Freedom of religion, but not freedom from religion! Checkmate, atheists!

/s

Like a record, baby.

Found the Republican

For perspective, one of the states in the southwest (I think New Mexico) tried to pass a similar ban and it got overruled by a judge because it was found that it would affect a total of 4 girls in the entire state, and the judge felt that that violated the federal law that says that you can’t make a law that targets specific people (ie you can’t make it illegal for Mike and Jerry specifically to join the basketball team).

Because the best way to fight bigotry is through exposure. This is why colleges and cities run more liberal - because that’s where people are introduced to and live around a wider variety of people and cultures and realize “Oh, they’re people, just like me.”

I’m working class. I’m trans. I’ve never met a Mexican farmer. If I said that I find caring about the issues that Mexicans face alienating, would the fact that I’ve never even met a Mexican matter? It absolutely would.

The fact that none of the people that you work with have probably ever known a single trans person is very important to how they’ve formed their opinions.

Another Millennial here, so take that how you will, but I agree. I think that Gen Z is very tech literate, but only in specific areas that may not translate to other areas of competency that are what we think of when we say “tech savvy” - especially when you start talking about job skills.

I think Boomers especially see anybody who can work a smartphone as some sort of computer wizard, while the truth is that Gen Z grew up with it and were immersed in the tech, so of course they’re good with it. What they didn’t grow up with was having to type on a physical keyboard and monkey around with the finer points of how a computer works just to get it to do the thing, so of course they’re not as skilled at it.

Because we’re talking pattern recognition levels of learning. At best, they’re the equivalent of parrots mimicking human speech. They take inputs and output data based on the statistical averages from their training sets - collaging pieces of their training into what they think is the right answer. And I use the word think here loosely, as this is the exact same process that the Gaussian blur tool in Photoshop uses.

This matters in the context of the fact that these companies are trying to profit off of the output of these programs. If somebody with an eidetic memory is trying to sell pieces of works that they’ve consumed as their own - or even somebody copy-pasting bits from Clif Notes - then they should get in trouble; the same as these companies.

Given A and B, we can understand C. But an LLM will only be able to give you AB, A(b), and B(a). And they’ve even been just spitting out A and B wholesale, proving that they retain their training data and will regurgitate the entirety of copyrighted material.

Reminds me of when I read about a programmer getting turned down for a job because they didn’t have 5 years of experience with a language that they themselves had created 1 to 2 years prior.

The argument that these models learn in a way that’s similar to how humans do is absolutely false, and the idea that they discard their training data and produce new content is demonstrably incorrect. These models can and do regurgitate their training data, including copyrighted characters.

And these things don’t learn styles, techniques, or concepts. They effectively learn statistical averages and patterns and collage them together. I’ve gotten to the point where I can guess what model of image generator was used based on the same repeated mistakes that they make every time. Take a look at any generated image, and you won’t be able to identify where a light source is because the shadows come from all different directions. These things don’t understand the concept of a shadow or lighting, they just know that statistically lighter pixels are followed by darker pixels of the same hue and that some places have collections of lighter pixels. I recently heard about an ai that scientists had trained to identify pictures of wolves that was working with incredible accuracy. When they went in to figure out how it was identifying wolves from dogs like huskies so well, they found that it wasn’t even looking at the wolves at all. 100% of the images of wolves in its training data had snowy backgrounds, so it was simply searching for concentrations of white pixels (and therefore snow) in the image to determine whether or not a picture was of wolves or not.

Yep, they literally cannot work any other way than as a ponzi scheme. Because the people “earning” want to take more money out of the system than they put in, and the company is taking money out as well just to keep the game running and the employees paid, as well as to make a profit. So you need substantially more suckers buying into the system than the money that is being paid out.

Eventually, somebody is gonna be left holding an empty bag.

I just bought a forester a few months ago, and my 2 stipulations on the cars I was looking at were all-wheel drive because I live in snow country, and a car no newer than 2018 (IIRC) because that was the year car companies largely switched from manual controls to a 16-inch screen with everything, including climate control, accessed from an app.

When I was talking to the guy at the dealership I bought it from and mentioned how much I disliked the new screens, he outright said, “Yeah, a lot of people don’t like them.”

My bet is on it fracturing. Cults of personality usually don’t survive the death of their leader, and that’s exactly what Trump’s diehard supporters are - Flavor-Aid drinking cultists.

I mean that crypto currencies are essentially the same as stocks. They have no worth on their own, and their value is tied to converting them to other currencies.

And this conversion rate fluctuates constantly. What one bitcoin is worth today is not what it will be worth tomorrow. In order to buy something with a crypto currency, companies have to first check how much it’s worth in fiat currency.

I wouldn’t say that it’s harder to counterfeit so much as that the methodology is radically different due to the untrusted, peer to peer nature of crypto. Because of the way that that works, in order to fake a transaction you need to convince the majority of ledgers that the transaction occurred (even if the wallet that is buying something doesn’t have anything in it). Because the ledger is ultimately decided by majority vote. You can trace the transaction, but wallets are often anonymous, so the trail ends at the wallet. Especially since somebody would use a burner wallet to do such a thing. It’s basically buying something with a hotel keycard with a stolen RFID on it.

I think governments don’t want anything to do with it because its nature causes it to be too unstable in its value. It would be like tying the value of your country’s currency to the value of day trade stocks. One day, your money is worthless; a week later, it’s skyrocketing in value.

At the end of the day, currencies are a system of abstraction to simplify the process of trade - whether between people or countries. We agree that the magic paper is worth the same amount because it’s easier than arguing that the magic rock that gave your wife cancer is worth at least 2 goats, not one. It’s always going to be a flawed system in some way. Crypto’s flaws just make it an ideal system for black market dealings compared to traditional fiat currency in its current setup, on top of the energy and computing costs.

Found the diamond hands.

Crypto currencies are still backed by and dependent on those same currencies. And their value is incredibly unstable, making them largely useless except as a speculative investment for stock market daytraders. BitCoin may as well be Doge Coin or Bored Ape NFTs as far as the common person is concerned.

I hope your coins haven’t seen a 90%+ drop in value in the past 4 years like the vast majority have.

I think it’s because of what crypto turned into and the inherent flaws in the system. Crypto currencies are still backed by and dependent on traditional currency, and their value is too unstable for the average person. The largest proponents of crypto have been corporations - big capital, as you put it - and there’s a reason for that (though they’re more on the speculative market of NFTs looking to make a profit off of Ponzi schemes).

In the end, crypto hasn’t solved any problems that weren’t already solved by less energy intensive means.

I recently noticed a number of bitcoin ATMs that have cropped up where I live - mostly at gas stations and the like. I am a little concerned by it.

The original comic was rather popular at the time, and as a result, it became an early meme before mass-scale meme culture had really taken off besides doge memes and “I can haz cheeseburger.” So it quickly entered the cultural zeitgeist of the early internet because the kinds of people into memes and gamer culture at the time would’ve been about the size of the terminally online crowd today.

Another possibility is that she’s XY, but the Y never activated, so she developed female but with a single “faulty” X chromosome.

I don’t remember my biology classes well enough to say, but wouldn’t that also mean that potentially neither of her parents were colorblind, since the Y would’ve come from her father while the faulty X would’ve come from her mother? And, if she were XY in this scenario, wouldn’t that mean that she’d pass that trait along to her kids as well?

I mean, you’re really just arguing the semantics of phrasing.

Developing the ability to see green through random mutation was potentially an evolutionary advantage that allowed them to become better adapted to survival. Which is what they meant by “needed.”