Lvxferre [he/him]

Be careful with this sort of comment. You don’t want to piss off Musk by mocking his property, do you?

Delicious.

I feel like those tech companies will do this “let’s set up a façade in Vietnam, until Vietnam gets tariffed and we do it elsewhere” silly dance for now. But eventually they’ll stop caring - as USA’s customer market becomes increasingly impoverished, it becomes less of an issue to appease its whimsy kinglet.

Kinda - it was about people being unable to do maths if they rely too much on calculators. And it’s actually a valid argument, if you care about mental maths*.

There are two differences here, though:

1. Calculators are rather good at simple calculations. Large language models suck at outputting anything resembling critical thinking. They’re always bullshitting, and unless you have good critical thinking you’ll swallow bullshit after bullshit, because your tool requires a skill that you don’t have due to your unrestricted usage of that tool.
2. Critical thinking is a considerably bigger deal than being able to do simple maths by head or by hand.

*you should - it’s often faster and less laborious to do coarse maths by head than by calculator, and it allows you to spot errors you wouldn’t otherwise. Same deal with any other tool, tools are great but you should be able to do the basics without them too.

Dunno if it’s by design, “bug turned into feature”, or simply neglect. In any case, the result is the same, though - masses that are easy to manipulate, composed of dysfunctional individuals.

The lack of critical thinking is why the far right has room to breathe

100% this. People often say “you’re not immune to propaganda”, and that’s true - complete immunity is impossible. However, critical thinking does raise your resistance, as it makes you less eager to swallow bullshit.

The root of the problem is way, way older than AI. It’s a mix of

• humans being naturally lazy, typically not developing skills or knowledge unless we’re clearly getting something out of it
• we have a thoooousand tools enabling us to do stuff without skill/knowledge
• our education systems do not value self-improvement enough to promote the development of those skills and knowledge

So it’s a lot like you not remembering phone numbers by heart because you can check them in your contact list, you know?

And, yes, text generators do play a role on that. But when it comes to critical thinking, it’s a death of a thousand cuts.

Here’s how I’d answer it: “No. And do not contact me further.”

Odds are that they will insist. If they do, the answer is longer:

"You seem to have a really hard time understanding simple words, such as «no». So let me rephrase what I said, in a way that hopefully even you will understand:

I DO NOT WANT TO TOUCH YOUR BLOODY COMPANY, LED BY A LITERAL NAZI, WITH A THREE METERS POLE. NO MEANS NO. SOD OFF YOU BLOODY MUPPET, THIS IS NOT UP TO DEBATE, STOP BUGGING ME WITH THIS SHITE."

then block it.

For further info, check this. Two things to keep in mind:

• your unaided sight doesn’t distinguish between a pure wavelength and a mix of wavelengths
• your sight only works for a rather narrow range of wavelengths, 380nm~750nm (violet~red)

And most of our tech and art are based on both limitations. For example, your screen outputs red (620nm), green (520nm) and blue (460nm) lights; it won’t output a pure yellow light (580nm), but who cares - you won’t notice the difference between that 580nm yellow and a mix of 620nm and 520nm anyway*. And image file formats were also made with that into account.

So far, so good. But this shit breaks once you need to take into account the actual wavelengths, instead of just replicating what you’d perceive as the same thing; the article mentions a few situations where this is relevant, but it’s mostly

• different substances and chemical elements emit specific wavelengths. This is useful to know the composition of something, or the presence/absence of a certain substance (like grease from merchant fingers messing with that precious Voynich manuscript)
• in specific light conditions, wavelength differences do make you notice things in a different way. Black flames are cool example of that.

So far this has been handled by a format called OpenEXR, that allows an arbitrarily large number of colour channels. So instead of having red/green/blue channels you’d have, let’s say: one channel for 900nm infrared, another for 899nm infrared, another for 898nm infrared […] 650nm red, 649nm red… […] 380nm violet, 379nm ultraviolet… yup. No wonder file sizes were so bloody big.

Doing some simple maths, if you were to use one channel per 1nm range, and stick only to the visible range, you’d have 370 colour channels. Yup - and it gets worse if you include IR and UV. No wonder image sizes were so big.

*NOTE: at least, not with unaided vision. If you wear thick glasses, and look at the source of light sideways, the red+green light mix forms two partially overlapping coloured “ghosts”, and the pure wavelength doesn’t. But it’s your glasses doing it, not your body.

I don’t even use Windows, but this “it’s for security lol” pseudo-explanation is so blatantly false that it’s pissing me off.

In this context “politics” clearly conveys “things directly related to governments, such as wars, elections, or socio-economical ideologies”. It is only a subset of the definition of politics that you’re probably using, something like “things direct or indirectly related to human groups and their conflicts of interest”.

We got a whole Lemmy to talk about Israel vs. Hamas, late stage capitalism, elections etc. We could - and should - have at least one community to chill and talk about other stuff, and without that rule we won’t have it. For example without that rule 99.99999% of the content as of late 2024 would be about Trump, as if Americans didn’t have multiple communities to talk about it already.