I’ll be honest, I looked at this with the intention of poking holes, but that was a surprisingly thorough article on researchers doing a year-long study trying to figure out practical uses for AI. I for one am still not convinced there’s a practical or truly ethical use at the moment, but I’m glad to see researchers trying. Their results were decidedly mixed, and I still think all the trade-offs don’t work in our favor at the moment, but this was a surprisingly balanced article with a fair amount of subtly on an issue than needs to be examined critically. They admitted that hallucinations are still a huge wildcard that no one knows how to deal with, which is rare. The headline is dumb, but because of how skeptical and distrustful I am of this massive AI bubble, I’m glad there are still researchers putting in the work to figure this shit out.

Because it does its job terribly. It provides inaccurate information when it would be faster for any one of us to just do a search for ourselves. And when it can’t figure out a source, it still spams the post, instead of just staying out of it. There has been widespread opposition to the bot existing at all, from day one, and the mods seem to have ignored all of us who say the bot sucks and only gets in the way.

It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes, and we don’t need that crap on Lemmy.

I didn’t like the bots on Reddit, and I don’t like the bots on Lemmy.

Not to generalize, but any Jew who still plans to vote for this antisemitic piece of shit isn’t concerning themselves with reality or history. (Whoops I generalized.)

I think I’m okay with this. Ghost of Tsushima is one of my favorite games.

Yeah, that has more to do with American social issues and lack of government support for the general population. Water engineering is expensive no matter where or when you are, and America is huuuge.

Plumbing was common in the ancient world in the Near East, Middle East, Mediterranean (Greece and Rome), and really wherever there were people. Keep in mind if you ask two different archaeologists, you’ll get two slightly different answers, but it’s pretty common knowledge that running water is not a modern invention.

Some sources (only a quick search, I don’t have access to all the academic journals where you’d find the good stuff):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7004096/

https://ancientengrtech.wisc.edu/greece-overview/water-systems/

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/roman-aqueducts/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_technology

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1506/ <–this one is really cool, the Qanats are still fully functional today

Edit: fixed links

Even when archaeologists don’t have that level of detail, they can still confidently tell you that people don’t really change. If we can imagine something now, they could most likely imagine the same thing a thousand years ago.

For example, you know what’s an incredibly common thing to find on a dig? Dildos. Phallic stuff is everywhere, and when you find a well-polished, life-sized clay dick, it’s pretty clear what it was used for. The Greeks had devices that were essentially computers that could predict celestial movements. Running water and indoor plumbing was relatively common in the ancient world.

We’re so egotistical to think that humans in the past were somehow incapable of thinking, planning, or building at our level. And we convince ourselves that we’re better than them because we have all this fancy stuff No, their brains were just as complex and capable, they just didn’t have access to the same kinds of tools that we do.

how do they know?

I have to know now, this is bugging the hell out of me. Is it an estimate based on daily downloads? Do they get a ping when you connect to the internet, and if so, why would they count that as a boot? If I boot this on an air gapped laptop, there’s no way they could ever know, right? So many questions. Regardless, this seems like a weird thing for them to brag about.

Wait, I never used snapchat, so I could be totally off base, but don’t Snapchat messages get automatically deleted? Isn’t that the whole point? Haven’t they already been caught deceiving users into thinking their deleted photos are actually gone? This just seems so gross.

I was thinking, don’t I remember something about UN workers sexually assaulting a bunch of Haitians during their last peacekeeping mission? Yup, it’s right there in the article. Appalling.

The UN mission in Haiti was criticized for its role in perpetuating the political and economic structures that favored the Haitian elite and foreign investors while neglecting to tackle the underlying causes of poverty and inequality in the country. The UN’s 2004-2017 failed peacekeeping mission was also marred by allegations of sexual assault by its troops and staffers. Furthermore, peacekeepers from Nepal were blamed for introducing cholera into Haiti’s largest river in October 2010, resulting in the death of over 10,000 Haitian people. Although the UN has acknowledged its role in the epidemic and the lack of sufficient effort to combat it, it has not explicitly admitted to introducing the disease.