alternative_factor

Really appreciating Israels SkyNet 100% speedrun here, some really impressive moves. However, I’m starting to wonder if this run passes the suspect test, I feel like you can’t get past regulators so well in most cases without an exploit.

Yup Kojima 1000 years ahead of his time.

After the SORA AI reveal today I’m starting to see that luddites have a point. I don’t think we’ll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I’ve seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I’ve seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.

But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don’t even know how to use a phone. I don’t see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.

Yup I like to hateread /r/conservative and one of their big posts was how Tucker was praising Putin’s Moscow for having less crime and homelessness than the average American city. My dudes, the criminals and homeless are dying on the front. Not to mention if you called Putin “Sleepy” or some stupid shit you would end up falling through a window.

My brother compared super pro-Zionism to mCarthyism and yup here it is. Don’t even need proof, just fire away at random people you dislike.

At this rate we will have colliders that encircle the entire planet like a super advanced ancient civilization from a videogame.

Yes of course China covered up COVID, however I believe that this actually probably is M. Pneumoniae as it’s famous for spreading in schools amongst children as well as already resistant to many antibiotics because it has no cell wall.
My one concern is that this could secretly be a human to human form of avian influenza, but there is absolutely no hiding a disease with a mortality rate on par with Ebola (30-50% or 18-30%- as much as Spanish Flu or the black death) for very long at all. COVID has around a 1% mortality rate and there were people posting videos of people dying in the streets on Chinese social media, if it’s avian flue than there will be mass graves on an unheard of scale.

That’s interesting I read that it was Mycoplasma pneumoniae, not a new pathogen but a report says it’s resistant to a new antibiotic.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-hospitals-children-pneumonia-respiratory-illness-who-data-rcna126480

There are a few great Chinese single player games out there like amazing cultivation simulator, but they are all indie games. The Chinese government restricted how Steam works in China so I have no idea how indie Chinese games are getting out there, if at all.
https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-china-launch/
I played a little Genshin after it first released but was put off by the underage characters being portrayed sexually. The sad fact of the matter is that its a great game made with passion, and many Chinese games have a “”“lolicon”“” issue. I tried the game Mahjong soul after getting into Mahjong from Final Fantasy, and it has the same issue.
And when I say “”“lolicon”“, I mean kids as young as 11-13, maybe even younger. it’s disgusting. Otakus seems to run the industry there as far as I can tell, or at least what makes it to the west because to know real stuff about Chinese culture you have to be at least kinda a weeb for Chinese stuff. I got into Xianxia from my love of manga which lead to Manhua. The Xianxia scene has a lot of problems but “”“lolicon””" hasn’t been one of them.
TL;DR The chinese video game industry is run by otakus, at least for whats made it into the west. The worst part is that HoYoVerse WAS an indie developer whose motto was “by otakus, for otakus” they aren’t hiding what they are about, but unfortunately have become #1 for pandering to the lowest possible denominator

Genshin actually has a surprising amount of horny teenage girls who play it, too. One article says its 55% male to 45% which is honestly very impressive.

OnLY ThEOcrACY iN ThE MIDdlE EasT

In biology we’ve been using machine learning for a long time now so the AI super hype out there is pretty funny to me. It’s for sure useful with stuff like predicting protein folding and analyzing genes and stuff, but it’s all hyper-specific stuff just like it has its always been. Good for removing tedium for sure as its the reason we can even know the human genome because it would take literally forever to sequence it without modern tech, which we did in the in the 90s and finished in 2003.
My big hope is that all this hype will get people to invest in proteonomic technology which is 100% a great use case for AI and also the future.

You’re totally right, everyone knows that blue has been one of the best flavors for a long time, yet most companies are scared because blue “isn’t real”.

Death to processed food! Liberate the world from simple carbohydrates!

I remember way back on reddit after hearing the neuralink buzz, I went to /r/neuralink and asked questions about how they would prevent infections with such procedures.
The answer?
“Well its just on the outer skin and doesn’t really pass the blood brain barrier so its fine”, I felt so validated and was blown away by how laissez-faire they were with infections, guess that little blurb was company policy!

There are honestly a lot of parallels between the war in Ukraine and WWI, Putin’s actions remind me a lot of the leaders of some countries in WWI who were super wrapped up in their egos to the point of wanting a “gentleman’s war”, only to end up killing and traumatizing millions. Putin assumed he could just swoop in and crush the Ukrainians, much like many leaders in WWI had such nationalistic fervor that crushing other nations would be easy, instead he is now bogged down in a horrible forever war.

Of course it’s not all the same because the Ukrainians are clearly the victims here, but I feel like Putin is more comparable to a WWI style leader who just makes one suicidal push after the next than the Nazis who did in fact have some victories, not to mention that the Russian army does not do well against more modern military technologies.

Great to see cassette beasts getting tons of love. I’ve played Siralim and TemTem but cassette beasts really scratches the same itch as Pokemon while also doing some cool new stuff.

TemTem is 3D but they had a bigger team and budget than my beloved Cassette Beasts.

Graf is probably better than ever now, shame it’s not as long lasting was in Rome. Hopefully some of the best artists pick up sculpting so people in the future might have a little taste.

I thought that when I read it too, but I asked my folks and they were big scifi fans at the time, and it’s unironic.
wikipedia also says its unironic, for what its worth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#Criticism_of_militarism
If you read Heinlein’s wikipedia page it also checks out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein#Views