For pure entertainment or passive turn-brain-off type games I’m inclined to agree with you. Mario Party isn’t exactly changing lives out here.

Games that tell a story though, they can be extremely impactful just like any form of story. Through stories I myself have changed my world views, taken new perspectives in life. Star Trek The Next Generation’s season 6 episode Tapestry changed my outlook on risk taking especially in my professional life, my username reference to the Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask got me to overcome my extreme fear and anxiety of being rejected by friends. Was I much younger when I experienced those stories, sure, but they still changed the course of my life.

My day job is working on satellites, I’m a hobbyist carpenter, been teaching myself to play piano, frequently go camping/hiking into Colorado’s mountains, work on a project car, and sure this evening I’ve been playing Factorio but I’ve been doing so while sipping wine that I made myself.

You could call me many things, but I don’t think boring fits.

It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care

What I was referencing by proxy war was Ukraine and what Israel was supposed to be. The US sends arms to another nation with the intention that the other nation, who is already in conflict (or just happens to be through dubious and convenient circumstances) will take those arms and give political adversaries a bloody nose or serve as enough of a distraction that they won’t come after the US and keeps the US from putting boots on the ground. Is working out quite well for us in Ukraine, Israel was supposed to distract the middle east but turns out that when you hand a genocidal maniac a bunch of weapons, he’s gonna do maniacal genocidal things with them. Who could have possibly guessed

Someone who works in said US defense industry here

Neither defense nor war really apply to what we do, but between the two defense is the more apt description. The DoD largely uses a strategy of deterrence, where the technology we develop and training done for the “war fighter” is just public and visible enough that no other major country wants to take the risk of going into full open conflict with the US. Since most efforts go into deterrence, and deterrence is a defense strategy, it does become the more appropriate word.

Sure the US loves its proxy wars, but those don’t throw the entire nation into wartime. Plus, in a round about way proxy wars help with the deterrence since we get an outlet for the decades old stock piles of arms that we no longer want and want to replace with the new stuff. If our waste products are being useful in places like Ukraine, it helps build up an idea of what it is we keep for ourselves, again building up a deterrence of openly and directly attacking the US

And you’re awfully active for an account created 5 hours ago. How’s that for intelligence gathering

At this point I’m wondering if your National Reconnaissance Office mission patch profile pic is supposed to be ironic or not. It shouldn’t take an intelligence officer to discover literally the sentence before the one you quoted.

You wanted an example of where the accusations of rape directly led to ruined lives, and I gave you one.

Sure, in the example I gave the motive behind the accusations was racism, but the accusation was still about rape. The original commenter was pointing out that any and all accusations must be met with suspicion in order for “innocent until proven guilty” to function.

What that doesn’t mean is that any and all accusations of rape should be dismissed because the accuser is a woman. There’s a difference here

Should the police believe someone when they claim they’ve been raped and should the police investigate? Yes.

Should the police, court of law, court of public opinion believe a rape accusation purely because the accuser is a woman? No.

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

Somewhat famous case, thought partially to have been a source of inspiration for a book called “To Kill a Mockingbird”, somewhat famous in its own right.

Highly recommend you read it

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Working in the aerospace industry has given me a lot of insight into the different ways engineers rationalize the potential for harm that they cause. The most common is wilful ignorance or straight up denial. No, the products I work on can never hurt anyone, it’s just xyz I know personally engineers who work on weaponry and fall heavily into that camp and it blows my mind.

Lol whoops yeah, ARRL. I work in aerospace where we love our alphabet soup and I brainfarted AFRL.

I wasn’t trying to say that the band plan doesn’t exist for a reason, it absolutely does, some reasons which you pointed out exactly. I’ve definitely been around guys who treat the band plan like it is the law, and I imagine the original commenter had the misfortune of running into one of those guys and believed him at face value. Imho it’s one of the reasons ham radio has been dying as a hobby.

Nothing legally stops you from listening. To transmit, you are legally required to have a callsign (which you must broadcast during transmit) and your callsign must be licensed for that frequency.

If you break the law, it’s highly unlikely that the FCC themselves will hunt you down and fine you. If you’re using it to talk to others on the HAM bands, they’ll likely get pissed at you for not being licensed but actually tracking you down is difficult. Using it for your own personal projects, friend groups, etc, it’s unlikely anyone would notice you at all.

