[–] 1 point 1 day ago

Anecdote incoming: I’m in my mid thirties and teach college students (so Gen Y teaching mostly Gen Z).

Every single student I’ve had over the last two years has been far better at telling AI photos and videos than I am. Like, they can just tell, and I need to notice a glitch.

I’d consider that a form of digital navigation (but you’re right, that’s a completely bullshit term), and it’s a continuation of the trend that’s existed since some of the first moviegoers tried to bail out of the “path” of a train filmed head-on in black and white

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I moved away from the US several years ago and unfortunately grew up in a fox household. On election night/the next day, I found myself seeking out CNN and MSN for the first time in my life. Normally I just do the results, but I wanted to bathe in people finally choosing differently. I wanted to hear the commentary and see their relief and I’m glad that I got to see Rachel Maddow talking about just throwing away trump’s comments.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    I mean, would you?

    The press has probably been kinder to Jeffries than to John boehner, Kevin McCarthy, or Nancy Pelosi, and it’s still not exactly flattering coverage. Paul Ryan got off pretty easy (for a guy dumb enough to tell reporters RATM was one of his favorite musicians while being a conservative legacy politician and business inheritor; to paraphrase Tom Morello, Ryan is the machine), and majority leader is a less impactful role, so they don’t tend to get as raked.

    Either one kind of pigeonholes you in congress unless you can then leap to president or vp, but most of the people trying that in the last fifty years have lost and exited politics.

    Plus, you’ve got to engage in politics all the time. I know they’re all politicians, but I really hope they didn’t all get into it because they like constantly negotiating with their caucus members and opponents, then pressuring them, then (allegedly) fucking them over if they don’t vote like they want.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    I had a phone call with a friend of mine, who told me that a person we both knew had lupus. We talked about it for a minute or two, because I’d only heard about it on house and didn’t know what it involved. Starting that afternoon, I got ads for lupus for about two weeks. I know I hadn’t received those ads before because I play a word game for which “lupus” is a really useful word, and I had not seen its spelling before then.

    This was about 15 years ago. It could be a coincidence (but I’m not the age or race most predisposed to lupus), but I’ve been a believer in phones listening to you since.

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  •  

    I fit the internet SJW stereotype to an uncomfortable degree, but I don’t really identify with it (which makes sense, given that it’s a shallow idea of a person designed by people who dislike them).

    At the same time, I absolutely do not fulfill the stereotype of the American in Germany, and people are often very surprised when they hear that I am.

    Do you fit or break a lot of stereotypes?

     

    If 8.1 billion people marched on a government, even with a full array of advanced and nuclear weapons in their arsenal, would they still definitely lose? What about one billion? A hundred million? Ten million? Where do you think the line is?

    Caveat: The government does want to be able to live on earth again within their lifetimes, but can spend up to a year in bunkers, and the military doesn’t revolt- given that nuclear weapons can be deployed by one person, the worst option doesn’t even really require the military’s cooperation.

     

    In trying to figure out how to warn our descendants about nuclear waste, even through a possible societal collapse, one of the more fun ideas is using cats that show a visible difference in the presence of nuclear radiation along with nursery rhymes/mythology that tell you to get the fuck out of dodge after your cat turns blue.

    Similarly, our mythology about the fae lines up alright with current generative AI: it will tell you what you want to hear, but can’t be trusted; it looks like a person, but might have too many fingers or its eyes are made of stone; something’s just off.

    To be clear: I don’t actually believe humans destroyed a previous society with “AI” at a similar sophistication level and coded cultural warnings against it into us, but it’s fun to think about.

    James Hart Stern (en.wikipedia.org)
     

    James Hart Stern (June 13, 1964 – October 11, 2019)[1] was an African American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, speaker, and author from Los Angeles, California. He was best known for his work defusing gang violence through a series of summits in the 1980s and 1990s and for his incarceration with Edgar Ray Killen, the former KKK leader who was convicted of the 1964 Mississippi Burning murders.

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