconds) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA).

It doesn't look like we need the help of celestial bodies intersecting ours, though. We're ushering in our own demise just fine on our own, thank you very much!
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Aren't you sick of this tired old argument?

Humans have not existed on this planet for the 4 billion years. More like 4 million. Sure, an accurately recorded history of 174 is still a pretty small fraction of 4 million.

So if you're going to try to downplay the increasingly obvious Great Filter our idiotic species is hurtling towards at breakneck speed, at least be dignified about it and use the right numbers. Thanks!
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
> He was building for at least Windows and Linux

Are you sure about that? I remember in Doom 3 era Carmack was rocking a fancy NeXTStep computer and doing cross platform development. But before that I'm pretty sure everything was a strictly Windows affair...

Wikipedia seems to suggest in the first line that it was originally released for Linux. But the "Ports" section it mentions that:

> The first port to be completed was the Linux port Quake 0.91 by id Software employee Dave D. Taylor using X11 on July 5, 1996

And on that topic:

> In late 1996, id Software released VQuake, a source port of the Quake engine to support hardware accelerated rendering on graphics cards using the Rendition Vérité chipset.

> and didn't have OpenGL so he was doing all the 3D manually

So in other words he could focus on the fundamentals of doing vector math and rasterizing pixels, rather than worrying about 600 different incompatible OpenGL extensions, pipeline stalls, and memory management bugs?

> Plus assembly code...

Assembly isn't that hard. Pokemon Red/Blue was written entirely in assembly.

> had to handle all the raw networking code

Again, not that hard when all you're doing is blasting out UDP packets on a very simple network. You didn't have to worry about double NAT, people didn't expect your game to work for diverse peers connected from Germany to Belgium.

> wrote tools to work with assets and process levels

I think Romero wrote a lot of the tooling. Side note - have you read Masters of Doom? It goes into a lot of this stuff and is a great read.

> encryption to unlock the full game on the shareware

I couldn't find anything online but I doubt this was anymore more than some xor + rot13, it's not like Carmack was also Daniel J. Bernstein in disguise :) Back then the state of computer security was, well, rather nascent.

I hope this comment doesn't come across as contrarian. I also hope it doesn't sound like I'm trying to diminish the achievements of Carmack. He's a role model for me personally as a programmer. And he and his mates spawned an entire game genre that I have enjoyed for ... an amount of time I'd rather not disclose or think too much about!

The original point I was trying to make is thus: computers, and computing, have steadily become more and more powerful, which results in more and more complexity, and progressively more unwieldy abstractions to deal with all that complexity. Back when Carmack was cutting his teeth, computers were still fairly early on that complexity curve.
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Well, it is Carmack we're talking about here. He's well known as a prolific programmer prodigy ;)

But also, some other things to note:

* A lot of "agile" development in corporate environments is anything but agile because of overhead in horizontally scaling human gray meat (until we get neural interfacing between one another or something)

* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack was coding against a much simpler architecture, with significantly fewer variants.

* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack could focus on blitting pixels to the screen as fast as possible, rather than spending 6 months trying to wrap his head around Vulkan.

* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack didn't have to worry about building for Windows, macOS and Linux, and iOS. And Android. And ...

* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack didn't need to worry about accessibility requirements. Web service integrations. Digital distribution complexitities. etc...

Even in the modern day there's still people who get prodigious amounts of work done when they can focus on doing something they like doing, and the stars align. A good recent example off the top of my head in game development is The Witness. Jonathan Blow + 2-3 other programmers IIRC.
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Interesting, thanks. Didn't realise there was ways to embed WebKit views that also got JIT (escaped the walled garden a while ago!)

Still, my original point still stands. As you note, you can't have Spidermonkey running on iOS doing JIT. But you also couldn't have Gecko doing rendering and using WebKit JIT, either. ... Right?

> The security considerations should be no different than those on a desktop platform.

Completely agree. The "it's for your own security" angle is just usual Apple FUD to make their anti-competitive stance seem pro-consumer.
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Rather than just downvote you for stating incorrect things with such conviction, I'll refer you to Apple's own website :)

https://support.apple.com/en-eg/guide/security/sec15bfe098e/...

> Memory pages marked as both writable and executable can be used only by apps under tightly controlled conditions: The kernel checks for the presence of the Apple-only dynamic code-signing entitlement. Even then, only a single mmap call can be made to request an executable and writable page, which is given a randomized address. Safari uses this functionality for its JavaScript Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler.

In other words, Apple only allows Apple to do Javascript JIT on iOS.
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
Some cursory web searches reinforce an assumption I had: Amazon absolutely dominate the eBook sales market, with figures from 65-80% of all sales being indicated.

So how can you make the case that Amazon doesn't have "leverage" to negotiate DRM-free publishing?

> together with CDs not having DRM

I don't recall printed books ever having any form of "DRM".
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
I wasn't making any kind of comparison to petrol cars! I guess it seemed like I was and that explains the downvotes, perhaps?

All I was trying to do is add some support to the claim that battery density does matter in cars (contrary to ancestor assertion). Less weight = less strain on brakes and tires = less nasties in the air and our lungs.
gameoverhumans
·3 года назад·discuss
As I understand it, electric cars are actually surprisingly polluting, which is a consequence of their battery weight and particulates from tires:

https://dynomight.net/tires/