Good ol’ Biting Pear of Salamanca.

Firefox marketing department checking in.

Where does it say that it has to be Turing-complete to be a programming language?

Not an unpopular opinion.

Of course the masters worked hard. I’m saying that no matter how hard you work, you aren’t going to become Mozart or Einstein. Hard work is important, but it also isn’t the only factor.

There’s an artist I like, Da Cruz, who has a couple of videos that utilize that surreal look of AI-generated content (like this one.) She says

We used the latest AI programmes for this. We chose this method because we find the current state of technology really interesting. AI makes mistakes that lead to almost surreal results. It’s quite possible that this won’t be possible in a year’s time.

I think this is a lot different from other uses of AI-generated content, because it isn’t pretending to be something else. It isn’t trying to fool me into thinking that it isn’t AI. It’s actually playing off of “flaws” in the software to create a certain effect.

Prodigies exist. Some people learn faster than others, and some have ability that’s just leaps and bounds beyond anybody else. This is independent of hard work, but somebody who has talent but doesn’t do the hard work isn’t going to be very good. At one end of the bell curve are people who just aren’t going to get it no matter what, and prodigies are at the other end. Most people are in the middle: they can become technically proficient with hard work, but they’ll never be as good as a prodigy who works just as hard.

If you’ve had very little experience with painting, how do you know how good you would be at it? Your friend might have a natural talent, but that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t learn how.

…Verily?

Shows that don’t have a fixed endpoint have this issue where the quality of an episode can vary quite a lot depending upon who the writer is. Doctor Who has this problem worse than most, and I think it’s because their showrunners themselves suck. I think this particular showrunner (Chibnall?) had an obsession with faces, because there were several episodes during his time where something weird was done with a face, like sticking it on sheet like they do here. (I don’t have a problem with a face on a sheet. I do have a problem with that face talking without a throat or lungs!)

Doctor Who does go balls-to-the-wall with the Rule of Cool, and sometimes they can pull it off, but often not IMO (e.g. the face on the sheet). I think the old Doctor Who is much better, but the pacing on it was much slower because they usually didn’t try to cram the entire story into one or two episodes. It’s so slow, though, it would bore modern audiences to death. I like it because there is a lot more dialog and the story is allowed to grow over the course of 4-6 episodes. There was much more suspense because they had an incredibly low budget for special effects. It could just be nostalgia, but I think the stories were much better, too. In a cheesy sci-fi B-movie kind of way, at least.

Yeah, right after I finished writing that, I thought “Am I crazy, because that actually sounds like a good idea.”

What you’re describing is an automat.

I was talking to my roommate about a ramen restaurant, and he scoffed and said “Ramen restaurant? Who the fuck had that bright idea?!”

It turns out he thought that all ramen was instant. Like you walk into the restaurant, sit down, and they serve you some noodles in a cup.

Belief that heirarchies are natural and desirable because some people are better than others is the worldview required to be vulnerable to the lie of fascism, it’s the precursor to all supremacist thinking.

It isn’t because “some people are better than others”, it’s because some people are better than others at leading. Leadership is a skill, and it can be learned and practiced just like any other skill. You could say, “Hey, Mary is good at fixing things, let’s put her in charge of repairs. Margaret is good at planning projects and organizing people, let’s put her in leadership.”

And no, it doesn’t imply that the person leading should have total control over everything or that they can’t be held accountable.

If you look at opinion polling across countries, die-hard support for supremacist candidates hovers around 25-40%.

You said “humans who want hierarchies” and you’re equating that with “support for supremacist candidates”. Does that mean that if I support a centrist or a left-wing candidate, then I don’t want hierarchies? I can tell you, there are certainly not that many anarchists in the world. 60-75% of the population?

Look at it this way. One of my values is having the courage to help others. So, I would admire somebody who risked their life to go into a burning building and save somebody. I’m doubtful that I have the same courage, but I hope that I would. It’s something that I aspire to.

In the same way, somebody who admires Musk has a value of “being rich”. They’re doubtful that they’ll ever be as rich as he is, but it’s something that they aspire to.

I’d like to see how you got to “hierarchies = fascism”. I also think that the people who want hierarchies are much higher than 25-40%.

It raises the question. Begging the question is this.

It seems that populism/fascism is ‘ingrained’ in our simple minds.

These are not mutually exclusive. Right-wing populists can also be fascists.

This is what the US tried to do in Germany after WWII. There were “denazification” efforts. Unfortunately, they did a shit job of it, which is why Germany still has a problem with the right wing.

This is the same logic as “If I give the bully some money, then they won’t take all of my money”. If they can get some, why wouldn’t they take the rest? Appeasement doesn’t work. They just push for more.

You don’t need AI to do this…but they’re probably using it, anyway.