MeetMeAtTheMovies [they/them]

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  • 22 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 18th, 2026

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  • Do we have any actual documentation of anybody who might be called a ‘gimp’ actually being offended by the name?

    You want documentation that gimp is offensive? Go call your boss a gimp. They’ll give you some documentation. Feel free to share it here.

    Gimp does not refer to people with movement disabilities. It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program.

    Pretending to not understand when an acronym spells a word is a new one to me. Maybe you should be writing bill names for congress.

    Or is this just more performant bullshit?

    I dunno about you, but last time I used it, gimp was pretty performant.

    See? That’s me intentionally misunderstanding something obvious in order to ignore a point you’re making. See how transparent and ineffective it is?









    1. The amount of money spent on NASA is negligible compared to the MIC
    2. Human intuition about what STEM stuff is useful is very poor. The basis for your ability to securely do online banking is a quirky little number theory equation that was useless for centuries. Or think about the reactionary complaints about “they’re paying scientists to study cat urine” or whatever. Those studies typically have a practical reason for getting some and practical implications once they’re finished. Even the stuff that is practical looks impractical to the layperson. Space travel is very similar in that the technology it enables can have other uses.
    3. Whoever figures out asteroid mining first is going to make a lot of fucking money




  • There could be something which served workers’ interests which we call “AI”, but I would argue that much if not all of the implementation details would be different.

    A copy-paste of part of a previous comment I made:

    Look at how modern LLMs work. They’re trained in large data centers owned by private companies using giant corpuses of data that were largely obtained without the permission or knowledge of the people who created it. Then, to use them, the weights are loaded into an amount of memory that’s out of reach for most consumer desktops and users must call into the LLM using an API. Working memory of a conversation doesn’t persist in between messages or tool calls, so the entire history must be loaded into its context window on every call. In other words, all the “learning” for these models must take place up front in training and outside of taking context into account, it doesn’t actually adjust to learn new things about the world. There are workarounds for this, of course, to simulate the experience of interacting with something that can learn, but they have their limitations and aren’t reliable yet. I could go on. Running probabilistic process on deterministic hardware is an area that we may see more work on soon.

    Every single step of that description had alternatives that would be more likely to be chosen outside of a capitalist system. They could be more eco friendly. They could be more efficient. They could be more powerful and learn from your interactions in way that persists. And a lot of these changes would delay the exposure of LLMs to the general public and see them spending longer in academia. But that would be okay because we wouldn’t have the profit motive at the center of this inflating a giant bubble that’s poised to pop and flatten the economy. Bottom line is this stuff was pushed out and hyped up well before it was ready and well before it was able to be scaled up ethically and with the working class in mind. None of this was inevitable.


  • To coordinate that many people, you would need either:

    • a political party that would coordinate global actions via some sort of hierarchy
    • a disaster of some kind that affected enough of the population that the entire world could be convinced to act all at once, or at least in quick succession, but still didn’t take out all of our communication structures so decentralized communication would still be possible.

    We saw how Covid worked out so I think the likelihood of everyone not only acting at once, but also in unison, because of a disaster is quite small without a party to coordinate. There need to be constraints on behavior with levers of power to pull and enforce those constraints in order to get literally billions of people to do the same thing at the same time. I don’t see a way around it.