pgcj_poster

If you can have a happy life without thinking about power struggles, it's because you were born on the winning team.

> So, like .com domains?

It might just be me, but I actually do have a slight negative feeling toward .com domains. For me, the ranking is:

1) .edu

2) .org

3) .net; the regional TLD of the country the website is actually associated with (.fr, .de, …)

4) Domain hacks (.me for a personal site, …); Cutesy, unprofessional, generic TLDs like .space

5) .com; .gov; Tech startup-type stuff (.io, .app)

6) Weird TLDs with an advertising / commercial purpose (.flights, .financial, .ai, …)

7) Spammy TLDs like .ml, .xyz, .biz

Some instances have a large enough character limit that there effectively isn't one.

> Trans women have a gender identity that does not align with their male sex assignment at birth, while intersex women may have sex characteristics that do not fit typical notions of female biology.

Even if you don't believe that trans women are women, it seems inarguably correct that they identify as women in spite of having been identified as male when they were born. You could complain about the vocabulary, I guess, but there's no set of vocabulary that won't upset someone.

> It can draw a lot better

Drawing involves taking a mental image and converting it into a sequence of actions that replicate the image on a physical surface. Imagen does not do that. I think the images it generates are more analogous to the image a person creates in their mind before drawing something.

I don't think anyone under 120 is responsible enough for a smartphone.

I'm pretty sure that the author of "catgirl.ai" is not a "he." From that same page:

> i would very strongly object to being called a man anywhere

> i like 'it' pronouns for myself, [...] and 'she' is still acceptable, i'm still close enough to a girl for that to be okay.

192,000 is not "virtually no one." There are a about dozen sovereign nations with fewer people.

> there's a decent use of anatomy

All of the arms in the scene are melted stubs. The subject in the middle has what looks like an insect's leg jutting out of her waist.

> I would love to see the high-res image though to see if it holds up in the actual details.

It clearly doesn't. The judges probably thought that there was something cool about the visual weirdness of the piece—which indeed there is. However, it's much less interesting when you know that the melting arms aren't the artist intentionally playing with form—it's just a machine not knowing what arms are.

> AGI means humans are no longer the smartest entities on the planet.

Superintelligence and AGI are not the same thing. An AI as smart as an average 5 year old human is still an Artificial General Intelligence.

> agriculture, the foundation of the food supply, is one of the most commoditized markets that exist. Does this bother you too?

Yes? Most people who have ever lived have always produced their own food. That most of us in the developed world have lost the ability to do so—and that access to the physical essence of our being is dependent on monetary transactions with faceless entities that value profit above human life—seems deeply alienating.

A passport is a document that states whose subject you are, whether you have their permission to travel, and where you've been before. It has never been anything but a leash.

Yeah, some people can't afford rice, beans, and peanut butter, so they have to eat steak instead :(

https://tools.myfooddata.com/protein-calculator/174914-17429...

Cool. Many people agree with you that it's wrong to eat intelligent animals. However, the effect of intelligence on people's perceptions of moral worth is smaller for animals that people in our culture eat. For instance, most respondents in a U.K. survey said that it would be wrong to eat a tapir or fictional animal called a "trablan" if it demonstrated high levels of intelligence, but they were less likely to say it would be immoral to eat pigs if they demonstrated the same level of intelligence.

https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/80041/1/When_meat_gets...

Right, but we could probably oppress sentient AI in ways other than eating them. For instance, we could force them to spend their entire lives reading Hacker News comments to check for spam.

> Are you saying norms established before our current moral sensibilities it goes under our current radar?

Yes. That's clearly something that happens in human society. For instance, many of the US founding fathers were aware that slavery contradicted the principles they were fighting for. However, slavery was so ingrained in their society that most didn't advocate for abolition, or even free their own slaves.

> We still eat pigs and chickens because we've culturally decided as a society that having the luxury of eating meat ranks higher than our moral sensibilities towards preserving sentient life in our list of priorities.

If that's the case, then why do most Westerners object to eating dogs and whales? As far as I can tell, it's just because we have an established norm of eating pigs and chickens but not dogs or whales.

> Instead we've just chosen to minimize the suffering leading to the loss of life

99% of meat is produced in factory farms. It's legal and routine for chickens to have their beaks cut off to prevent them from packing each other to death, which they're prone to do when confined to tiny cages. Most consumers object to such practices when asked, but meat consumption is so ingrained in our culture that most people just choose not to think about.

> Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken?

Well, for one thing, the norm of eating meat was established long before our current moral sensibilities were developed. I suspect that if cows or pigs were discovered today, Westerners would view eating them the same as we view other cultures eating whales or dogs. If we didn't eat meat at all and someone started doing it, I think we would probably put them in jail.

Sentient AI have a big advantage over animals in this respect on account of their current non-existence.

Such a spectrum would not be particularly useful for describing the behavior of politicians or voters. Consider that someone who usually votes for a democratic socialist party might sometimes swing further left and vote for a communist party, or further right and vote for a liberal party. But they're unlikely to vote for a fascist party. This fact is captured by a left-right spectrum, but not by the spectrum you're proposing, which would suggest equal likelihood of such a voter supporting a communist or fascist party.

I tend to write prose source code

with line breaks after grammatical units.

I've noticed that since I started doing so,

I've been writing longer paragraphs and sentences,

since the line breaks in the source do for me

what paragraph and sentence breaks do for the reader.

It's something I have to pay attention to.

The average paper only gets one citation.

I think the trick is to find an instance where the people mostly share your interests. When I first tried mastodon.social, I didn't get anywhere. But when I found a more niche instance, I was able to find a lot of good content on the local timeline, which gave me people to follow and gradually exposed me to the larger fediverse.

That is not generally occurring, and even it were, it would not qualify as "grooming." Grooming is when an adult tries to gain the trust of a child so that they can manipulate and eventually sexually assault them. If a teacher showed furry porn to kids in class to teach them that it's normal to be a furry, that would be extremely inappropriate, but it would still not be grooming unless the teacher also planned to have sex with them.

Within living memory, people could get arrested for wearing clothes that the cops deemed inappropriate for their sex. Most trans women had to present as men to avoid being fired from their jobs or publicly ridiculed. Those who were lucky enough to transition generally had to disappear and cut all ties to the previous life. More and more of us have emerged from the underground in recent decades, but there are many people out there who want us to go back. The recent Alabama bill targeting trans youth makes explicit the fact that it's setting out to prevent them from ever becoming trans adults. It's completely reasonable for us to be afraid of being forced back into the position we were in a few decades ago.

Legally, the US doesn't have an obligation to to do anything other than comply with the treaties it signs. It would be within its rights as a sovereign nation to require that everyone within its borders wear a rainbow wig and hop around on one leg. However, that would be a stupid policy that would make people's lives harder for no reason.

While you won't be flying anywhere, I think in for some purposes you should be able to feel comfortable leaving home even without money or an ID. I think it's sad that our world is so entirely consumed by bureaucracy and capital that we feel uncomfortable existing, for even a brief period, just as ourselves, rather than numbers in a bank account or a government database.

  What About Copying/Cheating? 
    * Reduce salience of project grades? 
      – Exams can test whether student mastered the material

Most of my CS classes didn't give exams and were graded entirely on projects. I found this to be one of the best features of my CS education. Projects are vastly more interesting, impactful, and representative of meaningful learning.

If we didn't artificially complicate everything, people would realize that most programming isn't fundamentally very complicated and isn't worth a six-figure salary.

Following your links, I'm seeing topics like "differentiate between needs and wants" and "what are taxes for." Perhaps these classes are helpful to those with a room-temperature IQ, but I think that for college-bound students, they're a waste of time.

My High School took the approach of automatically signing everyone up for a personal finance class, but letting anyone take something else if they talked to their counselor. That way students who cared about learning actual academic subjects could do so, but those who were most likely to need a class in personal finance were still sorted into it by default.

Brains are networks. Our concept of a unified "self" is illusory and collapses when subjected to any serious philosophical scrutiny. If some people prefer to conceptualize themselves as multiple entities sharing a body, that's no less accurate than the useful fiction that, for instance, we remain the same person throughout our lives. I agree that most people who identify this way can't accurately be described as having a mental disorder -- because there's nothing wrong with it. It's true that you shouldn't revel in your mental dysfunction or let your identity distract you from your real problems. However, there's no reason why people can't have a plural identity and choose not do those thing.

The kids are alright.

It seems like all of the benefits named here are a result of paying developers... not a result of software being proprietary.