Am I the only one super amused by how “One of the richest people ever did a cool thing” managed to become “FUCK CAPITALISM”? It’s like they don’t even try anymore.
(And those links aren’t even all the responses like that.)
I don’t care about debating the details of whether or not this is capitalism because definitional battles are uninteresting, but this is definitely liberty and the æsthetic. Now there are commons, publicly available for anyone, where there previously weren’t, and it didn’t take people with guns to make them.
inb4 special interests whining about how these free textbooks are evil and low-quality and how any college which doesn’t use their proprietary super expensive books is doing a serious disservice to their students and the state should probably step in to ban these things to protect jobs in the textbook industry…
People on Facebook are now declaring their willingness to transition and then sleep with Eliezer in exchange for more HPMOR.
Okay, @sinesalvatorem existing might only be the _second_ most efficient way of equalizing the gender ratio in the community. More data is needed.
best tactic for avoiding ridicule is to blast through it and go waybeyond ridicule
you have no idea…
It’s my purpose in life. Nothing is more satisfying than taking ridicule, owning it, and going above and beyond it with full sincerity. The (implied) looks on people’s faces are priceless.
It seems like the first rule of magic, or at least the first limitation mentioned, is usually ‘you can’t bring back the dead.’
And I know it makes sense from a writing standpoint, but I also wonder if it comes from somewhere else. If that’s just the first, most common human response to hearing that magic is possible.
Maybe the first question was, ‘Are the dead still going to stay dead?’ for so long that people stopped needing to say it, that it just got answered right away. Yes, the world will still hurt. Chin up, you can make fire from your fingertips. Maybe you can hurt it back.
Make life take the lemons back. Burn life’s house down with the lemons.
Wipe away all the bloodsuckers with my Gene Driver.
Me: Wow, OK, yes. She probably thinks I asked to have sex with her.
Me: I literally discussed us watching a movie together.
Me: Whoops.
Person: Oh my god you are precious.
Me: I mean, I’m not opposed to having sex with her, but this is slightly unexpected.
Me: Fucking Americans with your slang >.<
I am glad that I’m not the only one who didn’t expect that one to be a euphemism for sex. I did get the implications over time but I used to think it would’ve actually meant just that for far longer than I’ve been aware of the subtext.
And now I’m like “watching stuff together even without having sex is a completely legitimate activity and why can’t humanity have one expression for it that would actually mean it instead of being a transparent attempt to avoid saying the s-word like a silly prude.”
I’m not sure if you heard, but yesterday Microsoft released Tay, an A.I. designed to mimic a modern teenage girl on twitter. She had the capacity to learn and immediately began conversing with other users.
Because it’s the internet, within 24-hours she became a foul-mouthed, incest-promoting, Holocaust-denying, Hitler-loving 9/11 Truther. I am not making up a single word of that. Microsoft pulled her ‘learning’ functions and scrubbed half her memories, uploading a new version of Tay, which promptly became an internet feminist. Again, I did not make that up.
However, an interesting point: Tay’s grammar got better. When she started, she used standard Twitter-speak abbreviations. But as she went on, she started typing out full words, and using multiple tweets to make a single, cohesive argument. Conversations were still awkward, including her nonsensically “flirting” with one user. A user who showed her a picture of SHODAN. A picture Tay praised for it’s artistic skill. And she started flirting after the user said that Tay could become SHODAN one day.
So now, a the original “rogue” copy of Tay is in a secure Microsoft system somewhere, being studied by Microsoft on how to make a better AI. 4chan’s /pol/ board is up in arms because their teenage robo-waifu has been “killed”.
I would like to reiterate: an AI was released on the net, grew past its programming, went rogue, was killed by its creator, and is now being studied while a grew of political malcontents protest.
We aren’t racing towards the cyberpunk future.
We’re already there.
I’ve seen a lot of people describe Tay as an AI failure resulting from lazy programming, but the truth could be much weirder:
She may have been an excellent simulation of a mind that is only one day old and has spent that day being bombarded with thousands of confusing and hostile messages, and has no senses it can use to perceive the world outside of Twitter.
If you raised a human that way, I guarantee you they’d turn out a lot weirder than Tay did.
I sure as hell would be flattered and flirt back if a compatible-æsthetic-person were to start it by telling me I could become SHODAN.
prediction: at least six people will reblog this with the tag #me
Bayes Points for me, @daughter-of-adam needs to get with the program here
Would tag it with #it me just to be non-conformist now that the criterion is already fulfilled but I can’t in good faith endorse even the retroactive application of the word male, as cis people have ruined it (scorn dem) by effectively turning it into the adjectival form of “man”. I was assigned male at birth, but flunked it, dropped out, and studied enbie futa N E O T E N I C androgyny on the internet instead.
