OP, come the fuck on. Have some integrity and don’t post articles from The Economic Times.

I’m not German and thought “huh, I’m not German; maybe I’m actually wrong, and I’m not going to overstep here”… And then the Germans arrived.

“Let’s nostalgia bait millennials who miss the Aero aesthetic.”

“Are these anti-Nazi protestors holding up a Star of David trying to protect democracy in Germany, or are they just trying to keep their family from being deported?”

🤡

No, they definitely are AI. ChatGPT for example is a generative pretrained transformer (GPT) is a transformer model is a deep learning model is a machine learning model is AI.

It’s just that the general public has no fucking idea what “AI” is due to being swamped in marketing about a field they have zero background in and have been led to believe is some kind of general intellect on the level of a human or smarter. In reality, a perceptron with one weight and one bias is machine learning is AI.

Since the start, what “AI” is has been fairly arbitrary; it’s just the ability for a machine to perform tasks we’d associate with human intelligence. It doesn’t even need to be machine learning; that’s just one branch. The game Video Checkers (1980) for the Atari 2600 running on 128 bytes of RAM has AI that you play against. The bar isn’t high at all.

That’s because every company’s strategy aiming to monopolize is to:

1. Make a product that’s genuinely better than what’s on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
2. Once you’re big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can’t pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can’t challenge you in step 3.
3. Once you’re so big that you’ve monopolized the market and can’t be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you’ve been wanting to this whole time and go from “boiling frog”-pace enshittification to “welp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go” enshittification.

It’s why people who say “Oh, well I wouldn’t mind it if X had a monopoly because they’re way better than those other companies” are so painfully misguided.

“Play has no limits, but your credit card does. Let’s aim for that.”

it shouldn't be that hard?

OP, what’s your background to make you think that way, and if you’re qualified enough to make that assessment, why aren’t you getting to work building the ground floor of something potentially highly lucrative?

The response to “It shouldn’t be that hard” for FOSS is invariably “PRs welcome”.

The difference: Israel is in Syria for imperialist aggression. Ukraine is in Ukraine to protect their homeland from imperialist aggresssion. Combine that with Israel’s pathological need to cover up and deny their extensive, seemingly neverending war crimes in Gaza… Yeah, I don’t have any faith until Israel can prove this was opsec rather than covering up. Israel has destroyed their chance for benefit of the doubt.

Even if it is opsec, they have no right being there, so fuck 'em. I hope their opsec isn’t maintained and their soldiers do die in much the same way I’d hope for a Russian base in Donetsk.

what zero pussy does to a mf

I don’t at all understand why the second law of thermodynamics is being invoked. Nonetheless, capillary condensation is already a well-studied phenomenon. As the scientific article itself notes, the innovation here over traditional capillary condensation would be the ability to easily remove the water once it’s condensed.

Re: Entropy:

• Entropy is a statistical phenomenon that tends to increase over time averaged across the entire body, i.e. the Universe. Not literally every part of the Universe needs to increase its entropy as long as on average it is increasing. You’re evidence of that: your body is a machine that takes entropy and pushes it somewhere else.
• Water vapor is a high-energy state compared to liquid water. What you’re saying therefore is the opposite of how the second law works: water vapor’s energy tends to spread out over time until it eventually cools back to a liquid. Liquid water is a higher entropy state than water vapor.

Here’s the key:

• The first source I use is just a scientific article. That’s it.
• The third source is just a scientific article. That’s it.
• The second source that I use to cite “dozens of extinctions” is quite emotionally charged, but here’s where that’s different: I could find a billion sources more credible than that NYT article about the dozens upon dozens of species who’ve met their end thanks to the domestic cat. These sources would give it an unemotional, academic treatment, yet I like how the NYT piece is narratively engaging rather than dry-ass “X et al. reported…”

I used scientific sources for (1) and (3) because those are claims people might actually think to contest. Moreover, the NYT doesn’t let itself slip into using garbage sources for the sake of its narrative. I could replace this source in two minutes, and then your argument about emotionally charged imagery would dissolve.

The reason I care so much about King’s massive bias in that article is because that bias is reflected in how absolutely egregious her sources are. She seems to genuinely not care how factual what she’s saying is as long as it conforms to her personal feelings, and so she turns it into assembling literally every source she can possibly find no matter how obscenely flimsy. She’s grasping at straws the entire article.

“It was terrible. He would spend hours telling me about how NFTs are the future and I need to get in on the ground floor.”

What you’ve presented is a deeply biased opinion piece, and it wears this immense bias on its sleeve. It fearmongers that thinking about cats as killing wildlife could cause “extremism” (it then cites as its lone example a man who suggested banning cats in New Zealand; soooo scary). It cites some organization called “Alley Cat Allies” who call it extremely biased with ostensibly zero credentials. They cite lobbyist and serial sexual harasser Wayne Pacelle formerly of the Humane Society who questions the methodology but even concedes: “We don’t quarrel with the conclusion that the impact is big.” And lastly, King herself does her own analysis on this meta-analysis’ methodology despite being – I emphasize – a professor of anthropology with no background in this field.

So your article has no one familiar with this field who could challenge if these statistical assumptions are actually reasonable. And here, given the authors are experts (and absent some published literature rebutting this in the 12 years since), I have no reason to believe their methodology would be so off as to meaningfully change the idea that “outdoor cats” are severely problematic.

Did Australia recently sink into the ocean and I just missed it?

We’re going through the biggest disinformation crisis in human history thanks exclusively to the Internet’s profound ability to change minds by spreading and normalizing bullshit, but “it’s just not gonna work” when it’s something you specifically don’t want to hear.

Edit: ironically, my mind was changed after hearing someone bring this up on the Internet and then reading the scientific literature.

• It is categorically not ever “impossible to avoid”. Not only is your cat statistically healthier indoors, but any excuse for why it’s not possible is complete bullshit unless you can offer one up that isn’t. Owning a pet is a responsibility, not a right; just because it’s “harder” to take proper care of your pet doesn’t absolve you of that responsibility.
• Anecdotes are not data. This is “I have a grandma who’s 106 and she smokes 26 packs a day and drinks a pint of leaded gasoline before bed.”

• I don’t think most people’s backyard is some kind of wildlife exclusion zone, and the problem isn’t specifically that cats are killing animals in other backyards that the neighbors called “dibs” on first.
• The cat obviously isn’t being attended to while it’s outside.
• The owners clearly imply that their other two cats have done the same thing and brought them dead animals before.

“Outdoor cats” are an invasive species that kill billions of animals every year, are a significant contributor to dozens of species’ extinction, and live shorter lives than cats properly cared for (i.e. kept indoors) including nearly 3x the risk for infections.

It’s a plague. We can’t keep normalizing this.

The judge also said the officers were entitled under the circumstances to qualified immunity — special legal protections that prevent people from suing over claims that police or government workers violated their constitutional rights.

And there it fucking is.