AFK BRB Chocolate

The point is that if the rules aren’t grounded in science, it’s not science fiction. You can have the trappings of science, like space travel or whatever, but if people are moving objects and doing impossible acrobatics by using a magical force, it’s fantasy.

Though not mine, I personally think that definition works better than most. Still, if you pin me down, I’d say that there’s a spectrum, with hard SF (where everything is rigorously anchored to scientific principles) at one end, and pure fantasy (with magic and such) at the other. There are lots of things between those endpoints, with some being closer to one or the other, and some being very much in the middle.

Oh, it’s fantasy

I always liked the distinction (I forget who originated it) that science fiction is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by physics and fantasy is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by the author.

Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.

It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.

What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.

Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.

LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.

Agreed, and it’s sad. I mean, I work at a highly technical engineering company. Everyone has at least a BS, and this guy was probably in his 60s with 30+ years of experience. Yet here he was repeatedly farting by a woman because they had a disagreement. It shows you that age and education don’t guarantee maturity.

She wasn’t interested in suing, she just wanted him to stop farting in her doorway. I didn’t know the guy, so I started by talking to his manager, who talked to the guy. Sounds like he initially tried to deny it, but in a way that made it clear he was doing it on purpose. His boss was pretty clear that it wouldn’t be tolerated and it never happened again.

Some people are so weird and petty.

I had a female employee come to me to complain years ago. She had had a disagreement with an older male employee (thankfully not mine) some weeks prior, and since then, every time he walked by her cube, he’d pause at her doorway, fart, and then keep walking without saying anything.

She at least was aware of how absolutely ridiculous it was, but legitimately didn’t think it was something she should have to deal with. One of the stranger management issues.

At the risk of making a serious reply in a shitpost thread…

Who you’re attracted to and what you’re looking for is subjective. No one else gets a say in what that is.

However, there are repercussions. The more rare what you’re looking for is, the harder it is to find. The more broadly desired what you’re looking for is, the more you’re competing with other people.

So sure, go looking for what you want, but be aware that you might be looking a long time, and they might not be interested in you.

The article makes a mention of the early part of the movie Her, where he’s writing a heartfelt, personal card that turns out to be his job, writing from one stranger to another. That reference was exactly on target: I think most of us thought outsourcing such a thing was a completely bizarre idea, and it is. It’s maybe even worse if you’re not even outsourcing to someone with emotions but to an AI.

No clue how that could happen

Well, now you know me so you can add another.

The margin of older voters who voted for Trump in the last election wasn’t that big. People think the vast majority of boomers are conservatives, but it’s just a slight majority. Similarly, only a slight majority of younger voters voted for Biden.

Mastadon is to Twitter as Lemmy is to Reddit. So you don’t really follow topics, but you can follow people if you want (I never have) and you can join communities on the topics you’re interested in. Some of the things you’ve mentioned, like Linux, are very popular/prolific here.

My advice is to set your browsing by All (and whichever of the other one makes sense to you; I usually do New, but sometimes one of the Top ones), then when you see something posted in a community that you’re interested in, instead of clicking on the post, click on the community name. In the sidebar, you can subscribe to the community. After you’ve been doing that a while, if you want you can change your browsing to Subscribed.

There’s also a Lemmy Explorer, and you can set it to Communities at the top and find the ones that are the most active or are on the subjects you’re looking for.

Having your posts seen is mostly a matter of posting to active communities with engaging topics.

Welcome and good luck!

Famous song by Gordon Lightfoot.

Are you saying that she’s a bot or a troll?

I always liked this one. And I always get this one in my head whenever I encounter any of the words.

Not my favorite one, but I really liked Kliban. Very surreal sometimes.