We have gone from cruise control to cars being able to drive themselves quite well in about a decade. The last percentage points of reliability are of course the hardest, but that’s a tremendously pessimistic take.

Just pattern recognition it is not the neural net everyone assumes it is.

Tesla’s current iteration of self-driving is based on neural networks. Certainly the computer vision is; there’s no other way we have of doing computer vision that works at all well and, according to this article from last year it’s true for the decision-making too.

Of course, the whole task of self-driving is “pattern recognition”; neural networks are just one way of achieving that.

Comparing huge multinational countries which serve every country to the half of countries with the smallest energy usage is not terribly illustrative.

And my comment only used social media as an example. The point is, big websites have more draw than small websites, leading to a self-amplifying effect.

From the user’s perspective it’s not about “reach”; it’s about simply having people to interact with. If you go to a thread on reddit there’ll be hundreds or thousands of people to talk about it with, and there’ll be active communities for all kinds of niches. If you want to avoid reddit - whether because of privacy issues or site policy or mods or whatever - you have to deal with the fact that everyone else is sticking with reddit.

Yes? That’s why loans with collateral charge a lower interest rate than unsecured loans.

It’s like any number of blog hosts that have gone before it.

Thanks for the SciHub link, but it doesn’t say what you’re saying it does. It says that a particular kind of upbringing predicts a discrepancy between self-reported sexuality and a measure of “implicit sexuality.” They further found a relationship between self-reported straightness and homophobia when “implicit sexuality” was measured as “more gay”.

Leaving aside the fact that (in my quick read-through, at least) although there was a lot of effort given to validating that this measure measured something, there was little effort given to validating that it measured sexuality, this correlation does not allow one to conclude that “those who profess anti-gay views are likely to be gay themselves” which is the distillation of what was expressed above. Let us start from someone who professes those views. The research means that, if you know this detail of their upbringing and if you know that they explicitly identify as straight (not the same thing as public identification) then you can predict (with clear statistical significance, but still quite low correlation) that that person scores highly on this measure of “implicit homosexuality”.

If you check the summary table you can actually just read off the correlation coefficient between homophobic views and the measure of implicit homosexuality and see that it’s not statistically significant.

And I do think that the measure of implicit sexuality, though clearly interesting and measuring something is equally clearly not a measure of “are you gay regardless of what you say about yourself.” It’s reasonable to believe we can use it to estimate homosexuality, but it’s like measuring distance with a ruler where all the markings have been scraped off. So even if a study like this did have a correlation with its measure, you then would have to mute the strength of that correlation by the strength of correlation between the measure and the underlying reality we’re interested in.

Fair enough, I genuinely misread and thought that was within the quotation marks. But her message is still wrong because she is still talking about AI in general, but her argument applies only to a) AI whose data is derived from data scrapers like Facebook or b) AI put to surveillance tasks. That does not apply to Stable Diffusion, which is why I mentioned it, but it is caught by her assertion, “AI is a surveillance technology.”

I think you’ve missed my assertion, which is that this is an example of confirmation bias. Listing examples of that confirm what I’m claiming is confirmation bias isn’t saying much. What about the thousands of people coming out as gay who haven’t got a history of anti-LGBT shit? Well they aren’t as interesting so you don’t remember them when you read such an article.

Your link is broken, but consider this: human beings are perfectly capable of hating one another for any difference, real or perceived. We don’t doubt that racism is down to hatred of the other, rather than the self, we don’t doubt that sexism is the same. Why is homophobia any different? Only because there is the potential for someone to be secretly gay.

I know what conservative women consider to be “respect,” and was applying their standards to this subject. Even by their absolute bottom of the barrel expectations, men are letting them down in this case.

Do you think the conservative women who appeared in the calendar agree with you? I would guess they don’t. So it seems to me your understanding of the spectrum of opinion is clearly missing something.

Maybe your views on this are out of whack because of spending “huge amounts of time” in a community with a view of conservatism skewed by their unique experiences? That’s not a knock against doing so or against those people, just that fundies have particularly extreme experiences of politics and religion which is bound to mean you hear a lot of outliers.

so this “division” is really just a disagreement about how they want to be disrespectful - via mildly titillating pictures, or via religious control.

I am not conservative but I don’t think looking at mildly titillating pictures of women is disrespectful, and I think that’s an opinion which is pretty common across the political spectrum in the West.

That makes it so much better :D

AI absolutely has the potential to be used for surveillance; its use in facial recognition most obviously. But the person quoted in the article didn’t say “AI has the potential to be used for surveillance” - she said “AI is fundamentally a surveillance technology”. So if she’s not talking about LLMs and image generators, why is she saying that it’s a fundamental part of the technology? It’s not very fundamental if these two year-defining AI technologies aren’t included in it.

Is this a reference to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB9JgxhXW5w or have you just converged there by happy accident? :P

Did you read the article? The point here is that there is a division in conservative circles, so talking about conservative men as a single group is missing the point.

The same division, presumably, exists among conservative women (albeit bearing in mind that in the USA men are more conservative than women) so there will be an alliance between pearl-clutching Christian women who decry the debauchery, and women who are feminist but for whom feminism culminated with the third wave, for whom objectification exemplified in a mildly raunchy calendar is something to, at worst, roll ones eyes at.

So by all means enjoy the division in conservative ranks, and hope that it splits their base and ruins their chances of victory, but at least understand what is going on properly. What you think of as “respecting women” is probably not what conservative women think of as respecting women; you’re judging and understanding their beliefs through your own lens, in a way that makes you misunderstand quite badly.

There is a great desire to see this kind of turnabout - for a long time people have said, without evidence, that the most anti-gay people are closeted, self-hating gay people themselves.

The real reason for this is because that juxtaposition, when it does occasionally happen, sticks in the mind precisely because it’s so weird. But good luck backing it up, especially to the degree people portray it, as you have done. (which is fairly black and white, “more hetero people don’t really think about this kind of thing”)

ChatGPT is not reliable enough to be worth citing. “Per ChatGPT” may as well be “per some bloke down the pub”.

Remarkably stupid take. It’s produced by big-data companies because you need a lot of data to feed it but that doesn’t make it “surveillance technology”. Stable Diffusion wasn’t trained on the kind of data she’s talking about, and it can’t be used to surveil you either. ChatGPT no more permits surveillance of its users than does chatting with a real person.

It’s spelled “copyright”, not “copywrite” btw :P

I know how HTTP works. These banners are supposed to (and are legally allowed to) store a cookie saying you have refused. Websites are allowed to store session cookies with displaying a banner at all.