Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird what makes me angry are the taxonomic names that latinize words in different ways. For example, "deino-" versus "dino-". It's terrible!

@futurebird looking at the kinds of people who have been driven out of LLM research, and out of LLM businessess, it seems the result is functionally equivalent to a conscientious and deliberate effort to drive out everyone who would be genuinely interested in fixing the technology. All the people who wanted to fix it have been chased out of the building.

@futurebird
I agree. And I think the evil genius of a chat interface wrapper for LLMs is the integration of lottery logic, psuedorandom number generation, in generating responses. The underlying lottery facet of its design combines synergistically with the human desire to see human meaning in text, and the endless bombardment of "ARTIFICIAAL INTELLIGENCE!!" marketing.

@futurebird
I've suffered depression all my life. As a reader, I've read endlessly about it. Mostly books, but plenty online. Online, it seems to me topics such as self-harm and sucide are dominated by fiction, by reporter's misperceptions, transcripts of conversations of with psychologists that never should have been public, and, last but probably most influential, murder forums like 4chan and kiwi farms. The modern "biggest is bestest" approach to LLM training hoovers all that up.

@futurebird hm, maybe this is how to get her to the vet next time it's needed.

@futurebird however you define it, I would prefer the fediverse not get lumped in with facebook, or with the hellspace formerly known as twitter.

@futurebird an important left vs right asymmetry: on the right, principles exist only to be gamed, therefore comprising one's principles is easily portrayed as smart political strategy. This gives many the illusion the same trick can work everywhere. But everywhere else, principles are the foundation, and comprising the foundation often leads either to collapse, or to a slide to the right, or most commonly, both.

@futurebird in principle I want to agree, but in practice, so many of these things are so complex, and while 500 chars is better than twitter's procrustean rules were, it's not enough (yeah I could move instances but I'm trying to avoid that as long as practical), and I find I'm often overcome by grief, rage, or exhaustion before I finish a toot.

@futurebird @farah
1/2
to me, the only part that doesn't make sense is that he tried to hoax it, rather than just waiting. Deaths in bike-person or bike-bear-sized animal collisions are vastly rarer than for cars, but they're not actually impossible, and now there's a smooth gradient from "ebike can do 20mph!" to "electric dirt bike can beat your mom's gasoline-powered kawasaki at the local drag",

@futurebird I keep wondering how many months the biking movement has before car industries decide electric bikes are eating into car profits, and the people who are riding too fast, not wearing helmets, not keeping proper lookout, or not following rules made for cars, are creating a golden opportunity to make ebikes look like the new heroin.

@futurebird oops, sorry, I didn't see yours. But thank you.

@futurebird suggested alt text: The Sun approaches sunset beyond the towers of New York City. Most towers are tall rectangles, but some have sloped tops, and a few have steep domes. An orange halo surrounds the Sun, and runs along the horizon, beyond the towers. In the foreground is a lens flare, and a low protective wall, giving the feeling the photo was shot from the roof of another tall building.

@futurebird there is a counter-argument, whose acceptance and veracity I do not know, that prior to the industrial revolution, it was normal for most societies to place a high value on protecting and nurturing children, so they could grow and learn, and the industrial revolution temporarily stomped all over that with child labor, putting children to work to profit industry, and the modern view of childhood is a return to a pre-industrial norm.

@futurebird @tayfonay
if there are ant pirates, how many are actually ant privateers, acting with the secret support of government and navy ants?

@futurebird @mattsheffield
wasn't Krystal Ball a vocal supporter of charter schools?

@futurebird I've noticed most "birds/mammals/trees of North America" type books often leave out Mexico and Greenland, which doesn't make any biogeographical sense at all.