i should be gripping rat

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • i guess my point is that I understand why the researchers are doing it - the UN gave them money to research ways the UN could use AI, so that is what they did. It’s not like the research is unethical in the sense that it directly harms participants. Maybe it’s a dumb waste of money, but at that point, the question is more for the UN leaders that said “we should give someone money to research AI”. And I don’t know that 404 Media has the pull to interview those people.


  • I feel like the article answers the question, or rather it gives the researchers a chance to answer the question:

    When I spoke with them, both Albrecht and Fournier-Tombs were clear that the goal of the workshop was to spark conversation and deal with the technology now, as it is.

    “We’re not proposing these as solutions for the UN, much less UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). We’re just playing around with the concept,” Albrecht said. “You have to go on a date with someone to know you don’t like ‘em.”

    Fournier-Tombs said that it’s important for the UN to get a handle on AI and start working through the ethical problems with it. “There’s a lot of pressure everywhere, not just at the UN, to adopt AI systems to become more efficient and do more with less,” she said. “The promise of AI is always that it can save money and help us accomplish the mission…there’s a lot of tricky ethical concerns with that.”

    She also said that the UN can’t afford to be reactive when it comes to new technology. “Someone’s going to deploy AI agents in a humanitarian context, and it’s going to be with a company, and there won’t be any real principles or thought, consideration, of what should be done,” she said. “That’s the context we presented the conversation in.”

    The goal of the experiment, Albrecht said, was always to provoke an emotional reaction and start a conversation about these ethical concerns.

    “You create a kind of straw man to see how people attack it and understand its vulnerabilities.”

    So if you read the headline and have the obvious visceral reaction, if you are asking yourself that question from the article, it kind of sounds like that is the point. They’re doing it now so that if people see it and say “that’s stupid”, hopefully that stops xAI or someone else from trying this to profit on the suffering of poor people. Alternatively, if people see it and say “wow this actually helped me understand”, that is also useful for the world at large. It doesn’t sound like the latter is the case, but that’s why you test a hypothesis.











  • I think Fairphone would say that they want you to keep using the FP4 forever, replacing individual parts as they fail. Their goal is the reduce waste in the smartphone industry, that’s why they make it so easy to maintain your device. Maybe eventually the main processor on your FP4 will be too slow to keep up with even those light apps. At that point, you come back to Fairphone and buy whatever the latest one is.

    And as Sunshine said, continually releasing new generations of phones keeps them enticing to the vast majority of smartphone consumers that don’t already use a Fairphone. I’m literally looking at this new one and considering if that will be my next smartphone when my Pixel 7’s battery starts to turn. Seems like a pretty good deal to me, tbh. Might finally rip me from Google’s grasp.




  • osm seems like a mess. your comment got me poking around my local area to see if they had marked a recent road closure i was aware of. They hadn’t, and the Walgreen’s next to the road was marked as a generic building. I dug into the editing tools, made an account, and made some edits. Then I tried asking OSM to give me directions to that pharmacy, and it just says it can’t find a route. lollll great thanks OSM.

    It seems interesting as a hobby to keep up with. Feels like editing Wikipedia articles but you’re getting in on the ground floor, so your individual contribution is way more valuable.





  • I am new to running a group but generally i’ve picked up a couple things:

    • One is having a loose schedule, and just scheduling games for days when everyone agrees that they can make it. Don’t try to force a weekly schedule or whatever. I’m sure that works for some groups of dedicated nerds, but for most of us this is just one hobby in an array of other hobbies and interests. Better to treat it like a rolling game night, than to treat it like weekly band practice.
    • The other is dividing your crew into “core cast” and “guest roles”. Some players are just more flaky or less dedicated than others. Your “guest roles” need to have a good narrative reason why they are in-and-out. I think i’m having an easier time with this because my game is Blades in the Dark, where the party is a gang of scoundrels. Scores usually start and end within a single session, so it is easy to write around a scoundrel or two that is only available for some missions. When they are gone, they are off on other solo missions, or they are indulging their vice or whatever. I understand that this is more challenging if you are playing an RPG with multi-session dungeon crawls. Maybe the character chose to take an alternate route through the dungeon, or they were knocked out or something?

    Do you just ignore the fact that the PC carrying the magical Orb of Whatsit is off on holiday when the king demands the Orb to save the kingdom?

    I think a key part of this is not giving key items to guest role characters.





  • The only real argument against lab-grown meat is that it might not reduce emissions that much. But even if lab-grown meat has an equivalent carbon footprint to farm-grown, there is still a critical difference: we don’t have to kill innocent creatures to produce it.

    In the 21st century, we can easily maintain a nutritious, balanced diet without consuming anything produced by an animal. For this fact alone, humans should be reorienting our entire food chain away from animal-based products, because most animal products are produced via factory farms that functionally torture animals from birth to slaughter. But eating meat is so embedded in our culture - we like the taste of it, and most people don’t have to face the harsh reality of slaughtering innocent creatures to produce it, so for most people it’s actually HARDER to go vegan than it is to just go with the flow.

    I hate these “debates” about lab-grown meat for this reason, because to me the controversy seems made up. There are literally no downsides, it just solves this “momentum” problem overnight. Even if the emissions are equivalent, it’s still a net gain for the planet because we dramatically reduce suffering worldwide.