A license is like $15 for life (just need to occasionally tell the FCC you’re still alive), the test will teach you some stuff, I don’t see it as that onerous to play by the rules so I’d recommend following them.

A HAM license realistically is for two things:

1 the test teaches you major items you should know about how radio works 2 how to not fuck shit up for everyone else

For the bands allocated to HAM radio in the US, as long as you’re not fucking shit up for everyone else the FCC doesn’t really care. A good example of that and my personal favorite rule is the power transmission rule of “only enough power to complete the transmission”. Functionally it’s so vague that I doubt anyone would ever actually get their license suspended over it.

The group AFRL ARRL has a pretty restrictive “band plan” that I think is where the above comment’s salt is coming from. A perception I have and have heard others talk about is the HAM community has a tendency to be borderline hostile to newcomers and are very gate-keepy, which ARRL in my experience embodies.

I have a license purely to play by the rules from a legal standpoint when I’m out in the rocky mountains hiking and camping with friends, makes communicating with different groups way easier

Edit: formatting, typoing ARRL

May I present to you:

The Marriam-Webster Dictionary

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial

Definition #3b

I don’t think the term AI has been used in a vague way, it’s that there’s a huge disconnect between how the technical fields use it vs general populace and marketing groups heavily abuse that disconnect.

Artificial has two meanings/use cases. One is to indicate something is fake (video game NPC, chess bots, vegan cheese). The end product looks close enough to the real thing that for its intended use case it works well enough. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, treat it like a duck even though we all know it’s a bunny with a costume on. LLMs on a technical level fit this definition.

The other definition is man made. Artificial diamonds are a great example of this, they’re still diamonds at the end of the day, they have all the same chemical makeups, same chemical and physical properties. The only difference is they came from a laboratory made by adult workers vs child slave labor.

My pet theory is science fiction got the general populace to think of artificial intelligence to be using the “man-made” definition instead of the “fake” definition that these companies are using. In the past the subtle nuance never caused a problem so we all just kinda ignored it

I think a better definition would be “achieve something in an unintended or uncommon way”. Fits the bill on what generally passes in the tech community as a “hack” while also covering some normal life stuff.

Getting a cheaper flight booked by using a IP address assigned to a different geographical location? Sure I’d call that a life hack. Getting a cheaper flight by booking a late night, early morning flight? No, those are deliberately cheaper

Also re: your other comment about not making a reply at all, sometimes for people like us it’s just better to not get into internet fights over semantics (no matter how much fun they can be)

That’s kind of the point though, isn’t it?

If I were to post with “Extend the plank!” there’s a near zero chance that even fans of the movie, or even the franchise, I’m thinking of will get the movie right. If I instead say “Who am I to argue with the Captain of the Enterprise” a normie might guess Star Trek, a true nerd and fan of the franchise will peg that instantly as from Star Trek Generations

Edit: That said, there are several lines in this thread that aren’t necessarily only recognizable to fans or people familiar with the movie, but instead just pop culture references.

From a technology standpoint, nothing is stopping them. From a business standpoint: hubris.

To put time and effort into creating traditional logic based algorithms to compensate for this generic math model would be to admit what mathematicians and scientists have known for centuries. That models are good at finding patterns but they do not explain why a relationship exists (if it exists at all). The technology is fundamentally flawed for the use cases that OpenAI is trying to claim it can be used in, and programming around it would be to acknowledge that.

It’s a still frame from Star Trek The Next Generation, episode The Game

The plot is a wearable device that is an AR “glasses” game that as you play the game it “makes you feel good” gets used to take over the Enterprise so terrorists can hijack it.

At the time I imagine it was intended to be part of anti-drug campaigns with the AR and companies curating what you see to distract from reality angle/sentiment being more relevant today

I hadn’t thought of that before, and I can think of several characters who’ve said things I doubt the writers would want attributed to them. I just want to see quotes from fiction being clearly labeled as such, and not using the grandiose of a character’s title to add weight to the quote.

For example when I see people quote Admiral William Adama on how when the military becomes the police, the people become the enemy of the state. That was Ron Moore writing a character for a show set in a post apocalyptic universe where the only survivors are hanging out on military ships, not a real world seasoned officer’s opinion. Is it an interesting point worth discussing? Sure, but I’m not putting it in the same category of 5-Star General Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex