Eh, I don’t think it’s fair to erase all nuance between spirituality and religion.

Heaven/Hell are these ordered places where some sentient divine being is supposed to judge you at death and sort you into. Whether it’s Anubis or God or whatever. It places a sort of human sense of control over the natural world.

Thinking there might be some sort of spiritual something or other, at least on my end, is thinking that well, we’ve got energy in our bodies that dissipates as we die. That energy ends up recycled in some way, first law of thermodynamics and all that. I don’t know if that energy can linger around as ghosts, or act as some new “soul” in some reincarnation cycle, or if it just gets dispersed or what, but you don’t need to believe in religion to consider it.

Though there’s definitely some overlap.

I think you’re conflating “intelligence” with “being smart”.

Intelligence is more about taking in information and being able to make a decision based on that information. So yeah, automatic traffic lights are “intelligent” because they use a sensor to check for the presence of cars and “decide” when to switch the light.

Acting like some GPT is on the same level as a traffic light is silly though. On a base level, yes, it “reads” a text prompt (along with any messaging history) and decides what to write next. But that decision it’s making is much more complex than “stop or go”.

I don’t know if this is an ADHD thing, but when I’m talking to people, sometimes I finish their sentences in my head as they’re talking. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes I don’t. That’s essentially what chatGPT is, a sentence finisher that happened to read a huge amount of text content on the web, so it’s got context for a bunch of things. It doesn’t care if it’s right and it doesn’t look things up before it says something.

But to have a computer be able to do that at all?? That’s incredible, and it took over 50 years of AI research to hit that point (yes, it’s been a field in universities for a very long time, with most that time people saying it’s impossible), and we only hit it because our computers got powerful enough to do it at scale.

I think the thing about the word “retard” is that it’s not so much about something being aggravating as it is about something being absolutely stupid. It has these hard consonants that make it sound powerful when it’s said. It’s effective, and it’s really uncomfortable to hear. It’s the fuck of the moron/idiot family of words.

And we’ve got this reality where there’s variability in how smart people are. And then people with developmental delays get tossed into the extreme end of the scale with medical terminology, and so that gives people an easy word to use when someone is acting on the extreme end of “not smart”. And then the word becomes a slur, and then a new word gets coined that’s medical and not a slur, and then it gets co-opted as a slur, and so on.

And it’s not gonna stop, because sometimes you do gotta call out someone for making stupid decisions, especially when their idiocy is causing harm. It’s just we’ve also got assholes around, but those people will insult more than just someone’s brain, they’ll go for anything that hurts.

I had to google the word tbh. My first instinct on reading segue was treating it like fugue, which ends on a hard g.

Ask yourself if it’s ego stopping you from accepting generosity. Here’s an extreme example:

I visited my dad in another province (parents separated). We went to a department store, and he forgot his wallet in his car. I offered to help, and he got extremely upset, lectured me in the middle of the store, and left me standing there waiting for him to fetch his money. He wouldn’t even take a “you can pay back me back after we’re out of here.”

It was honestly insulting to me, being shut down like that. I think I hurt his pride? But it soured my opinion of him.

If you’ve got good will and trust, take help gracefully, then offer it back when the time and means are right. People will remember how you react to these things, and if you consistently reject them, they will eventually stop offering, even when the time comes that you really need it.

I imagine this commercial/personal art dichotomy has existed ever since the first time someone paid for art. Like how there’s always been folk music played around campfires in contrast to the operas and orchestras where the local lord’s funding goes.

For laymen who might not know how GANs work:

Two AI are developed at the same time. One that generates and one that discriminates. The generator creates a dataset, it gets mixed in with some real data, then that all of that gets fed into the discriminator whose job is to say “fake or not”.

Both AI get better at what they do over time. This arms race creates more convincing generated data over time. You know your generator has reached peak performance when its twin discriminator has a 50/50 success rate. It’s just guessing at that point.

There literally cannot be a better AI than the twin discriminator at detecting that generator’s work. So anyone trying to make tools to detect chatGPT’s writing is going to have a very hard time of it.

Sorry, rereading it and I think I was unclear. I’m saying that this community moved from tumblr, to twitter, and now to mastodon. I quit this community at the twitter stage when it became too detrimental to my mental health.

But this community uses moderation as one tool to enforce cliques, rather than to actually prevent abuse. Or, you could say, this community has a history of using moderation as a form of abuse.

Alongside that, this community has a history of inciting witch hunts over the most petty things. And they will be happy about what the moderators are doing within their own clique.

I remember artist tumblr in the 00’s. Participated, then moved over to twitter in the 10’s before I got sick of it. This looks like another continuation of that same community.

They can do what they like, but this reeks of the exact same kind of drama and mobs that, for example, drives fanartists to attempting suicide because they painted a character’s skin a shade too light. (Zamii070, if you’re curious.)

These sorts of communities form an echo chamber that, frankly, can be absolutely horrible for kids. Yeah, they can do what they want in their house, but I’m staying far the fuck away.

Over the last five years, I’d click a link to Stack Overflow while googling, but I’ve never made an account because of the toxicity.

But yeah, chatGPT is definitely the nail in the coffin. Being able to give it my code and ask it to point out where the annoying bug is… is amazing.