• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’d heard his name but had no idea who he was.

    I looked him up and was like “I gotta join in the pile-on”

    Really, I’m here for the spectacle and it’s too rich that this dude spouting gun nut nonsense took a shot to his neck. I don’t care if he lived or died, I don’t celebrate gun violence, I wish I lived in a different kind of society. But I don’t, so I’m gonna laugh

    And I’m laughing even harder when conservatives clutch their pearls and demand that feel bad. Choke on my indifference, you fucking phony chuds











  • 2006 made me suspicious of the Democrats forever. Pelosi and the party ran on defunding the Iraq War, then promptly dropped it upon taking office.

    I DID primary for Obama because he was promising a public healthcare option. We all know how that turned out: he ultimately championed a Republican scheme to entrench private insurers. Democrats failed to support their party’s signature policy proposal when it mattered.

    While Obama expanded the Bush wars…

    That’s when I gave up all hope in the party making any progress or acting in good faith. They haven’t given me any reason to rethink that stance.

    Sorry your efforts and enthusiasm were wasted and abused by the DNC…

    I recall the Coffee Party having a moment, a nationwide movement planned meetups all coordinated. In Asheville, I attended. the meetup was crashed by Obama’s Organizing for America, and I later learned that they crashed meetups everywhere.

    I remember the smooth-talking guy and how he hijacked the meeting as we were making real progress. Fuck Obama and fuck the DNC



  • Obligatory: I’m anti-AI, mostly anti-technology

    That said, I can’t say that I mind LLMs using copyrighted materials that it accesses legally/appropriately (lots of copyrighted content may be freely available to some extent, like news articles or song lyrics)

    I’m open to arguments correcting me. I’d prefer to have another reason to be against this technology, not arguing on the side of frauds like Sam Altman. Here’s my take:

    All content created by humans follows consumption of other content. If I read lots of Vonnegut, I should be able to churn out prose that roughly (or precisely) includes his idiosyncrasies as a writer. We read more than one author; we read dozens or hundreds over our lifetimes. Likewise musicians, film directors, etc etc.

    If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?


  • Ah yeah, well… At least in America, the marketing gap is pretty wide I think! (mostly based around LLMs)

    Our “AI” courseware was pretty basic outside of the facial recognition (which I found impressive, if not TOO useful). It would keep track of student responses and tailor some questions based on previous performance, but that’s pretty basic (I think it would have been better if our content developers knew how to work with the software)

    About the marketing, we were actually a multimedia educational materials maker. Textbooks, courseware, video series , etc etc

    The founder/CEO liked to pretend we were a tech company, but our bread and butter was VIPKids-style English lessons and textbook series with long shelf life. (I often felt like he was cosplaying as Jack Ma, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, if you know what I mean)


  • I have no good references that aren’t boring propaganda from state media… Search China Daily for stories about ed tech

    Or more broadly, search for “Ed tech” or “educational technology”

    I think our “AI” was mostly BS, but I guess it had its niche.

    Oh that reminds me… When I worked at state media, we ran stories about AI facial recognition at the winter Olympics. The stories claimed that they could identify more than 99 percent of people wearing COVID masks (I suspect this may be an exaggeration, as airport immigration officials and train station officials would make people remove masks and smile for cameras)

    Also, just remembered: During my time at state media, I recall reading some Xi Jinping quote along the lines of “Whoever has the best AI will control the future”


  • My company in China added AI to its products basically to receive government subsidies.

    They introduced it into courseware to track student faces and tell parents whether kids were enjoying lessons, paying attention, etc etc. It was weird to see in action. I used the software and acted like a “bad student” to see what it would say about my face and lack of attention.

    I’m also a voice actor. They tried to replace me with AI voices but the voices in 2021 were stuck in the uncanny valley and clients complained.

    The company pretty much went belly-up when Beijing introduced the Double Reduction policy. I wonder what became of the their software? And I wonder if they ever made an AI version of my voice